How did we get the Bible? by Dr. Jason Lisle

How We Got the Bible and Why It Matters

Okay, I'm Terri Kammerzahl, and I'm here on behalf of Creation Fellowship Santee.

We're a group of friends who love to study God's Word and believe the Bible when read properly disproves Darwinian evolution. We've been meeting on this online platform since May of 2020. Since meeting online, we've been blessed with almost 90 individual speakers covering creation science, other theology topics, and even current events.

Our goal is to equip believers to be ready to share their faith. You can find most of our past presentations by visiting tinyurl .com forward slash cfs archives. And tonight we're happy to have back one of our frequent and most watched or favorite guests, Dr. Jason Lyle.

Dr. Lyle is the creation astrophysicist who founded the Biblical Science Institute. In addition to studying science and posting articles about it on his website, he also has a lot of other topics that he covers.

And tonight we're happy to have him with us to talk about how did we get the Bible. So with that, Dr. Lyle, I'd like to turn it over to you.

Inspiration, Revelation, and the Bible's Self-Description

Okay, well, thank you very much. This is a fun topic. It's an interesting topic. How did we get the Bible? Because we have in our possession this amazing document inspired by God. And a lot of Christians have some misconceptions about how we got it, or they don't know, or they haven't bothered to think about it, or they have actually a wrong idea about how.

They got it.

You know, it seems like a lot of people have this impression that God wrote the Bible up in heaven, and then it kind of floated into their local Christian bookstore in whatever translation is your favorite.

That's the one God wrote it in, of course. Well, the real history of how we got the Bible is a little more complicated than that. It's more interesting than that. And there's a reason why God did it the way that he did it.

And so I'll have some slides here that I can share with you, hopefully. And how did we get the Bible? And why does this matter? Because critics will make claims. You've probably heard critics claim, the Bible's been translated so many times, it probably isn't reliable at all.

Or the Bible can't be trusted because it was written by men. Or the Bible was probably written by some monk during the Dark Ages. Or there are thousands of variations. So how do you know which one is really the Bible?

And if you've been doing apologetics at all, if you've been evangelizing, those objections will come up. And so we need to know how to answer those. So with the first one, the Bible's been translated so many times, that's often what people say.

I have to wonder if that's really what they mean. Because if you have a modern Bible, the New American Standard or something like, or ESV, it's been translated once from the original Hebrew and Greek directly into English.

And so it's been translated once. Now it's been, you know, there are other languages, the Bible's been translated in other languages. But our modern English Bibles are not a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation.

That's just not the case. Perhaps when critics claim that the Bible's been translated so many times, what they really mean is it's been copied many times, but that's not translating, that's copying. And the Bible has been copied many times.

And so that's something we're going to have to look into. But the translation, that's not an issue because we can go back, we can go back and look at the Hebrew and Greek today and confirm that it's been translated accurately.

That's not an issue. Or the claim that the Bible cannot be trusted because it was written by men. And what books aren't written by men, men and women? All books are, right? So when somebody says that, I'm like, well, what book do you read?

And they'll name it. I'll say, but it was written by men. Well, of course, the Bible's written by men, but men inspired by God. And so that makes it unique in that it's God-breathed. It's the only God-breathed collection of books that we have in our possession.

Or the claim the Bible was probably written by some monk during the Dark Ages. I was doing a debate with somebody and he brought that up. It was an informal debate and the guy, he had a PhD, obviously it wasn't in the Bible.

It was in art or something. And he said, yeah, the Bible probably written by some monk during the Dark Ages. We have copies of the Bible that are older than that. We have complete Bibles that are older than that.

So that's, unless the monk could time travel, that's not a possibility. Now the last one, there are thousands of variations. So how do you know which one is really the Bible? There are thousands of variations.

That is, when we look at some of these ancient copies of the Bible, there will be differences in them. One will use this word, another will use that word, and so on. And that's something we're going to have to deal with.

But when we analyze the situation, we're going to find that it really confirms the authenticity of the Bible. It's often helpful when studying a book to see what the book says about itself. Most books have a little bit of information about the author.

Sometimes the author printed on the side and so on. The Bible is no exception. It has information about its author. It says that it's inspired by God or God breathed, and therefore profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be adequately equipped for every good work.

So all scriptures God breathed. Everything in scripture is something that God approves of, or in the sense that not everything that's recorded is something that God approves of, but the truthfulness of it is endorsed by God.

And so the Bible records false statements that critics have made, but it's accurate. It's a truthful, it's true that they made that false claim, as it were. And so the Bible really is God's word, and it is inspired.

For no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. And so the way the Bible was penned is different from the way other books are penned, where a human author sits down and writes from his own will.

The Bible is the will of God. It's what God wanted to be written. And the interesting thing about it, of course, is that God used the personalities in life experiences and writing styles of the various authors that he used to pen scripture, and so when you read an epistle of Paul, it's different than when you read the epistles of Peter.

There's a different style there, because the human author is different. And so that's a little perplexing to us. How could God do that? How could God use their personalities and their experiences to write what he wants?

Well, God designed their personalities and he controlled their life experiences, so it's not really a problem for an all-powerful God to do that. So yes, it's written by men, but men inspired by God.

From Oral Revelation to Written Scripture

When did God first speak to man? God speaking to man, that's revelation, divine discourse. God first revealed himself to man in the Garden of Eden. God spoke directly to Adam and Eve. We know that. It's recorded in Genesis 1, 2, and 3.

So you need to understand that there was a time when people didn't have a written.

Bible.

For the first 2 ,000 years of history, people did not have a written revelation from God, but they did have revelation from God. We've had that from the beginning. And Adam and Eve, no doubt, passed on that revelation to their children and onto their children.

And of course, you know, Noah's great-great-great-great-great-grandson or Adam's great-great-great-grandson could have talked directly with Adam. That's not a problem because people lived so long back then, up until about the flood year.

So that's not really an issue. So critics sometimes ask, how did people know about God before the Bible was.

Written?

And the answer is, people have known about God from the very beginning because God talked with them. So we've always had divine revelation. We've not always had the Bible. We've always had divine revelation.

It's just, it was originally spoken, passed down by word of mouth. Perhaps some of it was written, but eventually it was incorporated into scripture. The earliest books of the Bible, we actually think the earliest book of the Bible was probably Job.

We think it's written around 2 ,000 BC. There are a lot of good indicators for that. That would put it at about 350 years after the great flood, about 250 years after the Tower of Babel. A number of indicators that Job was written around that time,.

Job's great.

Age.

He lived 140 years after the events of his testing. And if everything else was doubled, then maybe he was 70 when he was tested. We don't really know, but it puts his age at around 200, something like that.

He's still using a barter system at that time. The way he sacrificed, Job made sacrifices to God, and he did that on behalf of his children in case that they had sinned. Job chapter one talks about that, but he did not sacrifice in the temple.

And once the temple was constructed, you were not allowed to sacrifice outside the temple. You had to bring the sacrifices to the temple. And so that tells us that Job was written before the temple was constructed.

So that's before the time of Moses. Now, how did we get Job? Well, Moses lived in that area, the land of Midian, which is thought to be very close to where Job lived, or maybe they even overlapped. And in fact, Moses spent 40 years there, so he unquestionably would have been familiar with some of their literature, including Job, which was originally written down perhaps by Job himself or maybe by his family.

But in any case, that account was written down and copied and passed around. And Moses got a hold of it, realized that it was not just another work of literature, but it bore the imprint of being inspired by God.

Moses, the Pentateuch, and Genesis as Eyewitness-Based History

Now, the next books of the Bible, the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all written around 1490 to 1450 BC during the Exodus. We know they're written by Moses. Jesus confirms that in Luke 24, 44, that Moses gave us the law, the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

And so, and of course, they claim to be written by Moses internally as well. So that makes sense. God normally uses eyewitnesses to record the events. And so the events of the Exodus and so on, it makes sense that Moses would record those events.

But the interesting thing about Genesis is it contains information about events that happened long before Moses was born. And so how did Moses get that information? Now, one possibility is that God just revealed it to him.

God could certainly do that. And that is a legitimate possibility. But it's also possible that Moses may have used previous written sources to compile Genesis. And it would still be considered his book because he's more of the editor.

But under the Hebrew custom, that would make you the author. And that is suggested in passages like Genesis 5, 1, where it says, this is the book of the generations of Adam. There's a book of Adam. And the Hebrew word there for generations, toledoth, there are 11 of these in Genesis.

One's a repeat, 10 unique toledoths. And those could be 10 original books written by the people that saw the events happened. And then Moses collected those and edited them under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, perhaps updating the date system and so on.

We don't know the details of it. But that is one possibility. But in any case, Jesus quotes from Genesis as authoritative. So it is God's word. And therefore, it is true. So now all the other books of the Bible then were written by all the other books of the Old Testament were written by the Israelites.

And so they were a tight community. They traveled together and then spread out, of course, into the land of Canaan. So this is sort of a timeline of the writing of the Bible. For the first 2 ,000 years of history, we don't have the Bible.

We do have revelation from God. We had that when Adam and Eve spoke with God. So there's no doubt about that. And they passed that information on to their children, Job, around 2000 BC. Then the other books of the Old Testament up until there's a 400-year period, 400 BC up to 1 AD, where there were no books of the Bible written.

And so that's the silent years. And then, of course, the New Testament was all written in a very short period of time after Christ's earthly ministry and as a result of Christ's earthly ministry. So the New Testament is quite different.

So that's sort of a timeline of the writing of the Bible. Now, the Old Testament of the Bible was written in the Hebrew language, which today looks something like this. Now, Hebrew reads right to left, opposite of English.

That takes some getting used to. Of course, the New Testament is written in Greek. And Greek's a little easier because it's left to right. And it has the same kind of alphabet sort of that we do. Hebrew is weird if you're not used to it.

The original language had only consonants. And all the main characters that you see there are consonants. And originally, it would have looked a little different from that. But the phrase that you're seeing here is Genesis 1 .1.

Barayshit bara Elohim edheshamayim va 'ita 'aretz. In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth. So that's what it looks like in Hebrew today. But originally, it would have looked different. Up until around 600 BC, when the Hebrews wrote scriptures, that's what the script looked like.

It's the same language. It's Hebrew. They call it Paleo-Hebrew or Proto-Hebrew script. It's the same language. It's just the letters look different. You can think of it as a different font. And then that font got updated to what we call the square script around 600 BC, when the Israelites were, or Judah, I guess, the Israelites, the northern tribes had been scattered.

And then the Jews had been taken captive into Babylon. And Babylon spoke Aramaic. And that's the Aramaic alphabet. And so the Hebrews began using the Aramaic alphabet. Just made it easier to communicate.

So that's originally the way it would have looked. That's what you saw above. And then the square script is adopted around 600.

BC.

Hebrew Vowels, Masoretic Preservation, and Manuscript Families

Now, there's no vowels in the original written Hebrew language. Now, obviously, there are vowels when you speak it, but they didn't record the vowels when they wrote it. And that would be a little difficult for us.

But if you think about it, if you'd heard somebody say something and you wanted to remember it, you could write down just the consonants. And that would be sufficient to trigger your memory. And you go, okay, yeah, you could write down the consonants.

And so it was probably, Hebrew was probably developed as a way of a shorthand for remembering something that was originally spoken. But in any case, during the captivity, the Hebrews thought that it might be logical.

It might be wise to indicate, in some cases, which vowel is used. And so they took three of their consonants and started using them as vowels. And that's what's indicated in the light blue that you see there.

So the spelling changed at that point. So in that case, the yod, which is normally pronounced like a y, a ya. In that case, it indicates that the vowel there has an e sound. So it's breshith and elohim.

And so that's why they did that. Now, it doesn't give you complete information on the vowels, but it gives you a little bit of help. And so we would expect spelling changes. Spelling changes occurred around the time of the Jewish captivity in Babylon.

That's the way the text would have looked during Christ's earthly ministry. It would have been using the square script. The older books of the Bible, when they were copied, would have been updated to the newer square script.

But there's still no vowels except for three consonants that are occasionally used as vowels. And if you're wondering, how do you know if it's a vowel or consonant? It's hard. But apparently, the Jews were used to it.

And so they could do that. Now, eventually, the Jews thought it wise to add a complete system where you could tell what the vowels were for people who were not Jews to be able to pronounce these words.

And so they added little lines and dots above and below the consonants. Because at this point, the text was considered sacred. You don't want to change the actual letters. But maybe we can add little things above it and below it.

And there's these little cantillation marks, not just vowels, but also which syllables should be emphasized and so on. It gives you quite a bit of information on how to pronounce the words. And so now you have a complete alphabet.

And that's the only way I can read Hebrew is if it has those vowel pointings. So those were added around 600, between 600 and 850 AD. So they're much more modern. And the reason I point that out is sometimes people will, you'll see people having a dispute about a Hebrew word.

And I'll say, well, the vowel is this. So it has to mean this. The vowels aren't original. Okay, the original text that God inspired did not have the vowel pointings. Those were added later by the Mazarites.

They were a group of Jews who were very concerned about preserving God's word and make sure that it was copied accurately. And they were meticulous. They were very good at it. We would find little numbers where they would count the number of words or the number of letters.

And so they made sure that they weren't missing anything. They were meticulous about copying the scriptures. And they eventually settled on one of three vocalization systems. And that's the way the text looks today, the way it does on the bottom there.

But how do we know the text has been accurately copied? That's the question that we want to ask. Because that's the one where the critics will say you don't. And so how, you know, you can't know that the Bible is reliable.

It might be totally different from what it was written. Well, we don't have any of the original manuscripts that were penned by the author. Those would be called the autographs. We don't have those. We don't have the sheepskin or whatever it was that Moses wrote on.

We don't have that. Or any of the New Testament documents that were actually written by Paul, for example, with his pen. We don't have those. But we do have many copies of those. Many, many copies. And the earliest complete Masoretic text that we have is the Leningrad Codex, and it goes back to 1008 A .D.

And so we still have in our possession today copies of the Old Testament that were preserved by the Masoretes, the Masoretic text. We still have those that date back a thousand years. Pretty good. And so we know that the text has not changed in the last thousand years because we still have manuscripts from a thousand years ago, and we can compare them to manuscripts today, and they're identical.

So the text has not changed in the last thousand years. But there was a lot of history that happened before that. How do we know that it didn't change in the previous thousand years or the thousand years before that?

Or in the case of Job, a thousand years before that? How do we know that? So the answer is we can examine different families of texts from different time periods. You'll find that when texts are copied and mistakes will creep in, that bothers a lot of Christians.

But the fact is people are not perfect copying machines, and they didn't have Xerox machines until the 20th century. So before then, you know, if you wanted to copy a book, you had to copy it. You had to manually look at it, letter for letter, word for word, copy it.

And people did not do that perfectly. Could God have made sure that they did? Yes, but he didn't do that. He allowed little spelling mistakes and things like that. And we'll look at those later. But when those mistakes are copied, any copy that is from those would have that same mistake in it.

And so you'll find that texts come in certain families where they have certain common features, certain variants that are in common. And by comparing those, in most cases, we know what the original text said, even though we don't have it.

And that's pretty neat. And here's the way it works. And this is sort of hypothetical, but just let's say it's a New Testament text. Paul just wrote this document and it goes to a church. And the pastor there says, this is great.

We need to get this to other churches. And let's say he makes three copies of it. Now, probably they made like, you know, a lot more than that. They might have made 10 or 20 copies. But in any case, let's say he makes three copies.

And one goes to one part of the world, one goes to another part of the world. And those texts are then copied, right? And in one of them, a mistake is made, which will represent by the purple branch there.

Let's say the original text said, Jesus Christ. And in that particular manuscript, they swapped it and it says, Christ Jesus. And by the way, most of the textual variants, the mistakes that have crept in are like that.

They have no effect on the meaning. Jesus Christ or Christ Jesus, it's the same person. It's whether you put the title, I mean, Christ isn't his last name. It's Bessi, it's his title. You can put it first, you can put it last.

It makes no difference in terms of the meaning. But when that's copied, then all the copies that stem from that, they'll have that mistake in it. And some of those will still be around today. We have a lot of manuscripts of the New Testament.

And so by comparing the different families, we could say, oh, this particular family, this one has Christ Jesus, but this one over here and this one over there, and they're very different parts of the world.

They both have Jesus Christ. And so, and since they are in different families, that has to be the original, you see? And so you can reconstruct what the original said, even though we don't have it today.

All we have are the bottom row there, the documents that remain. And if other mistakes creep in, we can identify those by their families. We can even do this if the mistake is very close to the original.

If one of the three copies has, one of the three original copies has a mistake in it, and those are copied, we can still identify it. It's because we can identify these two families that agree. And then this one's the outlier.

We know that the two that agree are the original. And that's a biblical principle. By the mouths of two or three witnesses, every matter is confirmed. And so we have different witnesses to the scriptures.

And in most cases, we can reconstruct what the original text said, even though we don't have it. It's pretty neat. And you can do this for different families and reconstruct what the original text was.

And so in most cases, there's no doubt what the original text said. So I know it bothers people that there are differences, that there are copying mistakes. But if you think about it, what was God supposed to do?

I mean, somebody's copying it. He's about to make a mistake. What's God going to do? Is God going to strike him dead just to make sure he doesn't make a mistake? I mean, God could have done that, but that seems unnecessarily cruel.

Or God could have taken over their writing. You know, they write the right thing, and then they go back to their own writing. I mean, yeah, God could do that, but he didn't. And there's a reason. You see, if God had forced everyone to be perfect copy machines, then we'd all have the same Bible today.

There wouldn't be any variants, but we'd have no confidence that it's the original. Somebody asked, how do you know that somebody didn't change that? We'd have no idea because there'd be no way to follow the families.

The only way we know what family is, what family the text is in, is by those little differences that have crept in. And so God allowed enough variants to creep in that we could track the families and know what the original said and have confidence that we know what the original said, but not so many mistakes as to affect any doctrine, as we'll see as we go on.

So there's a reason God did it that way, and it's a good reason. So again, the oldest complete Old Testament Masoretic text is the Leningrad Codex, about 1008 AD. We had an older one, the Aleppo Codex, and it was complete originally, but in 1947, a good portion of it was burned in a fire, and so we lost that, unfortunately.

We still possess about 60 of it. Now, we have portions of texts that go back earlier than that, but another document that is very helpful to us is the Septuagint. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament.

It began with the Greek translation of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. There was an Egyptian pharaoh, Ptolemy II, he wanted to read this book that the Jews had, but he couldn't read Hebrew, and the language of the day was Greek because of the Greek empire.

And so he had 72 Jewish scholars, but according to tradition, 72 Jewish scholars translate the first five books of the Bible into Greek. And some say 70 scholars, it just depends, but that's where the word Septuagint comes from.

It means 70, and it's sometimes abbreviated LXX, that's the Roman numeral for 70. So if you see LXX, that means Septuagint. And it is the Greek translation of the Torah, then the rest of the Old Testament, and some books that are not biblical, some other interesting Jewish books that are not inspired by God are also included in the Septuagint.

But in any case, so that process for the first five books of the Bible took place in the 200s BC, and then the rest of the Bible in the 100s BC. Now, the neat thing about the Septuagint is we have the complete Septuagint by mid AD 300s.

Pretty neat.

And so that's 700 years older than the oldest Masoretic text we have. And so you think, you know, older's better. It's been copied fewer times, that's good. But the Septuagint is not a copy of the Bible, it is a translation of the Bible.

And God never promised that any particular translation would be perfect. And the Septuagint does have mistakes in it. And we know that. We can compare it with the Masoretic text, and most scholars believe the Masoretic text is better for the most part, although there's some places where the Septuagint could be better.

It is older, but it's a translation. It's not the original text. And so it gives you some help. There are fragments of the Septuagint that go back to around 150 BC. So that's pretty neat because that means we have documents 2 ,000 years ago that document what the Bible said.

Granted, in a different language, but that tells us the content has not changed, not substantially. We have a tiebreaker too, at least for the first five books of the Bible. If there's a disagreement between the Masoretic text and the Septuagint, we have, for example, the Samaritan Pentateuch.

Now the Samaritans, they were a group that had split off from the Israelites. The Jews didn't consider them real Jews, and they didn't get along by the time of Christ's earthly ministry, because they had allegedly intermingled with non-Jews and so on.

But the interesting thing about the Samaritans is they had their own copies of the Bible, and they only accepted the first five books of the Bible as canon, as inspired by God. The rest of the Bible, they didn't think it was inspired.

So they had their own copies of scripture, and the earliest Samaritan Pentateuch that we have today goes back to around 1100. And you say, well, that's not as good as even the Masoretic text, because it goes back 100 years earlier than that.

But the Samaritans, because they didn't mix well with the Jews, they split off around 600 BC. And so the source material split around 600 BC, which is earlier than the Septuagint even. And so the point is, if the Samaritan Pentateuch, first five books of the Bible, and the Masoretic agree, that means that neither one has changed in the last 2 ,600 years.

So that's very compelling. And there's tremendous agreement, of course. Another wonderful discovery was made in 1947. That's the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There's a system of caves in the Qumran area near the Dead Sea, sometimes called the Qumran Scrolls, and a system of 11 caves.

And they found documents of all kinds of ancient literature, not just the Bible, but it included the Old Testament of the Bible. And the Dead Sea Scrolls go back to around 250 BC to 100 AD. And so that's as old as the Septuagint, but a lot of them are in the original Hebrew.

And so that's really exciting, because that allows us to see that the text has not changed substantially in the last 2 ,000 years. The Hebrew text did not change substantially in the last 2 ,000 years.

And I want you to be able to see this, because it's one thing for you to say, well, I heard this astrophysicist say something about, you know, the text is remarkably consistent. It sounded convincing, but I want you to be able to see it.

And so here I have Genesis 1. I'm a Genesis guy, so I wanted to look and see, has Genesis been accurately copied? And so let's look at the Masoretic texts, which we know has remained the same for the last 1 ,000 years.

So the Masoretic text on the left, and then the Dead Sea Scrolls on the right. Now, there's not just one Dead Sea Scroll, right? There's many. And so there's at least three Dead Sea Scrolls that have portions of Genesis 1, verse 1 on them.

And the scroll is indicated in the yellow text that you see there. So the 4Q2, that's one of the scrolls, and 4Q7 is another one. They both have Genesis 1, 1 contained in them, or at least portions of it.

Now, the Dead Sea Scrolls do not have the vowel pointings. We would not expect that, because those were added, again, around 600 to 800 AD. The Dead Sea Scrolls are much older than that. But the consonants, we can compare the consonants and see if any of them have changed.

And what I did, I have software that allows me to analyze that, and it highlights changes in red. And you say, well, there's only one red that you see there on the lower right on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

And that's because there's only one change in Genesis 1, 1. The other two scrolls are identical. They say, b'reishith b 'ra elohim etesh shemayim b 'eit ha 'aretz, just like the Masoretic text. In the beginning, God created heaven and the earth, same.

One of the scrolls, though, instead of saying b'reishith in the beginning, it says b'reishith in the beginning, which is to say it's the same word, it's just spelled differently. It's a spelling difference.

So the text, the words are identical. It's just, it's missing an aleph. So yeah, so there's tremendous agreement. Now, if you see brackets, brackets indicate sections that are uncertain because they're hard to read.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are not all in pristine condition. And the only reason some of them are in pristine condition is because it's near the Dead Sea. It's a desert and it's in a cave system. And so that kept it relatively dry and so on.

But there are some where they got a little water damaged and that makes them hard to read. So they put it in brackets. We think it says this, but we're not sure. But as far as we can tell, Genesis 1 -1 has not changed in 2000 years.

And that gives us confidence that in the previous time, it hasn't changed as well. So verses two, three, and four are identical between the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Masoretic text. We get our next change in verse five, our next variant.

And in one scroll, the text for Q2, the text is identical, except the red there indicates a punctuation difference. So there's a paragraph marker in the Masoretic text. So the words are the same. The words are identical.

Spelling's identical. However, there's one scroll, 4Q7, which has one word different. And that's, so this is Genesis 1 -5 by Yikra Elohim Laor Yom. And God called the light day. And then in the Dead Sea Scrolls, in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, in two of them, it says, and God called the light day.

In one of them, it says, and God called the light, instead of yom for day, it's yomam, which is another word for day. It's a more specific word for day. It's the word that they would use for daytime or daylight.

Whereas the Hebrew word yom can mean day or daylight, but it can also refer to the 24-hour time period. So it's not really a substantial change. It doesn't affect the meaning substantially. But did God call the light day?

Or did he call it day in the sense of daytime?

I want to know.

I want to know which of those two is original, because I'm a nerd and I want to know the details there. Well, we have a tiebreaker. We have the Samaritan Pentateuch, which again is later than the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it branched off earlier than that.

It branched off around 600 BC. And the Samaritan Pentateuch, lo and behold, it says yom. God called the light day yom. So that is the original. The Masoretic text had it right. And we know that by two or three witnesses.

It's a biblical principle. And so you can see that there's just tremendous agreement between these texts. And of course, you can find other places where there are differences as well. But the text has been remarkably preserved for the last 2 ,000 years.

There's no doubt about that. We have the documents that prove that. There are two criteria that give us confidence that our current texts are reliable copies of the original autographs. One is if you have a large number of ancient manuscripts, more is better because then you can compare them.