The Transmission of the Old Testament

The Old Testament writings cover thousands of years of history and were likely written across a number of centuries, possibly a millenium.  During that time the language and writings of the main characters changed, from possibly a proto-Hebrew or Akkadian language of Abraham to a well-developed Hebrew language of Isaiah and Jeremiah and an Aramaic language most likely spoken by Daniel and Esther.  In this Sunday essay, we will lightly explore the transmission of the Old Testament, from ancient Hebrew into modern languages such as English.

Hebrew scrolls

The language of the early Israelites, of Moses, Joshua and David, was Hebrew.  This was a Northwest Semitic language closely related to Akkadian, Aramaic and Ugaritic.  Written Hebrew involved 22 letters, all consonants, no vowels. Many words had three consonants. The text was read from right to left.

In the third or fourth millenium BC, Egyptians took papyrus reeds, grown along the Nile, and pressed them into a soft thick paper-like substance, papyrus, and wrote on sheets of papyrus with dark ink. At the same time the Babylonians wrote on soft clay which, once dried, created permanent clay tablets.  Although the Law of Moses was recorded on stone (Exodus 31: 18, Joshua 8: 32), later copies of Hebrew writings were written on papyrus or animal skin, rolled up into scrolls. Both papyrus and animal skin decayed over times and so these ancient writings were copied again and again, to create new scrolls.  These scrolls were an integral part of Jewish worship in the time of Jesus (see Luke 4: 16-21) and are still used today (see this Wikipedia article on the Sefer Torah.)

TaNaKh

Sometime in the Second Temple period, after the return from Babylon, the remnants of Israel living in Palestine organized the scriptures into 24 scrolls. There were three parts to this collection of scripture.  According to F. F. Bruce in The Canon of Scripture, there was the Torah (the "Law", that is, the five Books of Moses), the Nevi'im (the "prophets": Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Exekiel and the Book of the Twelve Prophets) and then the Ketuvim ("writings", including Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther, Daniel, Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles.) As many Hebrew words have three consonants, it was common to shorten Torah-Nevi'im-Ketuvim to TaNaKh and so the TaNaKh was the term for the Jewish scriptures. 

As an aside: it is to this collection of scrolls that Jesus refers in Matthew 23: 35 when he attacks the legalism of the Pharisees and accuses them of being responsible for bloodshed, from the first murder, of Abel, to the last murder, of Zechariah. Obviously the murder of Abel was the first murder mentioned in scripture. But what of Zechariah? The murder of the prophet Zechariah is described in II Chronicles 24: 20-21. At the time of Jesus, the scroll of (I & II) Chronicles was the last scroll of the TaNaKh and so the murder of Zechariah was the last murder in the Hebrew scriptures.

Later synagogue collections (says F. F. Bruce) might have counted 22 scrolls, including Ruth as part of  Judges and Lamentations as part of Jeremiah. For example, ancient Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, assumed 22 scrolls.

The Hebrew alphabet

The Hebrew script has changed over time. The early Hebrew writings were probably done in a script called paleo-Hebrew. This was likely the alphabet of David and Solomon. After the Babylonian captivity, this script of 22 consonants took on the Aramaic alphabet and eventually developed the "square script" alphabet of Biblical Hebrew. This writing still did not have consonants. At some point, in order to carefully preserve these sacred texts, copyists were required to follow precise rules for accurately copying the old texts.  These rules included counting all the letters in the text and noting the center word and letter, as a type of error-checking.  These precise copiers, who emphasized careful counting, were called soferim ("counters".) This error-checking assumes that a formal canon of Hebrew scripture had been determined by that time. (Tradition has the priest Ezra as an early sofer; the profession of sofer most likely evolved into the class of men called "scribes" in the New Testament.)

In 2019 a clay bulla with the name of a temple official from the time of the divided kingdom was found in a dig in Jerusalem. The inscription on the seal, in ancient Hebrew script, reads "(belonging) to Nathan-Melech, Servant of the King”. (See 2 Kings 23: 11 where Nathan-Melech is mentioned.) The ancient script of that time predates the later scripts showing up in the Masoretic texts.

Conflicts in the text

By about the second or third century BC, Jewish scribes had very rigorous rules for copying texts. Comparisons between the Dead Sea Scrolls (c. 200 BC) and the Masoretic Text (c. 900 AD) show few discrepancies.  However, there are still many places where the ancient texts vary.  In modern translations these differences are usually marked by footnotes.  The differences are almost always minor, often small discrepancies in spellings. These small variants, for one interested in languages, are somewhat enlightening.  I give two examples here, partly to emphasize the serious nature of the copyists and also to show the types of discrepancies that occur.

One example of a textual debate, given by Paul Wegner (in The Journey from Texts to Translations) occurs in Judges 18: 30, where some ancient manuscripts replace the name Moses with Manasseh. This change is indicated by inserting the Hebrew letter נַ (nun) into the name of Moses, changing  משֶׁה to   מְנַשֶּׁה. (Remember, we read from right to left!) Because the scribe was copying scripture and making any changes to scripture text is a serious matter, this insertion was not done secretly.  The insertion of nun into the name Moses was indicated in ancient texts by suspending the letter nun half a line above the ordinary text, so that the insertion is recognized as an alternative reading. It is possible that this insertion was made because the text describes idolatry in Dan, during the reign of certain priests. Manasseh (here meant to be the seventh century BC king of Judah) is more likely than Moses to have had a son who allowed idolatry. In keeping with that interpretation, we note that the verse describes idolatry occurring until the time of captivity, presumably the Babylonian captivity that occurred shortly after the reign of Manasseh.  Whoever inserted the letter nun believed that the original text had read מְנַשֶּׁה. but that an earlier copyist, accustomed to writing "Moses", had accidentally left out the second character, נַ. We emphasize that the later copyist was not free to make changes without adding marks to indicate the change.

Our second example is not a discrepancy but a place of confusion.  In Exodus 25: 5 an offering to be given YHWH in the building of the Tabernacle, includes precious medals, beautifully dyed garments and tehashim .  This strange word only occurs five times in the Old Testament, all five times in Exodus, always dealing with gifts to the sanctuary.  Translating ancient words is especially difficult when they are rare and this is a classic example.  Because the word is applied to skins, various English translations translate this as "dolphin", "badger", "sea cow", or "dugong." One version of the NIV translates the word as "durable leather".  But Robert Alter, in his translation of Exodus, argues that this word is most likely an Akkadian loan word for a yellow or orange dye. Alter argues that translating this word as a colorful dye fits into the context of beautifully colored garments.

Careful examination of various ancient texts then raises questions such as:

• Was it Manasseh or Moses who had a son that allowed idolatry? 
• Was the tehashim in Exodus an aquatic animal or the color of a dye? 

Hebrew scholars love to debate things like this (and publish papers on the Hebrew translation) but for  most of us these small disputes are irrelevant. These small disputes emphasize that Old Testament Hebrew was an ancient language with insight into an ancient culture.

Ancient sources for the Old Testament

Since the Hebrew scrolls (whether papyrus or leather) decayed over time, a natural question is "What are our sources, today, for the Old Testament?"  To be blunt, "How reliable is our copy of the Old Testament?"  

This question leans on the legitimacy of the oldest scrolls. 

One major source for the ancient Hebrew documents were scrolls created by the Masoretes, a Jewish group of scribes and scholars who copied the scrolls from 500 to 1000 AD. The Masoretes followed very rigid rules for copying the text and used marks over the Hebrew consonants to indicate the missing vowels. Most Old Testament translations rely on the Masoretic text (MT); the NIV footnotes simply call this the "Hebrew" text.  There are other ancient manuscripts; some, like the Septuagint, are translations of the ancient Hebrew into other languages.  We will look in more detail at these ancient texts in a future Sunday essay.