ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE TEXT OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

Howard F. Vos

[Howard F. Vos, Th.D. (Dallas Theological Seminary), Ph.D. (Northwestern University), is professor of history and archaeology at the King’s College, Briarcliff Manor, New York. He is the author of a number of books on biblical and archaeological subjects.]

Anyone who has studied classical literature is impressed with the tremendous variation in the existing manuscripts of even the greatest authors (e.g., Plato, Aristotle). One might expect that the same variation or corruption exists in manuscripts of Old Testament books. But such is not the case. Ancient scribes exercised meticulous care in copying the Old Testament, reverencing it almost to the point of worship.

This care is especially evident in the work of the Masoretes. These Jewish scholars lived primarily in Tiberias, Palestine, during the fifth to the ninth centuries A.D. and are called Masoretes because they preserved in writing the oral traditions (Masorah) concerning the biblical text. They sought not only to determine the exact text handed down to them but to pass it on to future generations without change. Their special contribution to the fixation and perpetuation of the text was its vocalization. Up to that time there were no vowel markings on the consonantal text. Their reverence for the text would not permit making changes in it, so they worked out an ingenious system of editorial notes. Where it appeared to them a copyist’s error had occurred, they left the error written in the text (a kethib wording—that which is written) but put vowel markings with it for a preferred wording (qere—that which is to be read) and inserted the consonants for that reading in the margin.

This Masoretic text has been extremely carefully preserved over the centuries. Robert Dick Wilson concluded,

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An examination of the Hebrew manuscripts now in existence shows that in the whole Old Testament there are scarcely any variants supported by more than one manuscript out of 200 to 400, in which each book is found.. .. The Massorites have left to us the variants which they gathered and we find that they amount altogether to about 1,200, less than one for each page of the printed Hebrew Bible.1

But when Wilson made his study, the oldest Hebrew manuscript of any length did not date earlier than the ninth century A.D., and the oldest complete Hebrew Bible dated about a century later. What sort of textual corruption had crept in during all the preceding centuries of copying? The Dead Sea Scrolls provide a partial answer.

The Discoveries

The Qumran Scrolls

When announcement of an ancient Isaiah scroll discovery in Palestine hit the scholarly world in 1948, Palestine was convulsed with the birth pangs of the State of Israel. Military action did not

Scholars study Dead Sea Scroll fragments (Palestine Archaeological Museum, Jerusalem)

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permit archaeological investigation. Some doubted that the manuscript had been found in a cave near the Dead Sea as the bedouin had claimed. Some thought it was a forgery or that it dated to the Middle Ages rather than the second century B.C., a date set by leading archaeologists. As a matter of fact, Professor E. L. Sukenik of the Hebrew University and Metropolitan Samuel of St. Mark’s Syrian Orthodox Monastery (both in Jerusalem) had obtained several scrolls. But specific knowledge of the complete Isaiah scroll was available because John C. Trever had photographed it at the American Schools of Oriental Research in Jerusalem and had sent the negatives to William F. Albright at Johns Hopkins University.

When Archbishop Samuel later sold his scrolls to the State of Israel, the complete collection in Israeli hands included the following: a complete scroll of Isaiah, a partial Isaiah, The Habakkuk Commentary (including two chapters of Habakkuk), The Manual of Discipline (rules for members of the religious community who lived nearby), Thanksgiving Hymns, A Genesis Apocryphon (apocryphal accounts of some of the patriarchs), and Wars of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness (an account of a real or spiritual war between some of the Hebrew tribes and tribes east of the Jordan—Ammonites, Moabites, etc.).

Finally, at the end of January 1949, about two years after the scrolls were discovered, it was possible to locate the cave in which they had been stored (now called Cave 1) and to excavate it thoroughly. It is 7 1/2 miles south of Jericho and 2 1/2 miles north of the spring ‘Ain Feshka and about a mile from the western shore of the Dead Sea. The cave yielded thousands of manuscript fragments as well as fragments of jars and cloth that had wrapped the scrolls.

The magnificent collection from Cave 1 raised the possibility of finding treasures in the other caves of the Qumran area. Both the bedouins and archaeologists scoured a total of some two hundred seventy caves between 1949 and 1956. Of these, forty yielded pottery and other objects, twenty-six yielding pottery of the Hellenistic and Roman periods identical to that appearing in Cave 1. In a total of eleven caves there were manuscript finds like those of Cave 1.

Excavation of Cave 2 turned up about one hundred fragments of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Job, Psalms, and Ruth. In Cave 3, in addition to inscribed fragments of

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hide and papyrus, there was the curious copper scroll (about twelve inches high) with directions to over sixty sites containing hidden treasure. To date no treasure has been found and there is a variety of speculations concerning this scroll. Cave 4 was in many ways the most exciting of all. It provided some 40,000 fragments of an unknown number of manuscripts, about 400 of which have been identified. About one hundred were biblical scrolls and represent all the Old Testament books except Esther. There were fragments from 13 scrolls of Deuteronomy, twelve of Isaiah, ten of Psalms, six of Exodus, and five of Genesis. A fragment of Samuel, dating to the third century B.C., is thought to be the oldest known piece of biblical Hebrew. Caves 5 through 10 had a variety of scroll fragments too diverse to list here. Prize pieces from Cave 11 included very fine portions of Psalms and Leviticus. The former included forty-eight psalms, forty-one biblical and seven non-biblical.

One more very interesting scroll, the Temple Scroll, came from the caves at Qumran, though it is not known which one. Yigael Yadin obtained it during the Six-Day War in 1967, one day after the fall of Jerusalem. It contains a large number of religious rules, an enumeration of sacrifices and offerings, and a detailed description of the Temple—not so much as it was but as to how it was to be built in the future.

The list of manuscripts (many very fragmentary) so far identified at Qumran is as follows: Psalms, thirty; Deuteronomy, twenty-five; Isaiah, nineteen; Genesis, fifteen; Exodus, fifteen; Leviticus, eight; minor prophets, eight; Daniel, eight; Numbers, six; Ezekiel, six; Job, five; Samuel, four; Jeremiah, four; Ruth, four; Song of Solomon, four; Lamentations, four; Judges, three; Kings, three; Joshua, two; Proverbs, two; Ecclesiastes, two; Ezra-Nehemiah, one; Chronicles, one.2

The Qumran Community

After Cave 1 was excavated, it was only natural that attention should center on Khirbet Qumran, a ruin on a plateau between Cave 4 and the Dead Sea. Did it have anything to do with the scrolls? Until that time there was a tendency to consider it to be a Roman military outpost. After preliminary and inconclusive investigation in 1949, G. Lankester Harding, director of the Department of Antiquities for the State of Jordan, and Father R. de Vaux

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One of the most important of the Dead Sea Scrolls is the complete manuscript of Isaiah (1QIsa), dating prior to 100 B.C. (Courtesy Biblical Archaeologist)

Airview of Qumran structures (Palestine Archaeological Museum)

of the École Biblique returned to dig in 1951, and again in 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956.

Excavations revealed that the site evidently had origins in the eighth through the seventh centuries B.C., perhaps as a fortress of King Uzziah of Judah (2 Chron 26:10). But its main period of occupation was during the first centuries B.C. and A.D. It became an important center about 135 B.C. and was abandoned temporarily after a great earthquake in 31 B.C. Jews again occupied it about the time of the birth of Christ and held it until A.D. 68, when the Romans took it and remained there for about two decades. Jews again used the center during the Jewish revolt under Bar Kochba (132–35).

Khirbet Qumran had one main structure about 100 by 122 feet with additional buildings on the northeast, west, and south. A tower at the northwest corner was used for defense. East of that was a kitchen area. South of the tower were assembly or dining rooms for the community. Above them on the second floor was a writing room where at least some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were produced. From this room into the debris below had fallen two large plastered tables (or benches) 17 feet long and 20 inches high with two inkwells—one containing dried ink. An intricate system of cisterns and pools provided for water storage and for the many ritual washings performed there. A fine collection of coins helped to establish the chronology of the site.

Evidently Khirbet Qumran was the center of a religious community, presumably largely celibate. Some 200 to 400 people are thought to have lived there at one time. Their living quarters were

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in tents or huts or some of the caves of the region. Most have concluded that the occupants were Essenes, but some scholars are still reluctant to make this identification. It is now generally agreed that the scrolls found in Caves 1–11 constituted the library of the Qumran community and that some of them were no doubt produced in their writing room or scriptorium.

The general date of the scrolls is bound up with the date of the community and is established on the basis of at least five lines of evidence: (1) carbon 14 tests on linen wrappings of the scrolls (range of c. 327 B.C.—A.D. 73); (2) coins found in the community, dating from 135 B.C. to A.D. 68; (3) pottery chronology for the jars in which the scrolls were found, as well as other pottery found in the community center and the scroll caves; (4) comparative paleography (science of handwriting); (5) linguistic analysis of Aramaic documents found in the caves.

Other Discoveries Along The Dead Sea

Discoveries in the Qumran caves and at Khirbet Qumran proved to be only the beginning of significant finds in the region of the Dead Sea.

Some of the caves at Qumran.

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Wadi Murabba ‘At

In the Wadi Murabba ‘at, about twelve miles south of Qumran and fifteen miles southeast of Jerusalem, bedouin found four manuscript-bearing caves in 1951. Lankester Harding for the Jordanian Department of Antiquities and R. de Vaux for the École Biblique excavated there in 1952, finding a variety of papyrus and sheepskin manuscripts written in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Latin. There were letters from Simeon ben Kosibah, identified as Bar Kochba, leader of the second Jewish revolt. Evidently Bar Kochba had maintained a garrison there. Fragments in Hebrew of five leather scrolls also turned up: two of Exodus and one each of Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Isaiah. There also was a whole phylactery containing passages in Hebrew from Exodus and Deuteronomy. The bedouin also produced from unidentified caves in the area other Bar Kochba materials, a Greek copy of part of the minor prophets, a fine (although incomplete) Hebrew scroll of the minor prophets (Joel 2:20—Zech 1:4) and fragments of Genesis, Numbers, and Psalms. This collection dated from the second century A.D.

Khirbet Mird

Shortly after their find in the Wadi Murabba ‘at, bedouin discovered manuscripts in a cave at Khirbet Mird in the Wadi en-Nar, six miles west southwest of Qumran and nine miles southeast of Jerusalem. A Belgian expedition explored the cave in February and March 1953, locating Arabic, Greek, and Syriac documents. The collection included Arabic private letters of the seventh and eighth centuries, a sixth-century Greek fragment of Euripides’ Andromache, and biblical fragments of Christian origin. The biblical materials (5th-8th centuries) consisted of portions of Mark, John, and Acts in Greek, and Joshua, Luke, John, Acts, and Colossians in Syriac.

Ain Feshka

Less than two miles south of Qumran, Pere R. de Vaux excavated a major ruin at Ain Feshka in 1958. The structure measured 78 by 59 feet and had an inner courtyard with rooms on all sides. He interpreted his discoveries as directly related to the Qumran site, serving as an agricultural and tanning center for the Qumran community.

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The Habakkuk Commentary (Israel Information Service)

Nahal Hever

Believing that there might be manuscripts on their side of the Jordanian border in the Dead Sea area, the Israelis carried on extensive searches in the wilderness near En-gedi. Finally, along the gorge known as Nahal Hever, 3 1/2 miles south of En-gedi, they made a significant manuscript discovery in a cave in 1960 of a collection of fifteen letters to or from Bar Kochba—nine in Aramaic, four in Hebrew, and two in Greek. The following year, in the same cave, the Israelis found sixty-five more papyri and parchment documents, including important legal documents. They also discovered bits of manuscripts that proved to belong to a fragmentary copy of a Greek version of the minor prophets purchased from bedouin in 1952. In addition they found Hebrew fragments of Psalms 15 and 16, Exodus 13:1–16, and Numbers 20.

Though the emphasis is on written materials in this survey, it should be noted that frequently other items of great value turned up in cave explorations. For instance, in the “cave of the treasure” at Nahal Hever were found 429 objects of the Chalcolithic period; 416 of these were made of copper and included 240 mace heads and 20 chisels and axes.

Wadi Ed-Daliyeh

A manuscript-bearing cave in Wadi ed-Daliyeh (nine miles north of Jericho and seven miles west of the Jordan), though not located near the Dead Sea, is often grouped with the Dead Sea materials for convenience and because its discovery came out of the same general excitement as the finds to the south. A bedouin found the cave in 1962, and Paul Lapp explored it in January 1963

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and February 1964. Some forty Aramaic papyrus documents were secured and were precisely dated from 375 to 335 B.C. These legal and administrative materials were entombed in a cave with perhaps 200 upper-class Samaritans who were trying to flee the wrath of Alexander the Great after his punitive destruction of Samaria in 331 B.C. Coins found in the cave all date just before Alexander’s sweep through Palestine in 332. These papyri are important for a study of Samaritan and intertestamental history.

Masada

From 1963 to 1965 an Israeli team with international staffing, under the leadership of Yigael Yadin, attacked the historic site of Masada. Located near the shore of the Dead Sea opposite the el Lisan Peninsula, the site had been the scene of a heroic stand of Jews against the Romans in A.D. 73. General comments on Masada appear in chapter 9; here attention centers on manuscripts. A few biblical fragments, twenty-six pieces of the important second-century B.C. Hebrew text of Ben Sirach, and a scroll identical with the text of Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice from Qumran were found. This was the first time a Qumran manuscript had been discovered outside a cave and in a stratified sequence. Biblical manuscripts were apparently all from about the middle of the first century A.D. and included Psalms 81 through 85 and 150 and fragments of Genesis, Leviticus 8–12, Deuteronomy, and Ezekiel.

Ras Feshka

After the Six-Day War in 1967 an Israeli team under the leadership of P. Bar-Adon excavated a building complex and adjoining cemetery at Ras Feshka, ten miles south of Qumran. The excavator dated his finds to the last century B.C. and the first century A.D. and linked them to Qumran and Ein Feshka structures, as belonging to the Essene community. Ras Feshka was a center for meeting and work—not living quarters. It is interesting to note that the cemetery at Ras Feshka was not celibate, and new work at the Qumran cemetery indicates it was not completely so either.

Significance Of The Dead Sea Scrolls For Old Testament Studies

Contribution To The Revised Standard Version

The big question yet to be answered is what all the magnificent

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discoveries near the Dead Sea have done for Old Testament studies. The complete Isaiah manuscript from Qumran (commonly identified as I Q Isa) became available to the scholarly world at the time when the Revised Standard Version translation committee was preparing the new version. They finally decided to adopt only thirteen readings for their translation based on the new manuscript. Millar Burrows, a member of the translation committee, later concluded that even some of these were unwarranted and that in five of the thirteen instances the Masoretic reading should have been retained.3

Burrows observed further, “It is a matter for wonder that through something like a thousand years the text underwent so little alteration. As I said in my first article on the scroll, ‘Herein lies its chief importance, supporting the fidelity of the Masoretic tradition.’”4 In fact, he concluded that at many points the Isaiah manuscript had readings inferior to those in some of the medieval manuscripts already possessed.5

As far as the second Isaiah manuscript from Cave 1 is concerned, Gleason Archer noted that it “proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.”6

Recognition Of Families Of Texts

But Rosenbloom was impressed with the number of variants between I Q Isa and the Masoretic text and believed that the former was “a popularization of the Book of Isaiah” developed to make it “more easily understandable to a readership which no longer used Hebrew as their primary language.”7 While Rosenbloom’s view is debatable, there is not as great divergence between him and Burrows as might appear on the surface. Burrows himself recognized that the variant readings in I Q Isa were numerous and later joined with others in holding that there were various families of texts represented at Qumran.

As time went on, scholars decided on the basis of the Dead Sea Scrolls that more than the Masoretic textual tradition existed in antiquity. There was also a textual tradition behind the Septuagint and one behind the Samaritan Pentateuch. Some even held

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that there was a fourth “neutral” tradition. Presumably the Septuagint textual tradition existed in Egypt (where the Old Testament was translated into Greek), the Samaritan in Palestine, and the Masoretic in Babylonia, whence it was brought to Palestine. All three of these traditions were represented at Qumran. Previously textual critics had held that the Septuagint was an inferior translation of the Masoretic text. Now they concluded that behind the Septuagint was a separate and somewhat divergent Hebrew text which the Septuagint translators had faithfully rendered into Greek. Henceforth the Greek version would be held in much higher regard than it used to be.

Rise Of The Standardized Text

At Qumran at least there was a variety of textual traditions. But as Moshe Greenberg observes, the community which left the Qumran library had already “rejected the authority of the Jerusalem priesthood and withdrawn from the mainstream of Jewish history. Forms of the text which it was willing to use and copy may have been already rejected by the more orthodox leaders of Judaism,”8 The standardized or Masoretic textual tradition became generally accepted during the latter part of the first century A.D. And during the first part of the second century A.D. Rabbi Aqiba concluded the process of standardization.

It is extremely instructive to note that the biblical materials dating to the first century A.D. at Qumran and to the first century A.D. and later at other Dead Sea sites are Masoretic in textual tradition. This is true, for instance, of the Psalms scroll from Cave 11, which dates to the middle of the first century A.D.9 It is likewise true of the first-century Psalms and Leviticus manuscripts found at Masada,10 the second-century Psalms manuscript found in connection with the Bar Kochba materials in the Nahal Hever,11 and the second-century A. D. scrolls from Murabba’at.12 These first- and second-century A.D. Dead Sea texts are almost identical to the medieval Masoretic texts we have had all along.

Problem Of The Septuagint

The problem of the extensive divergence of the Septuagint

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and Masoretic texts at certain points remains, however. For instance, the Cave 4 Samuel manuscript supports the Septuagint rather than the Masoretic tradition. The Septuagint text of Jeremiah is one-eighth shorter and the text of job one-sixth shorter than that of the Hebrew Bible. The Cave 4 Jeremiah tends to support the Septuagint. It is good to remind ourselves at this point that Dead Sea Scroll studies have only just begun. At the present rate of scholarly advance, it will take a generation to edit and properly investigate and interpret the materials that have come to light.

The Canon And The Dead Sea Scrolls

It is often observed that fragments of all the Old Testament books except Esther have turned up in the Qumran literature, as if the canonicity of Esther were therefore in doubt. But allusion to Esther appears in a Zadokite work found in Qumran. These works are nowhere declared to be books belonging to the sacred collection or canon of Scripture, however. And apocryphal literature is found in abundance at Qumran. In dealing with this question, one may argue that just as the Qumran community may have been somewhat unorthodox in accepting textual traditions, it also may have had a more expansive view of the canon. Moreover, noncanonical books do not appear in the other Dead Sea discoveries. And, as Pfeiffer observes, only canonical books had commentaries written on them at Qumran.13

The Dead Sea Scrolls And Theories Of Late Composition Of Old Testament Books

As a result of Dead Sea Scroll discoveries, it is no longer possible to date portions or entire Old Testament books as late as some scholars used to do. It is impossible to date any biblical work or any extensive part of one later than the early second century B.C.14 Fragments of the Pentateuch and the prophets date from the second century B.C. Ecclesiastes, sometimes believed to have been composed in the second or first century B.C., appears in a Cave 4 manuscript dating from 175 to 150 B.C. A second-century B.C. Copy of the Psalms indicates that the collection of Psalms was fixed by Maccabean times.15 A manuscript of Daniel dating about 120 B.C. brings into question the alleged Maccabean date of its composition.16

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Moreover, the Dead Sea Scrolls do not support the existence of a deutero- or trito-Isaiah, at least during the second century B.C. The complete Isaiah and the long fragment of Isaiah from Cave 1 (second century B.C.) treat the book as a unit.

The Dead Sea Scrolls And The Study Of Hebrew Language

The Dead Sea Scrolls have contributed much to the study of the Hebrew language. They give new information on the history of the Hebrew language, trends in spelling, formation of words, and pronunciation. They also prove that Hebrew was not a completely dead language in New Testament times because a fair amount of various kinds of literature was being written in Hebrew: religious, commercial, contractual, and military documents. This body of formal and informal literature throws much light on the meanings of individual words often not clearly understood from their Old Testament usage. And, interestingly, the Aramaic manuscripts of Qumran provide the first literary documents in the form of Aramaic used in Palestine in the time of Christ. Previously only brief inscriptions in Aramaic were known from this period.

Conclusion On Textual Accuracy

We must now return to the question raised at the beginning of this chapter. How much textual corruption crept into the Hebrew text of the Old Testament during all the centuries of copying prior to the efforts of the Masoretes during the Middle Ages? The new information (which pushes the history of the Old Testament text back a millennium) shows that there were three or four families of texts, of which the Masoretic type was one. By early in the second century A.D. this Masoretic type of text had achieved its present form and was destined to prevail until the present day. Moreover, “the many Qumran manuscripts which substantially agree with the Masoretic text show that it was based on a much earlier tradition, conveniently called proto-Masoretic.”17

Even though this family of texts, which reaches back into the hoary ages of antiquity, had to compete with other textual traditions, it did not greatly diverge from them in most Old Testament books. The number of variations in the manuscripts, rather than being an embarrassment to textual critics, is a boon to them because it provides critical apparatus to aid in arriving at the true text. As Roland de Vaux has observed, “And so new material has

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been provided for textual criticism, but we must at once add that the differences only have a bearing on minor points: if certain restorations can now be proposed with more confidence, and some obscure passages become clear, the content of the Bible is not ‘changed.’”18 Archer concludes, “Nothing in the new discoveries from the Qumran caves endangers the essential reliability and authority of our standard Hebrew Bible text.”19

All the evidence attests to the fact that Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries exercised the same care in copying the Old Testament that they did during and after the days of the Masoretes. Probably it is reasonably correct to say that there is at least 95 percent agreement between the various biblical texts found near the Dead Sea and the Old Testament we have had all along. Most of the variations are minor, and none of the doctrines have been put in jeopardy.20

(From Archaeology in Bible Lands by Howard F. Vos. Copyright 1977. Moody Press, Moody Bible Institute of Chicago. Used by permission.)

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