The Dead Sea Scrolls

In the winter of 1946 to 1947, Bedouin shepherds of the Ta'amireh tribe found jars containing leather scrolls in a cave in the cliffs near Qumran, on the north-western shore of the Dead Sea. Between then and 1956, eleven caves in the area yielded the remains of some nine hundred manuscripts, most of them in fragments, and further finds came from other sites in the Judean Desert such as Masada, Nahal Hever and Wadi Murabba'at. The manuscripts date from roughly the third century BC to the first century AD. About two hundred of the Qumran manuscripts are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible, and every book is represented at least by a fragment except Esther, counting Ezra and Nehemiah as one book, as ancient Jews did.

Before 1947, the oldest substantial Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were the Masoretic codices of the previous lesson, from the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. Overnight the evidence moved back a thousand years. It was as though a family that had owned only a grandfather's copy of a letter had found the copies made by their ancestors' ancestors, and could at last see what had and had not changed in between.

The scrolls are named by a simple code, and once you know it the footnotes and articles become readable. The first number is the cave, the letter after it is the site, then comes an abbreviation for the book, and a small letter distinguishes copies of the same book from the same cave. So 4QDeut j is the tenth copy of Deuteronomy catalogued from Qumran Cave 4, and 11QPs a is the first Psalms scroll from Cave 11. Cave 4 alone yielded thousands of fragments from several hundred manuscripts, many no bigger than a postage stamp, which is why the work of publishing the scrolls took until the early years of this century. When a footnote in your Bible says DSS, it is referring to one or more manuscripts named in this way.

Most of the rest of the Qumran library is not scripture: rules for a community, commentaries on prophets, hymns, calendars and other writings. Who lived at Qumran, and whether the scrolls were the library of the community at the site or were brought there from elsewhere, are long-running scholarly debates; many scholars connect the community with the Essenes described by Josephus and Philo, and others dispute the link. For a student of the Hebrew text that question matters less than the copies themselves. They are copies of the Bible made before and during the time of Jesus, by Jews who regarded these books as scripture.

The most famous of the scrolls was among the first seven found in Cave 1. It is called the Great Isaiah Scroll, and its catalogue name is 1QIsaiah a, written 1QIsa with a small raised a: 1 for Cave 1, Q for Qumran, Isa for Isaiah, and a because it was the first of two Isaiah scrolls from that cave. It is the only biblical scroll from Qumran that survives nearly complete. It contains all sixty-six chapters of Isaiah, with only a few small damaged places, written in fifty-four columns on seventeen sheets of parchment sewn together, about 7.34 metres (24 feet) long.

It is usually dated to about 125 BC. Handwriting analysis places it between about 150 and 100 BC, and radiocarbon tests give a wider range within the last few centuries BC. So the scroll was already old when Jesus stood up in the synagogue at Nazareth and was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah (Luke 4:17). It is roughly a thousand years older than the Aleppo and Leningrad codices.

Its later history is a story in itself. A dealer sold it, with three other Cave 1 scrolls, to Mar Athanasius Yeshue Samuel, the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Jerusalem, who took them to the United States. In June 1954 he advertised them for sale in the Wall Street Journal, and the Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin bought all four through intermediaries for 250,000 dollars. Yadin's father, Eleazar Sukenik, had already bought three other Cave 1 scrolls in late 1947, among them the second, more fragmentary Isaiah scroll, 1QIsa b. The Great Isaiah Scroll is now kept at the Shrine of the Book in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. In 2011 the museum, working with Google, put high-resolution photographs of it online, free, where anyone with a phone can read it column by column and search by chapter and verse.

What does it show? Two things at once. The first is how stable the text of Isaiah was. The great majority of its differences from the Masoretic Text are spelling, especially the use of extra letters to mark vowels, which scholars call full spelling, along with small differences in grammar and in the little words. Its fragmentary companion, 1QIsa b, is closer still to the Masoretic Text, early evidence of the very consonants the Masoretes later preserved. The second thing the Great Isaiah Scroll shows is that it is not identical to the Masoretic Text. It has many hundreds of small variants, and a handful matter for meaning. Isaiah 53:11 is one of them.

The scrolls did not overturn the text of the Old Testament, and no Christian or Jewish doctrine rests on a reading they removed. Anyone who tells your church otherwise has not read them. But the scrolls did change three things, and a pastor should know each.

First, they confirmed that the Masoretic consonants are ancient. Many biblical scrolls, which scholars call proto-Masoretic, are close to the consonants of the Leningrad Codex a thousand years before it was copied. The care you saw in the previous lesson was not a medieval invention; it continues a care much older.

Second, they showed that in the centuries before Jesus more than one form of the Hebrew text circulated side by side. Some scrolls stand close to the Masoretic Text. Others agree with the Hebrew from which the Septuagint was translated, which shows that where the Greek differs from the Masoretic Text, the Greek translators were often faithfully rendering a different Hebrew text, not inventing. The clearest case is Jeremiah. The Septuagint of Jeremiah is shorter than the Masoretic Text by roughly an eighth, and arranges some chapters in a different order, and two fragmentary Hebrew scrolls from Cave 4, 4QJer b and 4QJer d, have the shorter form. Emanuel Tov, who led the publication of the scrolls, has written the standard account of these text groups in Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Where this leaves the question of which form of Jeremiah is canonical is a real debate, and the Septuagint lesson in this module returns to it.

Third, the scrolls changed particular readings in modern translations. You have already seen two in the BSB. At Deuteronomy 32:8 the Masoretic Text reads that God set the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the sons of Israel; a scroll from Cave 4, 4QDeut j, reads sons of God, and most Septuagint manuscripts have angels of God. The BSB follows the scroll: 'according to the number of the sons of God.' At Psalm 145, an acrostic psalm in which each verse begins with the next letter of the alphabet, the Masoretic Text has no verse for the letter nun; a Psalms scroll from Cave 11, the Septuagint, the Syriac and one medieval Hebrew manuscript have one, and the BSB includes it at the end of 145:13: 'The LORD is faithful in all His words and kind in all His actions.'

The scrolls also brought a fourth kind of evidence into view. Some Pentateuch scrolls, such as a copy of Exodus from Cave 4 written in the old Paleo-Hebrew script, share many of the features of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the form of the five books of Moses kept by the Samaritan community, apart from its few distinctively Samaritan changes. Scholars call these pre-Samaritan texts. Their existence showed that the Samaritan Pentateuch, long treated as a sectarian curiosity, preserves a form of the text that was circulating among Jews before the Samaritans adopted it. It is one more witness for the textual critic to weigh, and occasionally a translation's footnote will cite it as SP.

Not every translation makes the same decisions. At the end of 1 Samuel 10, a scroll from Cave 4, 4QSam a, has a paragraph about the cruelty of Nahash the Ammonite, explaining the siege in chapter 11. The NRSV prints it; the BSB, the KJV and most others do not. When translations disagree about adopting a scroll reading, they are weighing evidence, not hiding it, and their footnotes tell you so.

Here is the Masoretic Text of the opening of the verse in the WLC: מֵעֲמַל נַפְשׁוֹ יִרְאֶה יִשְׂבָּע (me'amal nafsho yireh yisba, from the toil of his soul he will see, he will be satisfied). The verb יִרְאֶה (yireh) is Qal imperfect third masculine singular of ראה (r-'-h, to see), and it has no object. The KJV renders it as it stands: 'He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied.'

The Great Isaiah Scroll, the second Isaiah scroll from Cave 1, and a fragmentary Isaiah scroll from Cave 4 (4QIsa d) all read one more word after the verb: אוֹר (or, light). He will see light. The Septuagint also has light: its translators rendered the line as a statement that God will show him light. The BSB adopts the reading, and fills it out as 'the light of life', which is an interpretive expansion in the English; no ancient witness reads 'of life'. The NIV does the same. The KJV, translated before the scrolls were found, follows the Masoretic Text, and some modern translations still do.

The case for reading light is strong. Three Hebrew manuscripts a thousand years older than the codices agree with each other and with an ancient Greek translation made in another country. The verb see is left without an object in the Masoretic Text, which is awkward. And it is easy to see how the word could have dropped out. In יראה אור (yireh or) the two words share letters and look alike on the page, so a copyist's eye could pass over the second, the kind of accidental omission described in the Hermeneutics lesson Which Bible Are You Reading. Many textual critics, of different theological convictions, regard light as the original reading.

The case for the Masoretic Text is also serious. The verb ra'ah can stand on its own in Hebrew poetry, and the line makes sense without an object: after his suffering he will see, that is, see the outcome, and be satisfied. A shorter, more difficult reading is often the original one, because scribes tend to smooth difficulties, and a scribe who found the verb without an object might supply light, perhaps remembering Isaiah 9:2, 'The people walking in darkness have seen a great light.' Nor are the three scrolls and the Greek necessarily independent witnesses; they may all descend from one early Hebrew text that already had the word. The later Jewish Greek translations of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion, made in the early centuries AD, agree with the Masoretic Text in lacking light. Careful scholars hold this view too, and translations that keep the Masoretic reading are not ignoring the scrolls.

Look at how the BSB's footnote on Bible Hub records the decision: 'DSS (see also LXX); MT does not include the light of life.' In a dozen words it tells you the source of its reading, the supporting witness, and what the Masoretic Text has instead. That is the form almost every Old Testament textual footnote takes, and with the abbreviations of this module you can now read them: DSS for the Dead Sea Scrolls, LXX for the Septuagint, MT for the Masoretic Text, SP for the Samaritan Pentateuch, and Syriac or Vulgate for the ancient translations into those languages. A footnote is not an admission that the Bible is unreliable. It is a translator showing you the evidence so that you need not take his word for it.

What changes either way? Less than one might think. Both readings say that the Servant who was crushed and cut off (53:8, 53:10) will afterwards see and be satisfied, and verse 10 has already said he will see his offspring and prolong his days. With light, the language is closer to life after death, since light in the Old Testament is often the light of the living (Job 33:30, Psalm 56:13). Without it, the hope is still there in the verbs. A preacher who proclaims from Isaiah 53 that the Servant's suffering is not the end proclaims what both texts say. A preacher who builds a resurrection argument on the single word light should say that one of the witnesses lacks it.

Two opposite misuses of the scrolls are common, and you will meet both. The first says the scrolls prove the Bible has been changed beyond recovery. They prove nothing of the kind. They show a Hebrew text copied with care for more than a thousand years, with differences that are mostly spelling and a small number that matter and can be weighed. The second says the scrolls prove the Old Testament has never changed by a letter. They do not show that either; they show variants, and translations including the BSB have changed their text because of them. The truth is between the two slogans, and it is more interesting than either.

The honest preacher's sentence runs something like this: the oldest copies of this book, from before the time of Jesus, show us that it has been handed down with great faithfulness, and at one or two points they help us see the text more clearly. You can say that about Isaiah with your hand on the evidence.

There is a third misuse, which belongs to the sensational end of the bookshop and the internet. It claims that the scrolls contain secret teachings about Jesus that the church has suppressed, or that they reveal a different Bible hidden from ordinary believers. None of the scrolls mentions Jesus or any of the apostles. They were published in full, and the photographs are free online, so anyone can check. When a church member brings you such a claim, the kindest answer is to show them the Great Isaiah Scroll on your phone and let them see what is actually there: the book of Isaiah, copied before Christ, very much as you read it on Sunday.

It also helps to know the rules of thumb textual critics use, and their limits. A reading that explains how the others arose is usually preferred. A harder reading is often preferred, because scribes smoothed difficulties more often than they created them. A shorter reading is often preferred, because scribes added explanations more often than they cut. The age and independence of witnesses count, but they are weighed, not merely counted. Every one of these rules has exceptions, and in Isaiah 53:11 they pull in different directions, which is exactly why careful people disagree. A rule of thumb is a help to judgment, not a substitute for it.

Do not overstate your own position on a variant either. You have now seen enough to have a view about Isaiah 53:11, and you may hold it. But the people who disagree with you have read the same evidence, and when you mention the question in a sermon you should be able to state their case in a sentence before you state your own.

Open your notebook to your capstone passage and start a new page headed Scrolls.

First, find out whether your passage survives in the Dead Sea Scrolls. On your phone, search for the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, the free site of the Israel Antiquities Authority, and use its search to look for your book. If your passage is from Isaiah, go instead to the Israel Museum's Digital Dead Sea Scrolls site and open the Great Isaiah Scroll; it lets you jump to a chapter. Write down which scrolls contain your book, and whether your verses survive or only fragments of the book.

Second, if you can find your passage, look at the photograph for a few minutes even if you cannot read it yet. Find one word you recognise from your Hebrew text. Notice the absence of vowel points and any extra letters used for vowels. You are looking at scripture as it was copied before the Masoretes.

Third, open your passage on Bible Hub and read every BSB footnote. Copy any note that mentions the Dead Sea Scrolls, DSS, or Qumran, with the reading it gives and what the Masoretic Text reads. Then check the same verse in one other translation and note whether it makes the same decision.

Finally, if your passage has a scroll reading that changes the English, write two or three lines for each side, as section 4 did for Isaiah 53:11, and then one line on what you would say from the pulpit. If it has none, write that down: the oldest evidence supports the text of your passage as you have it, which is a finding worth knowing.