Skip to content

Course 4 · Lesson 2.3

The Dead Sea Scrolls and the state of the Old Testament text

12 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 4 outline

Module 1: How the Canon Formed

  1. What a canon is, and what canonical means
  2. The Old Testament canon: Law, Prophets and Writings
  3. The New Testament canon: from gospels and letters to a list
  4. Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant canons compared

Module 2: The Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint

  1. The Hebrew Bible and the work of the Masoretes
  2. Origin and character of the Septuagint
  3. The Dead Sea Scrolls and the state of the Old Testament text
  4. How New Testament writers quote the Old Testament

Module 3: Transmission of the New Testament Text

  1. Copying by hand: papyri, codices and scribes
  2. Manuscript traditions: Alexandrian, Western and Byzantine texts
  3. Kinds of variants and how they arise
  4. The principles of textual criticism
  5. Reading a critical apparatus and a translation footnote

Module 4: Reading Responsibly: Exegesis and Method

  1. Exegesis and eisegesis with worked examples
  2. Source, form and redaction criticism: what each asks
  3. Strengths and limits of the historical method
  4. Literary and canonical reading

Module 5: Meaning Beyond the Surface: Typology, Allegory and Genre

  1. Typology in the New Testament and the fathers
  2. Allegory and its critics: Alexandria and Antioch
  3. Reading by genre: narrative, law, poetry, prophecy, gospel and letter
  4. Setting, authorship and audience as questions to ask of any passage

Module 6: Christian Approaches to Interpretation

  1. The fourfold sense of Scripture in the medieval church
  2. Reformation principles: Scripture, clarity and the grammatical and historical sense
  3. Orthodox and Catholic approaches: Scripture within Tradition
  4. Historical scholarship and theological interpretation in conversation

Module 7: Writing an Exegesis

  1. Choosing a passage and framing a question
  2. Observation and context: what the text says and where it stands
  3. Using commentaries and reference works without being led by them
  4. Writing up, checking conclusions and revising

All courses

Program / Course 4: Biblical Studies and Hermeneutics / Lesson 2.3

What you will learn

  • Describe what the Dead Sea Scrolls are and when and where they were found.
  • Explain what they show about the stability of the Hebrew text.
  • Explain what they show about the variety of text forms in the last centuries before Christ.
  • Give examples where a scroll supports the Septuagint or another reading against the Masoretic Text.

The big idea

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish manuscripts found from 1947 onward in caves near the Dead Sea. They include copies of nearly every book of the Hebrew Bible that are about a thousand years older than the medieval Masoretic manuscripts. They show two things at once. Much of the Hebrew text was copied with remarkable stability. But in the last centuries before Christ several forms of some books were in use, and some of these agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text.

Key terms

Dead Sea Scrolls
Manuscripts discovered in eleven caves near Qumran and elsewhere by the Dead Sea, dated roughly from the third century BC to the first century AD.
Qumran
A site on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea near the caves where most of the scrolls were found. Many scholars connect it with a Jewish community that kept the scrolls.
Fragment
A piece of a manuscript. Most of the scrolls survive only in fragments, many of them tiny.
Pesher
A Hebrew word meaning interpretation. It names a type of commentary in the scrolls that applies a prophetic text to events in the writer’s own time.
Textual plurality
The existence of more than one form of the same book at the same time. It is also called textual pluriformity.
Proto-Masoretic
A name for scroll texts that are close to the later Masoretic Text.
Essenes
A Jewish group of the Second Temple period described by Josephus and others. Many scholars link them with Qumran, but the link is debated.

Background

In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd found jars with ancient scrolls in a cave near the Dead Sea. Over the next decade, searchers found eleven caves with remains of about nine hundred manuscripts. Roughly a quarter of these are copies of books of the Hebrew Bible. The rest include commentaries, prayers, rules for a community, and other works, some of them known before, such as Tobit and Sirach, and some new. The scrolls date from about the third century BC to the first century AD.

Before this discovery, our oldest Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were medieval. The scrolls moved the evidence back by roughly a thousand years, into the time of the Second Temple, and they showed what Hebrew copies looked like around the time of Jesus. Scholars were able to compare these copies with the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint for the first time.

Who collected and kept the scrolls is a matter of debate. Many scholars hold that they belonged to a community at Qumran, often identified with the Essenes. Others suggest that the scrolls came from several places and were hidden together in the face of danger. Either way, the collection is a large sample of what some Jews of the period read and valued.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: See the evidence for stability

The Great Isaiah Scroll from the first cave, dated to roughly 125 BC, contains the whole book of Isaiah. When scholars compared it with the Masoretic Text, they found that it agrees closely with it, apart from spelling, small differences of form and a modest number of variants. For a text copied by hand for a thousand years, that agreement is notable. It means that the scribes of the Masoretic period were guarding a text received from earlier times.

Many scrolls of the Law and the Psalms also agree with the Masoretic consonantal text in most details. Some scholars call such scrolls proto-Masoretic. The Masoretes did not make a new text; they were conservative stewards of an old one.

Step 2: See the evidence for variety

The scrolls also show that, around the time of Jesus, there was no single standard text of every book. Some scrolls follow a form close to the Masoretic Text. Some follow a form close to what the Septuagint translators used. Some resemble the Samaritan Pentateuch. Others are independent. This is the textual plurality described above.

For example, a scroll of Jeremiah from Cave 4 is shorter and arranged like the Greek book of Jeremiah, not like the Hebrew. Fragments of Samuel from Cave 4 contain readings that agree with the Septuagint and sometimes with the ancient historian Josephus against the Masoretic Text. So the Greek translators in Alexandria were, at least in some books, translating a Hebrew text that really existed. The old suspicion that the Septuagint was simply careless was weakened.

Step 3: Look at an example

In Deuteronomy 32:8, the Masoretic Text speaks of the boundaries of the nations being set according to the number of the children of Israel. The Septuagint reads according to the number of the angels or sons of God. A Hebrew fragment of Deuteronomy from Qumran reads sons of God, so it agrees with the Greek. Many translators now follow the scroll and Greek reading or mention it in a footnote. The case shows how a reading that seems at first like a Greek variant can be shown to go back to a Hebrew text.

Another case lies in 1 Samuel, where a scroll contains a paragraph about a king of Ammon named Nahash that is missing in the Masoretic Text and appears in Josephus. Some English Bibles include it, and some footnote it. Scholars debate whether it was lost accidentally from the Masoretic tradition or added in another.

Step 4: Draw careful conclusions

What can we conclude? First, the Hebrew text was copied faithfully over the centuries in the main line that led to the Masoretic Text. Second, in the time of the Second Temple some books circulated in more than one form, and the idea of one fixed text for every book is a later development. Third, readers of the Old Testament can use the scrolls as a check on the Masoretic Text and on the Septuagint, weighing each reading on its merits.

The scrolls do not decide the question of the canon. They include books that were later accepted, books that were later set aside, and others that were never part of any Bible. The community may not have had a closed canon, or it may have had one we cannot reconstruct. That is why the evidence is contested.

  1. Does this scroll agree with the Masoretic Text, with the Septuagint, or with neither?
  2. Is the difference a matter of spelling, a small wording change or a larger passage?
  3. How old is the scroll, and how much weight can I put on one fragment?
  4. Do other witnesses support the same reading?
  5. What does my Bible’s footnote say about the difference?
  6. What would change if the other reading were original?

Examples

The Great Isaiah Scroll

The scroll is almost entirely complete and about seven meters long. Its agreement with the Masoretic Text in most details was taken as strong evidence for the care of the scribes. Yet it contains a number of small differences, and some translations adopt a reading from it in a verse in Isaiah, noting it in the margin.

Psalms scroll

A Psalms scroll from Cave 11 contains many of the psalms in the usual Hebrew Psalter but in a different order, and it adds other compositions, including a poem known from the Greek and Syriac traditions. Scholars debate whether the scroll was a Psalter in the same sense as the later book or a liturgical collection. It is a good case of how the evidence can be read more than one way.

A commentary on Habakkuk

A pesher on Habakkuk quotes the prophet verse by verse and applies it to events and persons in the writer’s community. It shows one way Jews of the period read the prophets, as pointing to their own time. This is a useful background for the way the New Testament writers also apply prophecy to Jesus and the church.

Different perspectives

Jewish

Jewish scholars treat the scrolls as a window on the diversity of Second Temple Judaism and on the roots of the later rabbinic tradition. Many hold that the stability of the proto-Masoretic text supports the early authority of the line that rabbinic Judaism preserved.

Protestant

Protestant scholars use the scrolls to defend the reliability of the Hebrew text, noting the close agreement of many scrolls with the Masoretic Text, and also to correct it in a few places. Some Protestant Bibles now follow a scroll reading in a text and put the Masoretic reading in a footnote.

Catholic

Catholic scholars were among the early editors of the scrolls. They use them with the Septuagint and the Vulgate in translations such as modern Catholic Bibles, and they note that the Hebrew finds of Sirach and Tobit support the deuterocanonical books as ancient Jewish writings.

Orthodox

Orthodox scholars welcome evidence that the Septuagint sometimes preserves an older Hebrew reading, since the church has long used the Greek. They treat the scrolls as a help in understanding the Greek, not as a replacement for it.

Scholarly

Specialists differ on who owned the scrolls, whether the community had a canon and how best to classify the text types. The broad picture of stability alongside plurality is widely shared, and the details remain under active study.

Why it matters

The scrolls change how a careful reader speaks about the Old Testament text. It is no longer accurate to say there was one text that never varied, and it is not accurate to say the text was uncertain and wild. The truth is a stable core with real variety at the edges. That is the kind of balanced judgment this course tries to teach.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: The scrolls proved that our Old Testament is word for word the same as in the first century.

Correction: They show close agreement in many places and real differences in others. The honest summary is stability with some variation.

Misunderstanding: The scrolls are Christian documents or mention Jesus.

Correction: They are Jewish documents, mostly from before the time of Jesus. They do not mention him, although they illuminate the setting in which he lived.

Misunderstanding: The scrolls were hidden by the church to suppress their contents.

Correction: Publication was slow, partly for reasons of access and organization, but the texts have been published and are available to every reader.

Misunderstanding: The Qumran community certainly wrote or owned all the scrolls.

Correction: Scholars debate this. Some think the scrolls came from many places and were gathered in the caves.

Knowledge check

When and where were the Dead Sea Scrolls found?

They were found beginning in 1947 in caves near Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Eleven caves yielded the remains of about nine hundred manuscripts, dating from roughly the third century BC to the first century AD.

What does the Great Isaiah Scroll show about the stability of the Hebrew text?

It dates to about 125 BC and agrees closely with the Masoretic Text in most details, apart from spelling and a modest number of variants. That suggests the text was copied with care over a thousand years.

What do the scrolls show about textual plurality?

They show that around the time of Christ several forms of some books existed. Some scrolls resemble the Masoretic Text, some resemble the text behind the Septuagint, and some resemble the Samaritan Pentateuch, so no single standard text yet governed every book.

Give an example in which a scroll supports the Septuagint over the Masoretic Text.

In Deuteronomy 32:8, a Qumran fragment reads sons of God and agrees with the Greek, while the Masoretic Text reads sons of Israel. Another case is the shorter form of Jeremiah, which resembles the Greek. Either example is correct.

Think it through

  1. Why do both stability and variety of text matter to a believer who values Scripture?
  2. How might the Septuagint translators have felt if told that their text was a mistake?
  3. What would it mean for the idea of a closed canon if no single standard text existed?
  4. Which side of the evidence, the stability or the variety, do you tend to emphasize, and why?

Independent assignment

Find a scroll reading

Take a modern study Bible or a translation with extensive footnotes. In your notebook, find three footnotes that mention a Dead Sea Scroll, the Septuagint or an alternate reading. For each, copy the verse and the note, and write two sentences explaining what the note says and how it affects the meaning. Then write 150 words on what the examples show about the state of the text. Keep it in your notebook.

Further study