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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > February 1995

Tracing the Evolution of the Hebrew Bible

What the Dead Sea scrolls teach us

By Adam S. van der Woude

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 […]

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Footnotes

1.

Tanakh is an acronym made up of the initial letter of the three parts of the Hebrew Bible: Torah (the five books of Moses), Nevi‘im (prophets) and Ketuvim (writings).

2.

For more on Old Testament manuscripts, see Marc Brettler, “Glossary: Old Testament Manuscripts—From Qumran to Leningrad,” BR 06:04.

3.

See for example, Harvey Minkoff, “The Aleppo Codex—Ancient Bible from the Ashes,” BR 07:04.

4.

A genizah is a storage site for ancient Jewish books that are no longer fit for use. The Cairo genizah contained the remains of several thousand biblical manuscripts. See Raphael Levy, “First ‘Dead Sea Scroll’ Found in Egypt Fifty Years Before Qumran Discoveries,” BAR 08:05.

5.

See Leonard Greenspoon, “Mission to Alexandria—Truth and Legend About the Creation of the Septuagint, the First Bible Translation,” BR 05:04.

6.

See review of The Greek Minor Prophets Scroll from Nahal Hever, by Emanuel Tov, Books in Brief, BAR 17:02.

Endnotes

1.

See Judith E. Sanderson, An Exodus Scroll from Qumran. 4QpaleoExodm and the Samaritan Tradition (Harvard Semitic Studies 30) (Atlanta, GA: 1986); “The Contribution of 4QpaleoExodm to Textual Criticism,” in Memorial Jean Carmignac, ed. F. Garcia Martinez and E. Puech (Paris: 1988), pp. 547–560 (= Revue de Qumran 1349–52).

2.

Moshe Greenberg, “The Stabilization of the Text of the Hebrew Bible Reviewed in the Light of the Biblical Materials from the Judaean Desert,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 76 (1956), pp. 157–167.