The Masoretic Text - Scribes & the Old Testament - Part 2

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Scribal Methods & the Hebrew Bible - Scribes & the Old Testament - Part 3

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We live in a world where modern books can be printed over and over again exactly the way the author intended.

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We never think that what we're reading might not be exactly what the author wrote because the printer made a mistake.

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But we saw in the last video that in ancient times, before the invention of the printing press, things were very different.

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When it comes to the texts of the Hebrew Bible, we no longer have the originals, which are called autographs.

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Now we only have copies separated from the autographs by millennia, with an unknown number of copies in between.

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When people copy things by hand, errors quickly creep in because of carelessness, tiredness, distraction, and many other factors of human frailty.

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You see, humans are not machines. Even a scribe who holds a text in utmost reverence may make mistakes.

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There may be times when a scribe sees something he thinks is incorrect, so he corrects it.

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But then it turns out that it was correct before he corrected it. Then the next copyist who comes along may have to deal with the predecessor's errors by guesswork or logic, resulting in a series of intended improvements leading away from the original text.

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Sometimes the scribe's eyes might jump to the wrong place and cause him to skip a few words.

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Some scribes write explanations or comments between the lines or in the margin, and the next copyist accidentally incorporates them in the main text.

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And there will be other factors and types of errors that we'll discuss with examples in future videos. So all the writings which come to us from antiquity, including the writings of the

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Hebrew Bible, have mistakes because of human imperfection. So before we can translate the

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Bible, we have to establish what the text of the Bible is. We have to look carefully at all the witnesses and then reconstruct a single form of the text that is the most authentic according to the evidence.

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Once we have confidence in the text, we can move on to the other things like interpretation and translation.

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But first, we must try to get as close to the original canonical text as possible.

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Now before we go on, I want to explain why our goal is to restore the canonical text rather than the autographs.

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The goals of textual criticism for the Hebrew Bible have evolved over time. Initially, scholars aimed to restore the original composition by figures like Moses or Isaiah.

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However, with the advent of further breakthroughs in understanding the history of the text transmission, the focus shifted to restoring the final or canonical text, which was the product of editing, updating, and arranging.

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In some cases, like the Book of Jeremiah, we find multiple versions circulating in different communities.

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For example, the shorter Greek Septuagint version versus the longer Masoretic text.

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We believe the Masoretic text version to be the authoritative canonical version in that case, but even if someone were to prove that there were two different equally authoritative versions of Jeremiah, this shouldn't trouble those who trust and treasure the

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Bible because there's no theological reason why the Spirit couldn't have inspired different editions of the same book.

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So the concept of the canonical text refers to the version of the text that was accepted as authoritative by the ancient community of faith.

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This may not always be the earliest version, but rather the form that achieved widespread acceptance and use.

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For Christians in particular, this means that we are interested in what

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Jesus held to be the authoritative collection. In Luke 24 -44, Jesus said, "...everything

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must be fulfilled that is written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the

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Psalms." This three -fold division corresponds to the traditional Jewish organization of the

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Hebrew Bible known as the Tanakh, which is an acronym for the Torah, which is the first five books, the

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Pentateuch, the Nevi 'im, the prophets, and the Ketuvim, the writings.

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And if we also look at Luke 1150 -51, Jesus says, "...this

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generation will be held responsible for the blood of all the prophets that has been shed since the beginning of the world, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah."

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This last phrase about the blood of Abel and the blood of Zechariah refers to the first and last books of the

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Hebrew Bible as organized in the Jewish canon. These references point to an established authoritative canon at the time that was what we see today in the

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Hebrew Bible. And as a follower of Jesus, I accept what he deemed authoritative.

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So our goal is to acknowledge the complex history of the text and reconstruct it as it existed when it achieved its final literary form, probably around the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, before the process of transmission and copying introduced further changes.

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To do this, we use the science of textual criticism, which is often something people have never heard of.

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The word criticism shouldn't be confused with something negative in this context, as though we were criticizing the

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Bible. No. It simply refers to the fact that it's a science of analyzing texts.

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So we're using the word criticism in the sense of a serious examination of something.

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And so textual criticism deals with the identification of textual variance between ancient witnesses to a text.

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It's complex and meticulous, similar to the work of a detective trying to figure out what happened based on all the clues in front of him.

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The textual critic examines all the available evidence and does his best to discover what an earlier version of the text was.

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This science plays an incredibly important role in the body of Christ. Preachers can't preach if they don't know what text to preach.

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Translators can't translate the Bible if they're not sure if the original said A or B. Therefore, textual criticism is a work that we need to learn about and celebrate in our churches.

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This video and the ones that follow it will be a course on how to do this with the Hebrew Bible. Now, in order to understand it well, you should have some knowledge of Hebrew and Greek.

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But if you don't, that's okay. You can still learn a lot. And if you want to start learning

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Hebrew or Greek for free, check out the links in the description for a fun method that works for everyone, even kids.

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So there's no excuse to not start learning today. Textual critics produce scholarly or critical editions of the

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Bible, which help people see and understand the evidence for themselves. They present the different ways verses have been copied or translated throughout the centuries.

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And the purpose and goal of these editions of the Bible is to assist in achieving an objective understanding of the text.

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So they bring together in a convenient form a vast array of material, well beyond the capacity of individual scholars to assemble for themselves, to provide the basic requirements for a systematic study of the text.

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In order to navigate all this material and use it effectively, we need to understand its peculiarities and the value of its various elements.

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Now, when we come to a difficult passage, we can't simply gather the various readings and select the one which seems to offer the simplest solution, sometimes picking the

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Hebrew text or the Septuagint or the Aramaic Targum. Textual witnesses are not all equally reliable.

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Each has its own character and its own individual history. We have to be familiar with these if we hope to avoid bad or weak solutions.

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So in this series, we'll do our best to take a detailed look at most of the available witnesses, understand the kinds of mistakes scribes typically made, and then talk about how to apply what we've learned with specific verses that have textual variants.

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Let's begin with the Masoretic text. This text is called Masoretic because it comes down to us from the textual tradition of Jewish scholars, known as the

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Masoretes, who devoted their lives to the meticulous preservation of the Hebrew Bible from antiquity.

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It's sometimes referred to by the Gothic M symbol or simply by the abbreviation MT. Now when we talk about the

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Masoretic text, we're usually referring specifically to the text of B .19a,

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which is more commonly known as Codex L, short for Leningradensis, of the

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State Public Library of St. Petersburg, written in A .D. 1008.

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Now it's called Codex L because St. Petersburg was called Leningrad for a time.

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A Codex is an ancient manuscript text in book form, as distinguished from a scroll.

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Now the well -known Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, this one right here, the

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BHS, is based on this manuscript, which means that its main text is that of Codex L, but is also a scholarly edition, with information about different variants and witnesses as footnotes.

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And it has become the standard Hebrew text for many scholars and institutions. Now it should be said that scholarly editions like this one of the

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Hebrew Bible would be based on the Aleppo Codex if important sections of it hadn't been lost.

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The Aleppo Codex is one of the most important and revered manuscripts of the Old Testament, dating back to the 10th century

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A .D. The vocalization, cantillation marks, and Masoretic notes were added by Aaron ben

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Asher, one of the most famous and respected Masoretes. The manuscript was housed for centuries in the

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Great Synagogue of Aleppo, Syria, and became a central reference for Jewish scholars.

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Unfortunately, the Codex was damaged during the riots in 1947, and large portions of it were lost, including most of the

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Torah. So the missing pages are a subject of fierce controversy.

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Some believe that members of the Jewish community removed these pages and are keeping them hidden and secret to protect them.

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And to this day, it remains a great mystery. Whatever the truth may be, the Aleppo Codex is considered by many to be the most authoritative

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Masoretic version of the Hebrew Bible, both for its historical significance and its precision in preserving the biblical text.

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And even though 40 % of it is missing, the parts that remain agree to a high degree with Codex L.

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The percentage of differences between the two is generally estimated to be less than 1%.

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These differences mostly consist of small variations in spelling, vocalization, and occasionally in the accents.

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Now it's important to understand that up until very recently, the scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible have been very different in their approach from the most common editions of the

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Greek New Testament that we use today. These New Testament publications have what we call a reconstructed text or an eclectic text.

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That means that no single manuscript or no one manuscript has what is in the main text of these publications.

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Instead, scholars have taken all of the witnesses and created a text that they believe reflects the original most closely.

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In the apparatus or footnotes at the bottom of each edition of the Greek New Testament, they list variants, which is the term we use for readings from other manuscript witnesses that differ.

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But this BHS is not like that. Its main text comes from only one manuscript,

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Codex L, which means it's not a text reconstructed from lots of different manuscripts.

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This is called a diplomatic edition. Now the first two editions in the series of which the

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BHS is the fourth actually didn't follow Codex L. Instead, they followed an edition of Jacob ben

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Chaim printed by Daniel Bomberg in Venice in the years 1524 and 25, also known as the

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Second Rabbinic Bible. And this edition was based on late medieval manuscripts.

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So in BHS and its predecessor, BHK, we have a text that is centuries older than that of any previously printed edition.

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But when we consider the age of the Old Testament, the Codex L manuscript is remarkably recent.

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We don't have any other Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament written earlier than the 10th century after Christ.

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We do have a codex that dates from AD 895 according to its title page, but it contains only the prophets, and it's called

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Codex Caerensis. This manuscript was stolen from a Karaite community in Israel by crusaders in 1099, and later it came into the possession of the

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Karaite community in Cairo. When they left Egypt in 1983, they left the codex under the care of Hebrew University in Jerusalem for safekeeping.

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This leads us to the story of another exciting discovery. In 1864, a traveler and scholar named

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Jacob Safir visited a certain synagogue in Cairo and explored a chamber inside it called a genizah.

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This is a Hebrew word that means storage and refers to a repository in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn -out

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Hebrew documents on religious topics. Instead of destroying these writings, they put them in a room out of respect for the name of God contained in them.

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Periodically, the contents of a genizah would be buried in the ground with due ceremony.

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Somehow these manuscripts in Cairo escaped burial, and at some point the genizah was walled over and forgotten.

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Jacob Safir visited this genizah for two days, but didn't identify anything he thought was of special significance.

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However, he did suggest that with more careful searching, one might find something valuable.

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So in 1896, the Scottish scholars and twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson went to the genizah and returned with some fragments they considered to be of interest.

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They showed them to their friend Solomon Schechter at Cambridge, and when he saw what they had brought, he immediately recognized the importance of the material and made an expedition to Egypt.

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And there, with the assistance of the chief rabbi, he sorted through the documents, and he took back to Cambridge 25 ,000 of them.

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Many of these dated from the 6th to 8th century AD. Although the miraculous preservation of the

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Cairo genizah gave us access to fragments of ancient witnesses, there was nothing containing the entire

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Hebrew Bible. It's also important to keep in mind that manuscripts were often destroyed during the medieval persecutions of the

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Jews, sometimes by their adversaries, but sometimes also by the Jews themselves to prevent their sacred books from falling into enemy hands.

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Now at this point, it should be emphasized that when evaluating the significance of surviving manuscripts for textual studies, their age isn't the only or primary measure of their worth.

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For example, when papyrus fragments of the Greek classical authors were discovered, which were centuries older than the medieval manuscripts previously known, they aroused high expectations, but it turned out that their texts proved to be inferior.

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This was because the medieval manuscripts were based on the careful studies of the great

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Alexandrian philologists, while the papyri, which circulated in the provinces of Egypt, represented the range of textual corruption which made the critical work of the

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Alexandrian scholars so necessary. So the textual tradition represented by a manuscript is often more important than its age.

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In other words, a late manuscript can be of higher quality than an early manuscript.

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Just because a manuscript is old doesn't mean it's better. As the Jews became more dispersed as the victims of conquest and exile, the vitality of their language began to fade, and they were forced to go into conservation mode.

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Their focus became the careful preservation of what they had left. In the case of the sacred scriptures, some of them dedicated energy and resources to making sure that it was kept safe and accurate so that future generations might be able to understand and obey the word of Yahweh.

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As the use of a language like Hebrew diminishes, the necessity arises to add vowels in order to maintain the ancient reading tradition with precision.

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Now this isn't due to a weakness in the way Hebrew was written without vowels for thousands of years, but rather due to the fact that fewer and fewer

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Jews were native speakers of the language. In biblical Hebrew, vowels weren't necessary for native speakers because the language's structure and context provide enough clues to understand the meaning with accuracy.

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We can use an example from English for those of us who are native speakers. Even without the vowels, you can probably guess this says, can you read this sentence without any vowels?

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Here are a few more examples. Although these sentences might hurt your eyes and your brain because you're not used to seeing

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English written this way, they help us understand that context and word patterns enable us to make sense of them.

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In most cases, there will be little or no ambiguity because of the context and one's familiarity with the language as a native speaker.

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Also keep in mind that these examples in English aren't perfect because English isn't a

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Semitic language like Hebrew with all of the qualities that make it a better candidate for being written without vowels.

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In addition, consonantal Hebrew can use some letters like aleph or vav to stand in for a vowel whenever there might be something that needs extra clarity.

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These are known as matres lektionis or mothers of reading because they help in places where a word may be unclear without them.

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We see many examples of this in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most modern Hebrew, in spite of having become less

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Semitic than ancient Hebrew, is written without vowels. Why? It's not because they want to save ink, but rather because native speakers of the language have no trouble reading without them.

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So, the Mazarites invented a brilliant way to add vowel points and accents to make sure the correct pronunciation was preserved over time while simultaneously maintaining the consonantal text.

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For those Jews who no longer used Hebrew as frequently, this ensured the continued accuracy of pronunciation and interpretation that had been handed down from before the time of Christ.

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In the golden age of the Masoretic tradition, the scholars who devoted themselves to the preservation of the

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Hebrew Bible carried out distinct roles in the process. There were men called the soferim who wrote out the consonantal text.

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Then there were others called the nakdanim, from nakad to point, whose job it was to add the vowel points and accents to the manuscript.

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Finally, it was the responsibility of the Mazarites to add the marginal

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Masoretic notes, also known as the masorah. The same person could serve more than one function.

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The vowel points and the Masoretic notes were frequently added by the same scholar. According to its title page, called a colophon,

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Codex Leningradensis was the work of one man. Samuel Ben Jacob not only wrote it, but pointed it and added the masorah as well.

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During the first millennium AD, there were two kinds of Mazarites, the Jews of Palestine, known as the

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Western Mazarites, and the members of the great Jewish colony in Babylonia, known as the

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Eastern Mazarites. The Western school had its center at Tiberias until the end of the 3rd century, and again from the 8th to the 10th century.

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The Eastern Babylonian centers were authoritative in matters of Jewish scholarship for centuries, but gradually they lost their significance, and in the 10th and 11th centuries they disappeared.

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Once again, the West assumed the spiritual leadership of Judaism. The views of the school of Tiberias became determinative for the future, and the

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Eastern tradition was forgotten for a thousand years. Now as we've just seen, for many centuries the

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Hebrew text of the Old Testament existed as a purely consonantal text without written vowels.

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Vowel signs were not added to the text until a later stage when the consonantal text was already well established with a long history of transmission behind it.

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But before the 20th century and the discovery at Qumran, there was great debate among Hebraists about whether the vowel points of the

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Mazarites were original or not. Some believed they were preserved all the way from the revelation of the law at Sinai.

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Others argued that they were a more recent development, but there was no hard evidence to point to.

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To give you an idea of how fiery and complicated this dispute was, I want to share some fascinating stories and introduce you to some key

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Hebraists of the 16th and 17th centuries. We begin with a man named

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Johann Buxtorf the Elder who sparked the beginning of the great vowel debate in 1620 when he published a book called

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Tiberias. Buxtorf was the only Christian scholar of his time with a deep knowledge of the

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Masorah. Now another scholar, Elias Levita, had published a brief commentary on the

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Masorah called Masoret ha -Masoret in which he suggested that the Mazarites were sages from Tiberias who lived for more than 500 years after Christ, post -dating the writing of the

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Talmud. Christian scholars, unaware that Levita was contradicting Jewish tradition, developed misleading ideas based on his work.

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So Buxtorf sought to correct this by arguing that the Mazarites lived much earlier, well before the

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Talmud was compiled. In his book, he wrote the following caution concerning Levita's work.

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If the vowel points are a human invention and if their authority is human, they can be omitted and then the reading would become completely arbitrary.

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Where then would the stability and authority of the Hebrew text be? Nevertheless, some say that Christian Hebraists may modify with audacity the points, distinctions, constructions, meanings, and anything else that pertains to the grammar so that the meaning is in accord with the

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New Testament. In other words, Buxtorf was strongly concerned that a belief that the vowel points were an invention after the time of Christ would open up the possibility that the

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Jews had tampered with the vowels, with an anti -Christian agenda. Martin Luther held the opposite opinion and repeatedly claimed that the points were a recent invention, which was something he saw as an advantage for Christians.

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It meant that Christians didn't have to feel tied to these traditional interpretations, but rather could realign passages with the

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New Testament whenever necessary. He said that Christian Hebraists should modify the vowels and accents and turn away from the interpretation of the

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Jews so that the text agrees with the New Testament and is oriented toward it and they should do it with audacity and joy.

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He also wrote that the Jews have acted in this way for the last 1 ,500 years with respect to us as far as the

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Bible is concerned. Wherever they could deform the Bible of our Messiah and our faith and make of it something which did not conform to the

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New Testament by the use of the points, distinctions, conjugations, etc.,

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they accomplished it with a great and frenzied zeal. But Buxtorf didn't like this idea.

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He wrote, Where a case is doubtful, ambiguous, or difficult, these points could be modified and substituted by other points by anyone who is learned and competent.

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Then anyone at all could consider himself wiser and more competent than another and could correct the text, which would lead to greater uncertainty when a word's meaning had been changed by the modification of only a single point.

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If the texts were reduced to the consonants alone, it would be like wax that could be modeled into various forms.

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Then there would be no supreme judge in debating the texts, and there would be no normative state of the

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Holy Scripture of the Old Testament to serve as a yardstick for interpretation and to resolve controversies.

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After Buxtorf's book had been out for a couple years, he received a book rebutting his claims about the antiquity of the vowels and accents.

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This book was a pre -release copy of something by a guy named Louis Capel, who was a prominent

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French Protestant scholar and theologian. The work he sent to Buxtorf was called

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Critica Sacra, which eventually became one of the most significant contributions to the field of Hebrew and biblical scholarship.

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Capel's studies revealed a well -informed and almost prophetic understanding for his time of the progressive development of vocalization.

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He showed persuasive indications that the vowel points used in the Hebrew text were not part of the original script, but were added later by the

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Masoretes. At the time, this was still a revolutionary claim. He also demonstrated that, contrary to Buxtorf's fears, when the text was reduced to the consonants alone, it was not at all like wax that could be reshaped in any way.

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Instead, he argued that the biblical context left only a very limited margin of uncertainty as to the vocalization and accentuation.

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Buxtorf was unconvinced, but offered no substantial argument against Capel. Instead, he said that it would be best to suppress

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Capel's ideas and keep them out of schools and publications, since they threatened the status quo and might have dangerous consequences.

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But this didn't deter Capel. He went ahead and sought to publish his work, which paved the way for a more systematic and humble approach to the reality of the

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Hebrew Bible's transmission. He faced considerable opposition from both Roman Catholic and Protestant scholars, who believed that his book undermined the doctrine of the divine preservation of Scripture.

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Some even accused him of heresy. One scholar, writing a hundred years after Capel, said, "...the

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work of Capel has indisputably great merits. The questions that he treated had been debated frequently in isolation before, but never in such a complete, coherent, and unprejudiced way.

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Before him, most of the Protestants had a respect for the Masoretic text that could be called superstitious.

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It was believed that, thanks to a special divine assistance, that is, a continuous miracle, that had protected every copyist against errors, the

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Hebrew text had been preserved completely and faultlessly, just as it had come from the hands of the sacred writers.

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Though unbelievable in itself, and though contradicted by the experience of other ancient written records that have survived down to our time, this opinion was so closely tied to the strict conception of the integrity of sacred

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Scripture, held by the dogma of that time, that the theologians and philologists felt no need of having to defend it."

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So what specific methods did Capel use to arrive at his conclusions? He began by comparing different books of the

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Hebrew Bible, focusing on parallel passages and identifying clear differences between them.

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He then applied the same method to the New Testament passages that quote, or allude to the Old Testament.

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Next, Capel explored the Jewish traditions of Ketiv and Kerei, which involve variations in how certain words should be read versus how they are written in the

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Hebrew Bible. He also studied the complexities of Masoretic practices, which often seemed obscure and difficult to understand.

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Then he compared the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, with the current

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Hebrew text. The differences he found suggested that the Hebrew text used by the Septuagint translators was not the same as the one we have today.

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And he extended his comparative work to the Targums and Fragments of Ancient Greek Corrections to the Septuagint, by Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion, who we'll talk about later.

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By examining these texts alongside the Hebrew Bible, Capel showed that the differences between these manuscripts and the modern

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Hebrew text were often significant. Finally, Capel scrutinized the

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Latin Vulgate, comparing it with the Hebrew text in many places. He showed that the differences between the

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Hebrew and Latin texts weren't simply due to translation errors or copying mistakes.

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Instead, they stemmed from the fact that St. Jerome, who created the Vulgate, used a

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Hebrew manuscript different from the one we have now. Since St.

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Jerome's manuscript was older, Capel argued that its readings might actually be more reliable than those of the present

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Hebrew text. To give you an idea of how controversial and unwanted Capel's book was, when he tried to find a

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Protestant publisher, no one was willing to touch it. It was his son,

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Jean, a convert to Catholicism, who finally got it published in Paris sixteen years later.

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This was done under royal sponsorship, which had been obtained for him by three Catholic fathers.

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These men recognized how well -supported Capel's arguments were, and understood that his work effectively countered the

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Protestant claim that the Vulgate was flawed. Yet they also realized that if Capel's conclusions about errors in the

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Hebrew manuscripts were accepted, it would cast doubt on the very foundation of Scripture, unless one relied on church traditions as the ultimate authority.

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Despite his efforts to address these concerns, Capel couldn't fully resolve the tension his work created.

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What began as a scholarly investigation ended up igniting a theological firestorm.

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At this point in our story, we meet a contemporary of Capel named Jean Morin. He was a

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French theologian and one of the foremost biblical scholars of his time.

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Morin was known for his deep expertise in the study of biblical languages and his work on the history of the biblical text, particularly the

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Samaritan Pentateuch. Though he was originally raised Protestant, he later converted to Catholicism before he began interacting with the work of Capel.

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Morin recognized the implications of Capel's arguments, particularly how they could undermine the

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Protestant reliance on Scripture alone if the Hebrew texts were shown to be unstable.

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For Catholics like Morin, Capel's conclusions could be used to argue that the authority of the church and its tradition were necessary to maintain the integrity of biblical interpretation.

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Morin observed that for the first 500 years of the church, the Septuagint was the only

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Bible it used, while for the next 1 ,000 years, the Vulgate served as the church's sole

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Bible in the West. This raised a troubling question. Could it be that God allowed

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His church to accept a translation as authentic and canonical

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Scripture which was based, at least partially, on a corrupt

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Hebrew text? This issue was especially concerning to Morin because he could identify two distinct

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Hebrew texts, one supported by a quotation in the New Testament and the Septuagint, and another supported by the

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Vulgate and the Masoretic text. Regardless of one's view of the Septuagint or the

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Vulgate, this situation appeared almost impossible to resolve. It seemed to him that the

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New Testament authors had canonized as Holy Scripture a translated form of certain texts that likely rested on an incorrect

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Hebrew text. In these particularly challenging cases, Morin suggested that the inspired authority of the

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New Testament essentially validated and canonized the corrupted form of the Old Testament it cited.

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He then extended this principle to encompass all instances where a translation accepted by the church as an authentic representation of the

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Bible was derived from a corrupt parent text. Morin argued that the traditional versions of the church should never be revised to match the

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Masoretic text. He based this on two key reasons. First, he believed it was quite possible that the

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Masoretic text was more corrupt than the parent text from which the traditional versions were derived.

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And second, he felt that any potential textual issues these versions might have had were already corrected through the church's use of them, which had established these versions as authentic forms of the

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Bible. From this perspective, Morin suggested that we should approach the original

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Hebrew text in the same way the church fathers treated Origen's Hexapla.

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He wrote, The Hebrew texts must be put to the service of the church's translation without allowing them to dominate it.

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They should help but not command. They should support it but not demolish it. They should illuminate it and highlight it but neither obfuscate nor break it into pieces.

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Now some people accused Cappell of having been negatively influenced by Morin, which Cappell denied as rash and false.

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In reality, Morin ended up weaponizing Cappell's work against Protestants to undermine their claim of sola scriptura.

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Both of them opened up a Pandora's box that they were unable to close at the time.

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Based on the work done by modern scholars such as E .J. Reville and Jeffrey Kahn, we can say with confidence that the

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Masoretic text represents a very ancient tradition and form of the text.

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Its stability was fixed by the time of Bensirah in the 2nd century BC, or more probably at the end of the 5th century

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BC by Ezra and Nehemiah. The vowels and accents that the Masoretes added to the text represent an extremely reliable tradition that goes back well before the time of Christ, even though they weren't put to writing until later.

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We would know nothing about the varieties of text which circulated in the centuries before AD 70 if it were not for the

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Samaritan Pentateuch, the Nash Papyrus, the Septuagint, and all the biblical texts from Qumran.

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At Qumran, we can see three basic groups of text. Those related to 1.

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the Samaritan Pentateuch, 2. the Septuagint, and 3. the Masoretic text.

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So, how are the surviving non -Masoretic texts different from the

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Masoretic text? Well, first, they tend to use matres lectiones more frequently than the

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Masoretic text. Second, non -Masoretic texts more often modernize the language, or aramais.

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For example, sometimes they will use al for el, which would be the Aramaic form of the preposition.

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Third, non -Masoretic texts use more hefil forms of Hebrew verbs.

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Fourth, they replace the imperative use of the infinitive absolute for the simple imperative form.

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And finally, they frequently supplement the text with material from parallel passages.

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In contrast to these texts, the Masoretic text gives the impression of greater age and reliability.

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It also seems that the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch have many harmonizations.

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That is, when copying or translating, the scribes adapted the text many times to the language of parallel passages.

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In addition, explanatory glosses and sections composed of verses taken from various passages were added.

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Now that we understand a little better what textual criticism and the Masoretic text are, we'll take a closer look at other

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Hebrew manuscripts in the next video. Thanks for watching, and we hope you've gained a deeper appreciation for the complexities involved in the transmission of the