Tracing the Evolution of the Hebrew Bible

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In some ways—oddly enough—the more than 200 biblical manuscripts in Hebrew found among the Dead Sea Scrolls have elevated the authority of the Greek Septuagint at the expense of the Masoretic text, the received Hebrew version preserved by the Jewish community for 2,000 years. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the received text had special authority even before the Christian era.

To understand why, we need to recall the situation before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Our modern translations of what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Tanakh^a are based on the text of a complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in the Public Library of St. Petersburg in Russia, known as the Leningrad Codex, which dates from about 1008 A.D.^b Several other medieval Bible codices are about a century older but contain only part of the biblical text.^c Fragments of Hebrew Bible books dating from 600–900 A.D. were also found in the genizah of the Ezra Synagogue of Old Cairo at the end of the last century.^d

All of these Hebrew witnesses—codices and fragments—belong to the Masoretic textual tradition of the Hebrew Bible. During the tenth century A.D. the Masoretes, Jewish scribes, not only faithfully passed down a standardized consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible, they also punctuated or vocalized the consonantal text with vowel markers and added accents and comments. The relatively late date of all these manuscripts, however, means that until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we knew almost nothing about the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible 043books from the time of their origin.

Part of the history of this tradition can be learned from early Greek translations of the Old Testament—in particular the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible produced in stages beginning with the Pentateuch in about 300 B.C.^e In some places the Septuagint differs considerably from the Hebrew Bible, especially in the books of Samuel, Jeremiah and Job. But the character, and consequently the text-historical and text-critical value, of this Greek translation has been a matter of considerable debate. For one thing, the texts are not homogeneous, not by one hand, and not from the same time. Another problem was how to account for the variants between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. Some scholars attributed the differences simply to the license of the Greek translators. Others thought that the translators worked from an early version of the Hebrew text that differed from the Hebrew of the Masoretic text. Without knowing whether this was so, or whether the Greek text was simply a very free translation, it was difficult to use the Septuagint for text-historical or text-critical purposes.

A similar problem existed in the Hebrew-Samaritan Pentateuch, the Holy Book of the Samaritans, which contains only the books of Genesis to Deuteronomy. Its earliest manuscripts date to the late Middle Ages. The variances sometimes reflect Samaritan doctrines.

Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, we could assume that in the Masoretic tradition the original text of the Old Testament had come down virtually unchanged through the centuries. We could dismiss the Septuagint as a free translation of the Hebrew Bible, and the Samaritan Pentateuch as a sectarian rendition of the so-called five books of Moses. It was recognized of course that the Masoretic text contained some errors (transcribers all make mistakes) and that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch may have at times preserved textual variants that were 044acceptable or even preferable. Still these versions did not pose an essential problem to those who believed that the consonantal text of the Hebrew Bible had been passed down through the centuries with exemplary faithfulness.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, discovered near Qumran beginning in 1947, have changed all that. The biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea Scrolls have thrown a new light on the textual history of the Hebrew Bible. These 200 or so biblical manuscripts, almost all very fragmentary, lead us back to the text of the Old Testament as it circulated in Palestine before the beginning of the Christian era, in a few cases going back as early as the third century B.C.

The Qumran community had no “canon” of the Old Testament in the sense of a well-defined number of holy writings, as Rabbinic Judaism later recognized it and as we know it. Not only did they have no canon of included and excluded books, they had no fully standardized text. At least we find a diversity of textual traditions of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew at Qumran. In addition to texts that replicate the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition (on which our version of the Hebrew Bible is based), other Hebrew manuscripts among the scrolls resemble the Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch. Indeed, these three traditional categories do not encompass the totality of biblical writings found at Qumran, for some manuscripts from Qumran cannot be properly classified under any of these three headings.

For example, in addition to fragments of Jeremiah as we know it from the Masoretic manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls have also yielded a piece of the same book that contains the Hebrew predecessor of the Septuagint version of Jeremiah, which is about a seventh shorter. So in the case of Jeremiah this early Greek translation is not a free rendition, but a faithful translation of a different Hebrew text. Apparently these two divergent versions of Jeremiah existed side by side within the Qumran community.

Other examples: An Exodus manuscript¹ has shown that the text underlying the Samaritan Pentateuch is not sectarian, but basically a harmonization of the Masoretic tradition. And a Leviticus scroll written in paleo-Hebrew characters (the script used before the Babylonian Exile and occasionally in an archaizing manner at Qumran) appears to be independent of any of the three traditions; it is neither Masoretic, nor Septuagintal, nor Samaritan.

Although these variations do not affect the basic message of the biblical text, they show very clearly that the Old Testament text in the last centuries before the Christian era, at any rate in some circles of Palestinian Judaism, was a fluctuating one. And therefore we must accord greater respect to the variations in the Septuagint, and sometimes even to the Samaritan Pentateuch. But this is not the whole story.

It might be suggested that this fluctuating textual tradition was true only for the Qumran community. A number of these manuscripts were brought to Qumran from outside; indeed, some date from a time when the community did not yet exist. (The community was founded in about 150 B.C.; some of the manuscripts, as noted earlier, are from the third century B.C.)

In the decade after the first of the Dead Sea Scrolls was discovered, biblical manuscripts were also found elsewhere in the Jordan rift valley and at Masada. After the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (which began in 66 A.D. and ended in 70 A.D. with Jerusalem’s destruction and the burning of the Temple), a small group of rebels held out for another three years at Herod’s almost impregnable mountain fortress in the desert of Judah. Excavations at Masada have yielded fragments of Genesis, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Ezekiel and Psalms that all basically contain the consonantal text familiar to us from the Masoretic tradition.

At the end of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome (which lasted from 132–135 A.D. and was led by Simon bar Kokhba), Jewish fighters resisted the hated enemy to the very last in virtually inaccessible caves in this same area. The biblical manuscripts they left in these caves, principally in the Wadi Murabba‘at, also contain, apart from a few almost negligible details, the consonantal text known from the medieval manuscripts.

Therefore neither Masada nor the caves of the Wadi Murabba‘at give evidence of a pluriform textual tradition of the Old Testament, such as we find at Qumran. This is remarkable and obviously raises the question: How and why was the uniform textual tradition established—the tradition that underlies the medieval manuscripts on which our Bible translations are based—in view of the different version of books of the Hebrew Bible found at Qumran?

This problem has been answered in various ways. It is usually assumed that the text was standardized in the latter half of the first century A.D. after the end of the First Jewish Revolt. Out of the variety of Jewish sects before the First Revolt, the Pharisees were the only religious party to survive the debacle of 70 A.D. The Pharisees and scribes succeeded, some scholars argue, in preserving Jewish national unity by establishing the canon of Holy Scripture once and for all.

Others, exemplified by Professor Moshe Greenberg² of Hebrew University, have argued that the text was standardized in a much earlier period and should be attributed to the initiative of scribes within reach 045of the Temple in Jerusalem. These scribes made a critical selection among manuscripts and textual variants and thereby excluded the proto-Samaritan Pentateuch and the Hebrew predecessor of the Septuagint. Greenberg dates this text-critical work from the middle of the second century B.C., and I believe Greenberg is correct.

If, as seems clear, the Pharisees’ textual tradition prevailed after the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D., this textual tradition must have existed before that. But in view of the pluriformity of the texts found at Qumran, we have to explain how and why the Pharisees had an essentially uniform textual tradition before the catastrophe of 70 A.D.

On several bases, we can infer that the proto-Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible had already been standardized in certain Jewish circles before 70 A.D. This inference is supported not only by the discoveries at Masada of biblical writings that are all proto-Masoretic, but also by the fact that so-called “normative” or mainstream Judaism rejected the textual tradition of the Septuagint at a very early stage. Witness a Greek manuscript of the Minor Prophets found in the desert of Judah in Nahal Hever, dating to the late first century B.C.^f This text, a revision of the Septuagint tradition on the basis of a Hebrew text, shows marked similarities with the proto-Masoretic tradition that became current after 70 A.D. That is, the Hebrew predecessor of the Septuagint version was being brought at least in part into conformity with the proto-Masoretic text. So the process of adapting the early Greek tradition to the proto-Masoretic text began quite early.

Several Greek revisions of the Septuagint—by Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus—corrected the original text of the Septuagint toward the proto-Masoretic tradition. Some scholars explain this as follows: because the Christians had accepted the Septuagint as their Bible, these later Greek versions were intended to distinguish translations for the Jewish diaspora from the Christian text. On the contrary, I believe these Greek revisions toward the proto-Masoretic text were intended to harmonize the Greek text of the Septuagint with the proto-Masoretic tradition that was already standard in Jerusalem.

That this proto-Masoretic standard was the result of deliberate text-critical work by pre-70 A.D. scribes is also suggested by the later Rabbinic tradition that three scrolls were kept in the Temple court in Jerusalem; in case of textual variants between them, the reading that two of the three had in common was chosen. These tiqqune sopherim, “corrections of the Scribes,” certainly began before 70 A.D. and probably before the Christian period. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus states that the traditional writings were passed down by the forefathers with scrupulous precision and that no one dared to add, omit or change anything in them. Thus the events of 70 A.D. at most hastened the final phase of a process that began much earlier, a process that probably took place among the priests and scribes at the Jerusalem Temple.

A uniform textual tradition becomes necessary when there is no longer an appeal to present-day divine inspiration, when people wish to preserve earlier prophetic inspiration in Scripture—in short, when the authority outside Scripture is shifted to Scripture itself. The priests and scribes from Jerusalem before the beginning of the Christian era, as well as the early rabbis after them, believed that the prophetic spirit had withdrawn since the days of Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. They were left with books, holy writings, that in principle did not admit of modernizing changes. This gradually led to the canonization of Holy Scripture as God’s word.

What we have at Qumran are some variant manuscripts that survived from the time when the Hebrew Bible was being canonized in Jerusalem. These early Hebrew texts from Qumran allow us to understand this development in light of later Greek manuscripts in the Septuagint tradition.

But the pluriformity of texts from Qumran should not lead us to conclude that the canonization process occurred largely after the devastation of 70 A.D. In my view, the text of the Old Testament passed down to us is a basically faithful representation of the tradition by the spiritual leaders of early Judaism before the Roman destruction of the Temple.

This is not to say that I recommend a blind faith in the letter of the Masoretic textual tradition, let alone a defense of the literal inspiration of Scripture. But I do suggest that we should have great respect for this tradition, with all the consequences this has for our text-critical work on the Hebrew Bible.

I am indebted to Anthony Runia for translating this manuscript from Dutch into English. For further details, see Adam S. van der Woude, “Pluriformity and Uniformity—Reflections on the Transmission of the Text of the Old Testament” in Sacred History and Sacred Texts in Early Judaism: A Symposium in Honour of A.S. van der Woude, ed. J.N. Bremmer and F. Garcia Martinez (Kampen, Netherlands: Pharos, 1992).

In some ways—oddly enough—the more than 200 biblical manuscripts in Hebrew found among the Dead Sea Scrolls have elevated the authority of the Greek Septuagint at the expense of the Masoretic text, the received Hebrew version preserved by the Jewish community for 2,000 years. Nevertheless, there is reason to believe that the received text had special authority even before the Christian era. To understand why, we need to recall the situation before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Our modern translations of what Christians call the Old Testament and Jews call the Tanakha are based on the text of […]