Texts and Manuscripts of the Old Testament
TEXTS AND MANUSCRIPTS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Mark R. Norton
The ancient manuscripts of the Old Testament are the basic working material used to seek out the original text of the Bible with as great a degree of accuracy as possible. This process is called textual criticism, sometimes designated “lower criticism” to distinguish it from “higher criticism,” which is analysis of the date, unity, and authorship of the biblical writings.
The task of the textual critic can be divided into a number of general stages: (1) the collection and collation of existing manuscripts, translations, and quotations; (2) the development of theory and methodology that will enable the critic to use the gathered information to reconstruct the most accurate text of the biblical materials; (3) the reconstruction of the history of the transmission of the text in order to identify the various influences affecting the text; (4) the evaluation of specific variant readings in light of textual evidence, theology, and history.
Both Old and New Testament textual critics undertake a similar task and face similar obstacles. They both seek to unearth a hypothetical “original” text with limited resources that are at varying degrees of deterioration. But the Old Testament textual critic faces a more complex textual history than does his New Testament counterpart. The New Testament was written primarily in the first century A.D., and complete New Testament manuscripts exist that were written only a few hundred years later. The Old Testament, however, is made up of literature written over a thousand-year period, the oldest parts dating to the twelfth century B.C., or possibly even earlier. To make matters even more difficult, until recently, the earliest known Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were medieval. This left scholars with little witness as to the Old Testament’s textual development from ancient times to the Middle Ages, a period of over two thousand years.
Until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s and 1950s, secondary Aramaic, Greek, and Latin translations served as the earliest significant witnesses to the early Hebrew Scriptures. Since these are translations, and subject to sectarian and contexual alterations and interpolations, their value to the textual critic, though significant, is limited. The recent discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls and other early manuscripts, however, have provided primary witnesses to the Hebrew Old Testament in earlier times. The scholarly assessment of these discoveries is, at present, far from complete, and the discipline of Old Testament textual criticism anxiously awaits a more complete assessment of their significance. In a general sense, however, the Dead Sea Scrolls have affirmed the accuracy of the Masoretic Text that we use today.
IMPORTANT OLD TESTAMENT MANUSCRIPTS
Most medieval manuscripts of the Old Testament exhibit a fairly standardized form of the Hebrew text. This standardization reflects the work of the medieval scribes known as Masoretes (A.D. 500–900); the text that resulted from their work is called the Masoretic Text. Most of the important manuscripts dated from the eleventh century A.D. or later all reflect this same basic textual tradition. But since the Masoretic Text did not stabilize until well after A.D. 500, many questions about its development in the preceding centuries could not be answered. So the primary task for Old Testament textual critics has been to compare earlier witnesses in order to discover how the Masoretic Text came to be, and how it and earlier witnesses of the Hebrew Bible are related. This leads us to the initial task of textual criticism: the collection of all possible records of the biblical writings.
All the primary sources of the Hebrew Scriptures are handwritten manuscripts, usually written on animal skins, papyrus, or sometimes metal. The fact that they are handwritten is the source of many difficulties for the textual critic. Human error and editorial tampering are often to blame for the many variant readings in Old and New Testament manuscripts. The fact that the ancient manuscripts are written on skins or papyrus is another source of difficulty. Due to natural decay, most of the surviving ancient manuscripts are fragmentary and difficult to read.
There are many secondary witnesses to the ancient Old Testament text, including translations into other languages, quotations used by both friends and enemies of biblical religion, and evidence from early printed texts. Most of the secondary witnesses have suffered in ways similar to the primary ones. They, too, contain numerous variants due to both intentional and accidental scribal errors and are fragmentary as a result of natural decay. Since variant readings do exist in the surviving ancient manuscripts, these must be collected and compared. The task of comparing and listing the variant readings is known as collation.
The Masoretic Text
The textual history of the Masoretic Text is a significant story in its own right. This text of the Hebrew Bible is the most complete in existence. It forms the basis for our modern Hebrew Bibles and is the prototype against which all comparisons are made in Old Testament textual studies. It is called Masoretic because in its present form it is based on the Masora, the textual tradition of the Jewish scholars known as the Masoretes of Tiberias. (Tiberias was the location of their community on the Sea of Galilee.) The Masoretes, whose scholarly school flourished between A.D. 500 and 1000, standardized the traditional consonantal text by adding vowel pointing and marginal notes. (The ancient Hebrew alphabet had no vowels.)
The Masoretic Text, as it exists today, owes much to the Ben Asher family. For five or six generations, from the second half of the eighth century to the middle of the tenth century A.D., this family played a leading role in the Masoretic work at Tiberias. A faithful record of their work can be found in the oldest existing Masoretic manuscripts, which go back to the final two members of that family. The oldest dated Masoretic manuscript is Codex Cairensis (A.D. 895), which is attributed to Moses ben Asher. This manuscript contained both the Former Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings) and the Latter Prophets (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve Minor Prophets). The rest of the Old Testament is missing from this manuscript.
The other major surviving manuscript attributed to the Ben Asher family is the Aleppo Codex. According to the manuscript’s concluding note, Aaron ben Moses ben Asher was responsible for writing the Masoretic notes and pointing the text. This manuscript contained the entire Old Testament and dates from the first half of the tenth century A.D. It was reportedly destroyed in anti-Jewish riots in 1947, but this proved to be only partly true. A majority of the manuscript survived and will be used as the base for a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible to be published by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The manuscript known as Codex Leningradensis, presently stored in the Leningrad Public Library, is of special importance as a witness to the Ben Asher text. According to a note on the manuscript, it was copied in A.D. 1008 from texts written by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher. Since the oldest complete Hebrew text of the Old Testament (the Aleppo Codex) was not available to scholars earlier in this century, Codex Leningradensis was used as the textual base for the popular Hebrew texts of today: Biblia Hebraica, edited by R. Kittel, and its revision Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, edited by K. Elliger and W. Rudolf.
There are quite a number of less important manuscript codices that reflect the Masoretic tradition: the Petersburg Codex of the Prophets and the Erfurt Codices. There are also a number of manuscripts that no longer exist, but which were used by scholars in the Masoretic period. One of the most prominent is Codex Hillel, traditionally attributed to Rabbi Hillel ben Moses ben Hillel about A.D. 600. This codex was said to be very accurate and was used for the revision of other manuscripts. Readings of this codex are cited repeatedly by the early Medieval Masoretes. Codex Muga, Codex Jericho, and Codex Jerushalmi, also no longer extant, were also cited by the Masoretes. These manuscripts were likely prominent examples of unpointed texts that had become part of a standardizing consensus in the first centuries A.D. These laid the groundwork for the work of the Masoretes of Tiberias.
Despite the completeness of the Masoretic manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, a major problem still remains for Old Testament textual critics. The Masoretic manuscripts, as old as they are, were written between one and two thousand years after the original autographs. Earlier witnesses to the ancient Hebrew text still needed to be brought forward to testify to the accuracy of the Masoretic Text.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The most important ancient witnesses to the Hebrew Bible are the texts discovered at Wadi Qumran in the 1940s and 1950s. (Wadi is an Arabic word for a river bed that is dry except in the rainy season). Before the Qumran discoveries, the oldest existing Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament dated from about A.D. 900. The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls, therefore, lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon. That makes them one thousand years earlier than the oldest manuscripts previously known to biblical scholars. The texts found at Wadi Qumran were all completed before the Roman conquest of Palestine in A.D. 70, and many predate this event by quite some time. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Isaiah scroll has received the most publicity, although the collection contains fragments of all the books in the Hebrew Bible with the exception of Esther.
Because the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls is so important for Old Testament textual criticism, a short history and description of these recent discoveries is appropriate. The manuscripts now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of biblical and extrabiblical manuscripts from Qumran, an ancient Jewish religious community near the Dead Sea.
Before the Qumran find, few manuscripts had been discovered in the Holy Land. The early church father Origen (third century A.D.) mentioned using Hebrew and Greek manuscripts that had been stored in jars in caves near Jericho. In the ninth century A.D. a patriarch of the eastern church, Timothy I, wrote a letter to Sergius, Metropolitan (Archbishop) of Elam, in which he, too, referred to a large number of Hebrew manuscripts found in a cave near Jericho. For more than one thousand years since then, however, no other significant manuscript discoveries were forthcoming from caves in that region near the Dead Sea.
Scroll Discoveries at Wadi Qumran
The history of the Dead Sea manuscripts, both of their hiding and of their finding, reads like a mystery adventure story. It began with a telephone call on Wednesday afternoon, February 18, 1948, in the troubled city of Jerusalem. Butrus Sowmy, librarian and monk of Saint Mark’s Monastery in the Armenian quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, was calling John C. Trever, acting director of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR). Sowmy had been preparing a catalog of the monastery’s collection of rare books. Among them he found some scrolls in ancient Hebrew which, he said, had been in the monastery for about forty years. Could ASOR supply him with some information for the catalog?
The following day Sowmy and his brother brought a suitcase containing five scrolls or parts of scrolls wrapped in an Arabic newspaper. Pulling back the end of one of the scrolls Trever discovered that it was written in a clear square Hebrew script. He copied several lines from that scroll, carefully examined three others, but was unable to unroll the fifth because it was too brittle. After the Syrians left, Trever told the story of the scrolls to William H. Brownlee, an ASOR fellow. Trever further noted in the lines he had copied from the first scroll the double occurrence of an unusual negative construction in Hebrew. In addition, the Hebrew script of the scrolls was more archaic than anything he had ever seen.
Trever then visited Saint Mark’s Monastery. There he was introduced to the Syrian Archbishop Athanasius Samuel, who gave him permission to photograph the scrolls. Trever and Brownlee compared the style of handwriting on the scrolls with a photograph of the Nash Papyrus, a scroll inscribed with the Ten Commandments and Deuteronomy 6:4 and dated by scholars in the first or second century B.C. The two ASOR scholars concluded that the script on the newly found manuscripts belonged to the same period. When ASOR director Millar Burrows returned to Jerusalem from Baghdad a few days later, he was shown the scrolls, and the three men continued their investigation. Only then did the Syrians reveal that the scrolls had been purchased the year before, in 1947, and had not been in the monastery for forty years as was first reported.
How had the Syrians come to possess the scrolls? Before that question could be answered, many fragmentary accounts had to be pieced together. Sometime during the winter of 1946–47 three Bedouin were tending their sheep and goats near a spring in the vicinity of Wadi Qumran. One of the herdsmen, throwing a rock through a small opening in the cliff, heard the sound of the rock evidently shattering an earthenware jar inside. Another Bedouin later lowered himself into the cave and found ten tall jars lining the walls. Three manuscripts (one of them in four pieces) stored in two of the jars were removed from the cave and offered to an antiquities dealer in Bethlehem.
Several months later the Bedouins secured four more scrolls (one of them in two pieces) from the cave and sold them to another dealer in Bethlehem. During Holy Week in 1947 Saint Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Monastery in Jerusalem was informed of the four scrolls, and Metropolitan Athanasius Samuel offered to buy them. The sale was not completed, however, until July 1947 when the four scrolls were bought by the Monastery. They included a complete Isaiah scroll, a commentary on Habakkuk, a scroll containing a Manual of Discipline from the religious community at Qumran, and the Genesis Apocryphon (originally thought to be the aprocryphal book of Lamech but actually an Aramaic paraphrase of Genesis).
In November and December of 1947 an Armenian antiquities dealer in Jerusalem informed the late E. L. Sukenik, Professor of Archaeology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, of the first three scrolls found in the cave by the Bedouin. Sukenik then secured the three scrolls and two jars from the antiquities dealer in Bethlehem. They included an incomplete scroll of Isaiah, the Hymns of Thanksgiving (containing twelve columns of original psalms), and the War Scroll. (That scroll, also known as “The War of the Children of Darkness,” describes a war, actual or spiritual, of the tribes of Levi, Judah, and Benjamin against the Moabites and Edomites.)
On April 1, 1948, the first news release appeared in newspapers around the world, followed by another news release on April 26 by Sukenik about the manuscripts he had already acquired at the Hebrew University. In 1949 Athanasius Samuel brought the four scrolls from Saint Mark’s Monastery to the United States. They were exhibited in various places and finally were purchased on July 1, 1954, in New York for $250,000 by Sukenik’s son for the nation of Israel and sent to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Today they are on display in the “Shrine of the Book” Museum in West Jerusalem.
Because of the importance of the initial discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, both archaeologists and Bedouin continued their search for more manuscripts. Early in 1949, G. Lankester Harding, director of antiquities for the Kingdom of Jordan, and Roland G. de Vaux, of the Dominic Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem, excavated the cave (designated cave one or 1Q) where the initial discovery was made. Several hundred caves were explored the same year. So far eleven caves in the Wadi Qumran have yielded treasures. Almost 600 manuscripts have been recovered, about 200 of which are biblical material. The fragments number between 50,000 and 60,000 pieces. About 85 percent of the fragments are leather; the other 15 percent are papyrus. The fact that most of the manuscripts are leather contributed to the problem of their preservation.
Probably the cave next most important to cave one is cave four (4Q), which has yielded about 40,000 fragments of 400 different manuscripts, 100 of which are biblical. Every book of the Old Testament except Esther is represented.
In addition to the biblical manuscripts the discoveries have included Apocryphal works such as Hebrew and Aramaic fragments of Tobit, Ecclesiasticus, and the Letter of Jeremiah. Fragments were also found of Pseudepigraphal books such as 1 Enoch, the Book of Jubilees, and the Testament of Levi.
Many sectarian scrolls peculiar to the religious community that lived at Qumran were also found. They furnish historical background on the nature of pre-Christian Judaism and help fill in the gaps of intertestamental history. One of the scrolls, the Damascus Document, had originally turned up in Cairo, but manuscripts of it have now been found at Qumran. The Manual of Discipline was one of the seven scrolls from cave one. Fragmentary manuscripts of it have been found in other caves. The document gives the group’s entrance requirements, plus regulations governing life in the Qumran community. The Thanksgiving Hymns include some thirty hymns, probably composed by one individual.
There were also many commentaries on different books of the Old Testament. The Habakkuk Commentary was a copy of the first two chapters of Habakkuk in Hebrew accompanied by a verse-by-verse commentary. The commentary gives many details about an apocalyptic figure called the “Teacher of Righteousness” who is persecuted by a wicked priest.
A unique discovery was made in cave three (3Q) in 1952. It was a scroll of copper, measuring about eight feet long and a foot wide. Because it was brittle, it was not opened until 1966, and then only by cutting it into strips. It contained an inventory of some sixty locations where treasures of gold, silver, and incense were hidden. Archaeologists have not been able to find any of it. That list of treasures, perhaps from the Jerusalem temple, may have been stored in the cave by Zealots (a revolutionary Jewish political party) during their struggle with the Romans in A.D. 66–70.
During the Six-Day War in June 1967, Sukenik’s son, Yigael Yadin of the Hebrew University, acquired a Qumran document called the Temple Scroll. That tightly rolled scroll measures twenty-eight feet and is the longest scroll found so far in the Qumran area. A major portion of it is devoted to statutes of the kings and matters of defense. It also describes sacrificial feasts and rules of cleanliness. Almost half of the scroll gives detailed instructions for building a future temple, supposedly revealed by God to the scroll’s author.
Scroll Discoveries at Wadi Murabba’at
In 1951 Bedouins discovered more manuscripts in caves in the Wadi Murabba’at, which extends southeast from Bethlehem toward the Dead Sea, about eleven miles south of Qumran. Four caves were excavated there in 1952 under Harding and de Vaux. They yielded biblical documents and important materials, such as letters and coins, from the time of the Second Jewish Revolt under Bar Kochba in A.D. 132–135. Among the biblical manuscripts was a scroll containing a Hebrew text of the Minor Prophets, dating from the second century A.D. This manuscript corresponds almost perfectly to the Masoretic Text, hinting that by the second century, a standard consonantal text was already taking shape. Also found in Wadi Murabba’at were fragments of the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) and Isaiah.
The Value of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Apart from the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient witnesses to the Hebrew Old Testament that are actually written in the Hebrew language are almost nonexistent. Because of this, the Dead Sea Scrolls may easily be one of the greatest archaeological finds of all time. They take us a thousand years deeper into the history of the Hebrew Old Testament, giving us the ability to assess all the other ancient witnesses with greater understanding.
The most frequently represented Old Testament books among the Dead Sea Scrolls are Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, Psalms, and Isaiah. The oldest text is a fragment of Exodus dating from about 250 B.C. The Isaiah scroll dates from about 100 B.C. These ancient witnesses only confirm the accuracy of the Masoretic Text and the care with which the Jewish scribes handled the Scriptures. Except for a few instances where spelling and grammar differ between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text, the two are amazingly similar. The differences do not warrant any major changes in the substance of the Old Testament. Yet these discoveries are helping biblical scholars gain a clearer understanding of the text at an earlier time in its history and development.
The Nash Papyrus
Prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest Hebrew witness to the Old Testament was the Nash Papyrus. This manuscript was acquired in Egypt by W. L. Nash in 1902 and was donated to the Cambridge University Library. This manuscript contains a damaged copy of the Ten Commandments (Exod. 20:2-17), part of Deuteronomy 5:6-21, and also the Shema (Deut. 6:4ff.). This is clearly a collection of devotional and liturgical passages, and has been dated to the same period as the Dead Sea Scrolls, between 150 B.C. and A.D. 68.
The Cairo Geniza Fragments
Near the end of the nineteenth century, many fragments from the sixth to the eighth centuries were found in an old synagogue in Cairo, Egypt, which had been Saint Michael’s Church until A.D. 882. They were found there in a geniza, a storage room where worn or faulty manuscripts were hidden until they could be disposed of properly. This geniza had apparently been walled off and forgotten until its recent discovery. In this small room, as many as 200,000 fragments were preserved, including biblical texts in Hebrew and Aramaic. The fact that the biblical fragments date from the fifth century A.D. makes them invaluable for shedding light on the development of the Masoretic work prior to the standardization instituted by the great Masoretes of Tiberias.
The Samaritan Pentateuch
Exactly when the Samaritan community separated from the larger Jewish community is a matter of dispute. But at some point during the postexilic period (c. 540–100 B.C.), a clear division between Samaritans and Jews was marked off. At this point, the Samaritans, who accepted only the Pentateuch as canonical, apparently canonized their own particular version of the Scriptures.
A copy of the Samaritan Pentateuch came to the attention of scholars in 1616. Initially, it caused a great deal of excitement, but most of the early assessments of its value to textual criticism were negative. It differed from the Masoretic Text in some six thousand instances, and many judged this to be the result of sectarian differences between Samaritans and Jews. By some, it was simply viewed as a sectarian revision of the Masoretic Text.
After further assessment, however, it became clear that the Samaritan Pentateuch represented a text of much earlier origin than the Masoretic Text. And although a few of the distinctions of the Samaritan Pentateuch were clearly the result of sectarian concerns, most of the differences were neutral in this respect. Many of them had more to do with popularizing the text, rather than altering its meaning in any way. The fact that the Samaritan Pentateuch had much in common with the Septuagint, some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the New Testament, revealed that most of its differences with the Masoretic Text were not due to sectarian differences. More likely, they were due to the use of a different textual base, which was probably in wide use in the ancient Near East until well after the time of Christ. This realization, though not solving any real problems, did much to illustrate the complexity of the Old Testament textual tradition that existed before the Masoretic standard was completed.
The Septuagint (LXX)
The Septuagint is the oldest Greek translation of the Old Testament, its witness being significantly older than that of the Masoretic Text. According to tradition, the Septuagint Pentateuch was translated by a team of seventy scholars in Alexandria, Egypt. (Hence its common designation LXX, the Roman numerals for 70.) The Jewish community in Egypt spoke Greek, not Hebrew, so a Greek translation of the Old Testament was sincerely needed by that community of Jews. The exact date of translation is not known, but evidence indicates that the Septuagint Pentateuch was completed in the third century B.C. The rest of the Old Testament was probably translated over a long period of time, as it clearly represents the work of many different scholars.
The value of the Septuagint to textual criticism varies widely from book to book. It might be said that the Septuagint is not a single version but a collection of versions made by various authors, who differed greatly in their methods and their knowledge of Hebrew. The translations of the individual books are in no way uniform. Many books are translated almost literally, while others like Job and Daniel are quite dynamic. So the value of each book for textual criticism must be assessed on a book-by-book basis. The books translated literally are clearly more helpful in making comparisons with the Masoretic Text than the more dynamic ones.
The content of some books is significantly different when comparing the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. For example, the Septuagint’s Jeremiah is missing significant portions found in the Masoretic Text, and the order of the text is significantly different as well. What these differences actually mean is difficult to know with certainty. It has been conjectured that the Septuagint is simply a poor translation and is therefore missing portions of the original Hebrew. But these same differences could also indicate that editorial additions and changes worked their way into the Masoretic Text during its long history of development. It is also possible that there were a number of valid textual traditions at that time, one followed by the Septuagint, and another followed by the Masoretic Text. This illustrates some of the difficulties that arise while doing Old Testament textual criticism.
The Septuagint was the standard Old Testament text used by the early Christian church. The expanding Gentile church needed a translation in the common language of the time—Greek. By the time of Christ, even among the Jews, a majority of the people spoke Aramaic and Greek, not Hebrew. The New Testament writers evidence their inclination to the Septuagint by using it when quoting the Old Testament.
Other Greek Versions
Because of the broad acceptance and use of the Septuagint among Christians, the Jews renounced it in favor of a number of other Greek versions. Aquila, a proselyte and disciple of Rabbi Akiba, produced a new translation around A.D. 130. In the spirit of his teacher, Aquila wrote an extremely literal translation, often to the point of communicating poorly in Greek. This literal approach, however, gained this version wide acceptance among Jews. Only fragments of this version have survived, but its literal nature reveals much about its Hebrew textual base.
Symmachus produced a new version around A.D. 170 designed not only for accuracy, but also to communicate well in the Greek language. His version has survived only in a few Hexapla fragments. A third Greek version came from Theodocian, a Jewish proselyte from the end of the second century A.D. His version was apparently a revision of an earlier Greek version, possibly the Septuagint. This version has only survived in a few early Christian quotations, though it was once widely used.
The Christian theologian Origen arranged the Old Testament with six parallel versions for comparison in his Hexapla. In it, he included the Hebrew text, the Hebrew transliterated into Greek, Aquila’s version, Symmachus’s version, the Septuagint, and Theodocian’s version. Unfortunately, this wonderful compilation has survived only in a few small fragments. Other Greek translations mentioned by Origen and otherwise unknown are the Quinta, the Sexta, and the Septima.
The Aramaic Targums
The Aramaic Targums were Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Old Testament. Since the common language of the Jews during the postexilic period was Aramaic and not Hebrew, a need for Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible arose. Hebrew remained the language of scholarly religious circles, and translations for the common people were often spurned by the religious leadership. But over time, the reading of the Scriptures and commentaries in Aramaic became an accepted practice in the synagogues.
The purpose of these translations was to get the message across and to edify the people. Thus, the translations were extremely interpretive. The translators paraphrased, added explanatory glosses, and often boldly reinterpreted the text according to the theological biases of their time. They sought to relate the Bible text to contemporary life and political circumstances. Because of the dynamic approach evident in these translations, their use in textual criticism is limited, but they do add to the welter of evidence to be collected and collated in order to reconstruct the text of the Old Testament.
The Syriac Version
Another version worthy of note is the Syriac Version. This version was in common use in the Syriac (eastern Aramaic) church, which designated it the Peshitta, meaning “the simple or plain.” What they intended by this designation is difficult to discern. It may indicate that it was intended for popular consumption, or that it avoided adding explanatory glosses and other additions, or perhaps that it was not an annotated text, as was the annotated Syro-Hexapla then in use by the same community.
The literary history of the Syriac Version is not known, though it is clearly complex. Some have identified it as the recasting of an Aramaic Targum in Syriac, while others claim it has a more independent origin. Some connect it to the conversion of the leaders of Adiabene (east of the Tigris River) to the Jewish faith during the first century A.D. Their need for an Old Testament could have brought about the development of a version in their common tongue—Syriac. Still others connect it to Christian origins. Obvious later revisions to the Peshitta complicate matters even more. More study needs to be done to assess the nature of this version before it can lend much insight into the history of the Hebrew text.
The Latin Versions
Latin was a dominant language in western regions of the Roman Empire from well before the time of Christ. It was in the western regions of southern Gaul and North Africa that the first Latin translations of the Bible appeared. Around A.D. 160 Tertullian apparently used a Latin version of the Scriptures. Not long after this, the Old Latin text seems to have been in circulation, evidenced by Cyprian’s use of it before his death in A.D. 258. The Old Latin version was translated from the Septuagint. Due to its early date, it is valuable as a witness to the early Septuagint text, before later editors obscured the nature of the original. It also indirectly gives clues to the nature of the Hebrew text at the time of the Septuagint’s translation. Complete manuscripts of the Old Latin text have not survived. After the completion of Jerome’s Latin version, the Vulgate, the older text fell into disuse. Enough fragmentary manuscripts of this version do exist, however, to lend significant information to the early Old Testament text.
Around the third century A.D., Latin began to replace Greek as the language of learning in the larger Roman world. A uniform, reliable text was badly needed for theological and liturgical uses. To fill this need, Pope Damasus I (A.D. 366–384) commissioned Jerome, an eminent scholar in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to undertake the translation. Jerome began his work as a translation from the Greek Septuagint, considered inspired by many church authorities, including Augustine. But later, and at the risk of great criticism, he turned to the Hebrew text being used in Palestine at that time as the base text for his translation. During the years between A.D. 390 and 405 Jerome wrote his Latin translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. Yet, despite Jerome’s return to the original Hebrew, he was heavily dependent on the various Greek versions as aids in translation. As a result the Vulgate reflects the other Greek and Latin translations as much as the underlying Hebrew text. The value of the Vulgate for textual criticism is its pre-Masoretic witness to the Hebrew Bible, though this was compromised to a great extent by the influence of already existing Greek translations.
Various Other Versions
There are various other ancient translations. Most of them were dependent primarily on the Septuagint, including the Coptic versions in Egypt and the related Ethiopic version in Ethiopia. These are valuable as early witnesses to the Septuagint. The Armenian version used the Syriac Peshitta as its textual base and could lend significant information with respect to its development. After the rise of Islam and the spread of the Arabic language throughout much of the Near East, Arabic translations were made for a growing Arabic-speaking population. Translation into Arabic was also undertaken from the Septuagint, but the lateness of these translations (c. A.D. 900) make them of little value to Old Testament textual criticism.
Patristic Quotations
Additional textual evidence can be drawn from quotations found in the early writers known as the church fathers. The range of such quotations, covering most of the New Testament as well as parts of the Old, provides evidence on the history of transmission of variant readings and text types.
THE TRANSMISSION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
Reconstruction of the history of the transmission of the text is an important element in evaluating variant readings. Material from a wide variety of sources must be combined in order to arrive at even a tentative reconstruction of the text. A brief sketch of scholarly opinion follows.
The early history of the Old Testament text as reflected in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, and the ancient Hebrew text shows a remarkable fluidity and diversity. Evidently the standardizing process did not begin at the earliest stages. For example, the materials from the Qumran community, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, do not reflect any frustration with varying texts within that community.
Some scholars have attempted to account for such diversity by theories of local texts. They theorize that that various localities in the Near East (e.g., Babylon, Palestine, Egypt) had differing text types which are reflected in the various surviving Hebrew texts and versions. Other scholars account for the diversity by recognizing a precanonical fluidity. They feel that until the process of canonization was complete, accurate reproduction of the manuscripts was not viewed as very important. It should be noted, however, that the basic text that modern scholarship has identified as closest to the original was among the Dead Sea texts (for example, the large Isaiah scroll).
Destruction of the temple in A.D. 70 provided an impetus for standardization of the consonantal text. The texts found at Wadi Murabba’at, copied during the first centuries A.D., reflect the new stage. The scholars initially reporting on the discovery were disappointed to find in these texts so few variations from the standard Masoretic Text. To scholars, the very early texts from the Dead Sea Scroll discoveries had become the standard consonantal text to the exclusion of other variants. Scholars have now gone so far as to identify the only slightly later Wadi Murabba’at texts as a “Proto-Masoretic” standard. This seems to indicate that the Hebrew consonantal text was already approaching a standard in Palestine by the first centuries A.D.
Standardization as practiced by the Masoretes meant identifying one text as normative and copying carefully from that text. It also meant correcting existing texts by the normative text. The Hebrew text, of course, was written with consonants alone, not with consonants and vowels as we write English.
The next stage in the transmission of the Old Testament text was standardization of punctuation and vowel patterns. That process, which began fairly early in the New Testament period, extended over a period of one thousand years. A long series of Masoretes provided annotations known as Masora, which, in Hebrew, means “tradition.” Two different motivations are evident in their work. One was their concern for accurate reproduction of the consonantal text. For that purpose a collection of annotations (on irregular forms, abnormal patterns, the number of times a form or word was used, and other matters) was gathered and inserted in the margins or at the end of the text.
A second concern of the Masoretes was to record and standardize the vocalization of the consonantal text for reading purposes. Up until this point, scribes had been prohibited against inserting vowels to make the vocalization of the text clear. Because of this, a proper reading of the text depended on the oral tradition passed down from generation to generation. The origins of vocalization reflect differences between Babylon and Palestine. The Tiberian Masoretes (scholars working in Tiberias in Palestine) provided the most complete and exact system of vocalization. The earliest dated manuscript from that tradition is a codex of the Prophets from the Karaite synagogue of Cairo dated A.D. 896. Today the standard Hebrew text of the Old Testament, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, an updated version of Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica, is constructed on the basis of the Tiberian Masoretic tradition.
Standardization of both the consonantal text and vocalization succeeded so well that the manuscripts that have survived display a remarkable agreement. Most of the variants, being minor and attributable to scribal error, do not affect interpretation.
THE METHODOLOGY OF OLD TESTAMENT TEXTUAL CRITICISM
The search for an adequate methodology to handle the many variant readings found in manuscripts is inseparably intertwined with our understanding of the history of transmission. The basic issue in textual criticism is the method used to decide the relative value of those variant readings. Many factors must be evaluated in order to arrive at a valid decision.
Dating Manuscripts
The date of a manuscript is important because it places that text within a historical framework, a factor that can often decide the primacy of one variant over another. The process of dating the Dead Sea Scrolls found at Wadi Qumran serves as a good case study for the various methods employed by scholars today.
Early conclusions about the antiquity of the first Dead Sea Scrolls were not accepted by everyone. Some scholars were convinced that the scrolls were of medieval origin. A series of questions relate to the dating problem. When were the texts at Qumran composed? When were they deposited in the caves? Most scholars believe the manuscripts were placed in the caves by members of the Qumran community when Roman legions were besieging Jewish strongholds. That was shortly before the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70.
Careful study of the contents of a document sometimes reveals its authorship and the date when it was written. An example of using such internal evidence for dating a non-biblical work is found in the Habakkuk commentary. It gives hints about the people and events in the days of the commentary’s author, not in the days of the prophet Habakkuk. The commentator described the enemies of God’s people as the Kittim. Originally that word denoted Cyprus, but later came to be more generally the Greek islands and the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean. In Daniel 11:30 the term is used prophetically, and most scholars seem to identify the Kittim with the Romans. Thus the Habakkuk commentary was probably written about the time of the Roman capture of Palestine under Pompey in 63 B.C.
Another important item to consider when dating a manuscript is its copy date. Although the vast majority of manuscripts are undated, it is often possible to determine when a manuscript was written by paleography, the study of ancient handwriting. That was the method initially employed by Trever when he compared the script of the Isaiah Scroll with the Nash Papyrus, thus dating it to the pre-Christian era. His conclusions were confirmed by the late William F. Albright, then the foremost American archaeologist. During the time of the Babylonian captivity, the square script became the normal style of writing in Hebrew (as well as in Aramaic, a cousin of Hebrew). The evidence of paleography clearly dates the majority of the Qumran scrolls in the period between 200 B.C. and A.D. 200.
Archaeology provides another kind of external evidence. The pottery discovered at Qumran dates from the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods (200 B.C.–A.D. 100). Earthenware articles and ornaments point to the same period. Several hundred coins were found in jars dating from the Graeco-Roman period. A crack in one of the buildings is attributed to an earthquake that, according to Josephus (a Jewish historian who wrote during the first century A.D.), occurred in 31 B.C. The excavations at Khirbet Qumran indicate that the general period of their occupation was from about 135 B.C. to A.D. 68, the year the Zealot revolt was crushed by Rome.
Finally, radiocarbon analysis has contributed to dating the finds. Radiocarbon analysis is a method of dating material by the amount of radioactive carbon remaining in it. The process is also known as carbon-14 dating. Applied to the linen cloth in which the scrolls were wrapped, the analysis gave a date of A.D. 33 plus or minus 200 years. A later test bracketed the date between 250 B.C. and A.D. 50. Although there may be questions concerning the relation of the linen wrappings to the date of the scrolls themselves, the carbon-14 test agrees with the conclusions of both paleography and archaeology. The general period, then, in which the Dead Sea Scrolls can be safely dated is between about 150 B.C. and A.D. 68.
Reading Manuscripts
Modern science has provided a number of aids for deciphering a manuscript. Scientific dating procedures help to determine the age of the writing material. Chemical techniques help clarify writing that has deteriorated. Ultraviolet light enables a scholar to see traces of ink (carbon) in a manuscript even after the surface writing has been effaced.
Each manuscript must be studied as a whole, for each has a “personality.” It is important to identify the characteristic errors, characteristic carelessness or carefulness, and other peculiarities of the scribe(s) who copied the material. Then the manuscript must be compared with other manuscripts to identify the “family” tradition with which it agrees. Preservation of common errors or insertions in the text is a clue to relationships. All possible details of date, place of origin, and authorship must be ascertained.
Scribal errors fall into several distinct categories. The first large category is that of unintentional errors. (1) Confusion of similar consonants and the transposition of two consonants are frequent errors. (2) Corruptions also resulted from an incorrect division of words (many early manuscripts omitted spaces between words in order to save space). (3) Confusion of sounds occurred particularly when one scribe read to a group of scribes making multiple copies. (4) In the Old Testament, the method of vocalization (addition of vowels to the consonantal text) created some errors. (5) Omissions of a letter, word, or phrase created new readings. (6) Repetition of a letter, word, or even a whole phrase was also common. Omission (called haplography) or repetition (called dittography) could be caused by the eye of a scribe slipping from one word to a similar word or ending. Omissions by homoioteleuton (Greek meaning “similar endings”) were also quite common. This occurred when two words that were identical, similar, or had identical endings were found close to each other, and the eye of the copyist moved from the first to the second, omitting the words between them. (7) In the Old Testament, errors were at times caused by the use of consonants as vowel letters in some ancient texts. Copyists unaware of this usage of vowel letters would copy them in as aberrant consonants. Normally, unintentional errors are fairly easy to identify because they create nonsense readings.
Intentional errors are much more difficult to identify and evaluate. Harmonizations from similar materials occurred with regularity. Difficult readings were subject to improvement by a thinking scribe. Objectionable expressions were sometimes eliminated or smoothed. Occasionally synonyms were employed. Conflation (resolving a discrepancy between two variant readings by including both of them) often appears.
Awareness of these common problems is the first step in detecting and eliminating the more obvious errors and identifying and eliminating the peculiarities of a particular scribe. Then more subtle criteria for identifying the reading most likely to be the original must be employed. Procedures for applying such criteria are similar in both Old Testament and New Testament work.
General Methodological Principles
Through the work of textual critics in the last several centuries, certain basic principles have evolved. The primary principles for the Old Testament can be briefly summarized.
1. The basic text for primary consideration is the Masoretic Text because of the careful standardization it represents. That text is compared with the testimony of the ancient versions. The Septuagint, by reason of age and basic faithfulness to the Hebrew text, carries significant weight in all decisions. The Targums (Aramaic translations) also reflect the Hebrew base but exhibit a tendency to expansion and paraphrase. The Syriac (Peshitta), Vulgate (Latin), Old Latin, and Coptic versions add indirect evidence, although translations are not always clear witnesses in technical details. Use of such versions does enable scholars to use comparative philology in textual decisions and thus expose early errors for which the original reading probably has not survived.
2. The reading that best explains the origin of other variants is preferable. Information from reconstruction of the history of transmission often provides additional insight. Knowledge of typical scribal errors enables the critic to make an educated decision on the sequence of variants.
3. The shorter reading is preferable. The scribes frequently added material in order to solve style or syntax problems and seldom abridged or condensed material.
4. The more difficult reading is more likely to be the original one. This principle is closely related to the third. Scribes did not intentionally create more complex readings. Unintentional errors are usually easy to identify. Thus the easier reading is normally suspect as a scribal alteration.
5. Readings that are not harmonized or assimilated to similar passages are preferable. Copyists had a tendency to correct material on the basis of similar material elsewhere (sometimes even unconsciously).
6. When all else fails, the textual critic must resort to conjectural emendation. To make an “educated guess” requires intimate acquaintance with the Hebrew language, familiarity with the author’s style, and an understanding of culture, customs, and theology that might color the passage. Use of conjecture must be limited to those passages in which the original reading has definitely not been transmitted to us.
CONCLUSION
It should be remembered that textual criticism operates only when two or more readings are possible for a specific word or phrase. For most of the biblical text a single reading has been transmitted. Elimination of scribal errors and intentional changes leaves only a small percentage of the text about which any questions occur. Writing in 1940, textual scholar Sir Frederic Kenyon concluded:
The interval then between the dates of original composition and the earliest extant evidence becomes so small as to be in fact negligible, and the last foundation for any doubt that the Scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. Both the authenticity and the general integrity of the books of the New Testament may be regarded as finally established.
Similar confidence is expressed in the text of the Old Testament.
The field of textual criticism is complex, requiring the gathering and skillful use of a wide variety of information. Because it deals with the authoritative source of revelation for all Christians, textual argumentation has often been accompanied by emotion.
Yet in spite of controversy, great progress has been made, particularly in the last century. Refinement of methodology has greatly aided our understanding of the accumulated materials. Additional aid has come from accumulations of information in related fields of study such as church history, biblical theology, and the history of Christian thought.
Collection and organization of all variant readings have enabled modern textual critics to give strong assurance that the Word of God has been transmitted in accurate and dependable form. Although variant readings have become obvious through the publication of so many manuscripts, inadequate, inferior, and secondary readings have been largely eliminated. In relatively few places is conjectural emendation necessary. In matters pertaining to the Christian’s salvation, clear and unmistakable transmission provides authoritative answers. Christians are thus in debt to the textual critics who have worked, and are working, to provide a dependable biblical text.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brownlee, W. H. The Meaning of the Qumran Scrolls for the Bible, 1964.
Burrows, M. The Dead Sea Scrolls, 1956; and More Light on the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1958.
Cross, F. M. The Ancient Library of Qumran and Modern Biblical Studies, 1961.
Cross, F. M., and S. Talmon, eds. Qumran and the History of the Biblical Text, 1975.
Fitzmeyer, J. A. The Dead Sea Scrolls: Major Publications and Tools, 1975.
Kenyon, Frederic G. Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts (revised), 1958.
LaSor, W. S. Bibliography of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1958.
Milik, J. T. Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea, 1959.
Vaux, R. de Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1973.
Vermes, G. The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 1975.
Waltke, Bruce K. and M. O’Connor. Biblical Hebrew Syntax, 1990.
Wurthwein, Ernst. The Text of the Old Testament, 1979.
Note: Some of the material in this essay was adapted from unpublished articles written for Tyndale House Publishers by Morris A. Weigelt (Old Testament textual criticism) and Paul S. Haik (Dead Sea Scrolls).