Can You Trust the Hebrew Bible? Scribes & the Old Testament - Part 1

How do we get from this, to this, to this, to this?

Have you ever wondered how the Bible, a text written thousands of years ago, has come down to us in the form we have today?

Understanding the journey of this sacred text can deepen our appreciation for and confidence in the different translations we love and read on a regular basis.

This video series will guide you through the fascinating history of the Hebrew Bible's transmission, starting with its earliest witnesses.

Our goal throughout the series will be to present in great detail the different ancient manuscripts, versions, and publications of the

Old Testament. We'll also lay the foundation for understanding the science of comparing and evaluating different manuscripts as witnesses.

And just to be clear, we will be focusing on the transmission of the text of the Hebrew Bible, not the

New Testament. But for those who want to learn about that too, we'll have a link in the description to a fantastic free course by Daniel Wallace.

Imagine a court case. The more credible witnesses you have, the clearer the truth becomes.

If more witnesses agree with each other, we have more confidence that their story is true.

We also have to consider what type of witness is testifying. If it's someone who was right there where the event happened, we tend to consider them more reliable than someone who only heard from someone else what happened.

If the witness is older, perhaps we tend to trust their testimony more than the testimony of a child.

Or if we hear from a man of impeccable reputation, we tend to think that what he says is more credible.

This same principle of weighing witnesses applies to ancient manuscripts of the

Bible. Each manuscript is a witness to the original canonical text, and some are more reliable than others.

But despite their differences in age or quality, they align with each other remarkably, providing a trustworthy testimony to the

Bible's original words. The term manuscript refers to something that is handwritten.

Before printing presses, every book had to be copied by hand, often on materials like papyrus or parchment.

This painstaking process could take years for a single book, and each copyist became a part of the text's history.

Our journey begins with the Septuagint, a translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek produced about 2300 years ago in Alexandria, Egypt.

This translation was crucial for the Jewish diaspora, who had begun to lose touch with their

Hebrew roots. Much like immigrants today adapt to new languages and cultures, these

Jews needed a version of the scriptures they could understand, so some of them decided to translate the

Bible into Greek. A few translators began to work, and over the years they produced what became the very first translation of the

Bible in history. Young Jews who only spoke Greek could finally understand and enjoy the word of God.

Fast forward to 1947, when an accidental discovery by shepherds in the

Judean desert revealed the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran. These ancient

Hebrew texts pushed our knowledge back by a thousand years, confirming the remarkable preservation of the biblical text.

In other words, this discovery was extremely important because, until then, the oldest

Hebrew manuscript available was only a thousand years old. And these were more than two thousand years old.

These scrolls confirmed that the current text on which Bible translations were based was more reliable than many imagined.

There were a lot of insignificant differences and some major differences, but everything important had been preserved in an extraordinary way.

The third witness we want to look at comes from the work of a man named Jerome.

In the 4th century AD, Pope Damasus asked Jerome to correct the Old Latin version of the

Bible. This ancient translation had been based on the Septuagint text, and was therefore a translation of a translation, and the

Pope wanted a version that was based on the Hebrew text. So Jerome moved to Bethlehem and spent several years making a new translation of the

Old Testament directly from Hebrew manuscripts he had access to at that time.

His translation, which became known as the Vulgate, eventually became the official

Latin Catholic version of the Bible. Just as the

Vulgate and the Septuagint were translations of the Hebrew Bible, the fourth witness, the

Syriac Peshitta, was a translation into Syriac. About 1700 years ago,

Christians in Syria desired their own translation of the Bible and produced what we call today the

Peshitta. It's an important witness in the history of the transmission of the biblical text. But unfortunately, not much more is known about its origin.

Another witness enters this story, and this time as a result of the Babylonian exile, where the

Jews began to speak the language of their captors, Aramaic. Even after they returned to their homeland, many increasingly spoke

Aramaic rather than Hebrew. This led to oral translations or interpretations of the

Hebrew scriptures during the Second Temple Period, which they eventually began writing down. These explanations from the

Hebrew were called Targums. The word Targum means interpretation, and they continued to develop through the early centuries after Christ.

The Targums not only rendered the Hebrew text into Aramaic, but often included paraphrases or clarifications.

An example of the liberty taken by the authors of the Targums can be seen in the Targum of Jonathan in Jeremiah 10 .11.

This passage only has 10 words in the original, but in the Targum there are 57 words.

Although they are interpretations, the authors were looking at ancient Hebrew manuscripts that we can't access today, and they give us further evidence that can lead us to the original text.

Perhaps the most well -known witness in this survey is the Masoretic Text.

More than a thousand years ago, a group of pious Hebrews felt the burden of preserving the text of their

Bible with more care and accuracy. So, they developed a system of copying and marking the historical pronunciation of words so that they wouldn't be lost to future generations.

These scribes became known as the Masoretes. The Masoretes invented a vocalization system for the

Hebrew text, which until then was written without vowels, and established rules for the faithful transmission of the biblical text as it existed in their time.

The result was faithful, high -quality manuscripts. Most modern translations like the

KJV and NIV are based on this witness, which we call the Masoretic Text.

The most complete surviving manuscript of the Masoretes is the Leningradensis Codex, which is a little over 1 ,000 years old.

It's called Leningradensis because it has been kept in the city of Leningrad in Russia since 1863.

And perhaps the most well -known modern volume containing this text is the

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. The last witness in this group is called the

Samaritan Pentateuch, which contains only the first five books of the Old Testament. According to Samaritan tradition, the

Samaritans represent the true Israel from which others separated. Likewise, they claim that the

Samaritan Pentateuch is the genuine version of the Torah, dating back to Abishua, the great -grandson of Moses' brother

Aaron. The Samaritan Pentateuch is written in ancient Hebrew, but with an alphabet or script that was generally used before the

Babylonian captivity. The oldest manuscript we have today dates back to the 14th century

AD. So in summary, the main witnesses of the Hebrew Bible known to many as the

Old Testament are these, the Septuagint, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the

Vulgate, the Peshitta, the Targums, the Masoretic Text, and the

Samaritan Pentateuch. Now that we know who the witnesses are, it's our job to get to know them better and carefully consider the evidence they provide.

The discipline of weighing and analyzing this evidence is called textual criticism. It's a science similar to what detectives do, meticulously piecing together the available evidence to reach the truth.

Every manuscript copy inevitably contains errors. There are thousands of differences between the witnesses mentioned here, but this shouldn't frighten or threaten those who believe the

Bible. On the contrary, when we look at these mistakes or discrepancies, the vast majority are insignificant.

And because we have so many witnesses, scholars can reconstruct what the final canonical form of the text was.

Furthermore, the various disagreements between the witnesses don't affect any doctrine of Judaism or Christianity.

Let's take an example from our daily lives. Text messages. We're always sending and receiving messages marred by typos and autocorrect fails.

Take this text for example. I'm definitely going to lose my mind if I can't get out of here.

This message has three errors. Definitely should be spelled this way.

Loose should have been lose. And can't needs an apostrophe.

But we don't think twice about messages like this because we know that everyone understands us despite the mistakes.

The errors are insignificant. Even with a sign like this, while it may be hilarious, you still understand what they meant.

Things can often be understood from context and with a little logic. In the same way, many of the errors made by scribes throughout the centuries are insignificant.

With a little work, reasoning, and comparison of witnesses, we can understand what the original said.

Once I taught this concept to young children in Sunday school. The first day, everyone pretended to be scribes.

We had two teams, and a person from each team started by copying a few obscure verses from Isaiah.

When that person finished, the next person on their team copied what they had just copied. And so they continued taking turns copying what the person in front of them had copied without looking at the original.

Everyone made mistakes in the transmission of the text. Although it was a simple experiment and in their native language, they introduced all kinds of errors.

Then I waited a week for them to forget all about what they had copied. I gave each team the manuscripts that the other team had worked on copying.

And I said, now, you are detectives. You have to work together to compare all the witnesses and find out what the original manuscript said.

Believe it or not, the kids were able to figure out what the original said by looking at all the handwritten evidence

I gave them. Why was this possible, even for young kids? Because most of the mistakes in the manuscripts were different ones, and most of them were easy to explain with a little logic.

So my point is that if these kids could figure this out, then we can trust that trained biblical scholars can do a good job of figuring out what the original text of the

Bible was by weighing all the evidence we have from throughout the centuries. At the same time, it's not my intention to oversimplify the challenges in this work.

There are problems that no one has been able to resolve and it's further complicated by differences in the languages of the witnesses.

Another challenging factor is that we're dealing with very old, dead languages and sometimes we simply don't understand what some texts mean.

In addition to that, scholars can have blind spots and biases that may cause them to choose one text over another.

So reconstructing the original canonical text of the Bible can be exceedingly difficult or confusing.

Many manuscripts are very old and damaged, so some passages have to be deciphered with great effort and the most advanced techniques.

And there are more complicating factors, so it's important to be honest about all of this. Many textual variants are insignificant, but some are extremely hard to solve or understand.

Over the centuries, the existence of textual variants has been seen as a danger or an argument against the notion of the divine nature of scripture.

People who consider these variants as a threat have come up with a variety of solutions, sometimes concluding that the church has more authority than the word.

Others, with a more dismissive attitude towards any notion of divine inspiration, say that the words of scripture can't have been completely inspired without being completely preserved.

Their argument goes like this. If God really inspired the Old Testament, he would also have preserved every word and detail accurately and perfectly.

The responses to these arguments aren't easy. We must ask ourselves, what can we learn about God and about the scriptures assuming that God ordained the variation to occur?

A professor named Dr. Randy Leedy writes the following, If we had the originals themselves, the very pieces of papyrus

Paul used to compose Romans and Ephesians, for example, or if no copies contained any textual variants at all, unlocking the

Bible's power would still require us to do exactly what we do now, search for scripture's wisdom as for hidden treasure, interpreting carefully, comparing scripture with scripture, and making relevant personal application.

Nothing would change except that we would be able to dismiss from our minds the possibility that the text we're working with may not preserve

God's exact inspired words with complete perfection. But my own weaknesses, as a reader, expose me to far more significant misunderstanding than the differences in biblical manuscripts do.

So by far, the greatest problems that God must overcome in order to talk to me are within me.

Not within the transmission process. He also writes, The very strong pattern

God has ordained is that pristine perfection is a property of the next world, not this one.

So I just need to conform my expectations to that reality. The textual imperfections that generate so much angst and controversy are well within an easily tolerable range.

Text critical scholar Dirk Junkind also writes, Anyone who is studying the original languages of the

Bible or who thinks deeply about the meaning of the text will come again and again to the conclusion that God has not given us exhaustive knowledge.

We have more than sufficient knowledge, but a vast number of things that we do not know remains.

We would like to know more about the historical context of scripture, about the exact grammatical function of certain constructions, and about the specific semantic quality of unusual expressions.

To expect that God would allow these limits to exist in any area of studying scripture, but not in our knowledge of the original text, seems inconsistent.

God does not perform a special miracle to protect our collective reading and understanding of his word from error.

And likewise, he has not done so for the transmission of scripture. There are limits to our knowledge.

Taking all of this into account, we can humbly recognize our limits and the way

God has chosen to transmit his word through the centuries. And at the same time, we can be grateful for the level of confidence we can have in the

Bible despite the challenges faced by scholars and translators who work to present us with the most faithful text possible.

Now we have a general idea of how the Bible came to us. In the next video, we want to start looking at the details with a magnifying glass.

There is much more to learn about this. We will see examples of differences between manuscript witnesses, what kinds of errors scribes made, and learn how to navigate the information provided in critical editions of the

Hebrew Bible. This and much more. Thanks for watching and we will see you in the next video.