What is the Bible?
Part 3
Series Intro…
For many this may seem
like a very simple question, even silly. Everybody knows what the Bible is,
right? Yet, it’s really not simple at all. In this series of posts it is my
hope to share the variety of answers that are legitimately possible to that question.
The first of the Dead
Sea Scrolls was discovered in 1947 in a cave just west of the north end of the
Dead Sea.
Over the next few years, from 1949 to 1956, additional fragments of some
950 different scrolls were discovered in ten nearby caves…The richest yield, from
Cave 4, just opposite the site of Qumran, consisted of some 15,000 fragments.
The last cave, Cave 11, was discovered in 1956, and the scrolls found there
were in a reasonable state of preservation.[1]
- They are all dated to the
Hellenistic–Roman period from the third century BCE to the first century CE.
- The scrolls were
written on parchment (the majority) or papyrus and most were in a poor state of
preservation.
- Most scrolls are written
in Hebrew, some in Aramaic and a smaller number in Greek.
- About 230 scrolls
represent the most ancient evidence of the text of the Hebrew Bible and
represent every book except Esther.
- In addition, numerous fragments
represent books found in the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament;
“some of these had previously been known only in ancient translations (e.g.,
Tobit, Jubilees, and 1 Enoch), while others were completely new to us (such as
the Genesis Apocryphon or the Temple Scroll).[2]
· Evidence suggests that the Scrolls' contemporary communities did not
have a unified conception of an authoritative collection of scriptural works.
The idea of a closed biblical “canon” only emerged later in the history of
these sacred writings.[3]
While the Dead Sea Scrolls
may have been the property of one sect of Judaism—those who inhabited the
Qumran site, possibly the Essenes—during the mid to late Second Temple period,
various sects of Judaism existed in Palestine, as evidenced by the writings of
Josephus and the authors of the New Testament. Each had their own distinctive
ideas of which texts should be considered authoritative (i.e., in modern
parlance, “inspired”). The Samaritans accepted only the Pentateuch as God’s
Word (i.e., Genesis – Deuteronomy). The Sadducees focused on “the law and the prophets,”
while the Pharisees valued oral tradition as being equal in authority to the
written texts.
Among the “biblical” Dead
Sea Scrolls, while many closely resemble the much later Masoretic text, there
are also significant differences. Some Dead Sea Scroll texts are closer to the
text of the Samaritan Pentateuch or the Septuagint than they are to the
Masoretic text. Also, there are multiple copies of the same “biblical” book
that demonstrate differences between them, indicating that “biblical” texts
existed in multiple forms. Two scrolls of the book of Jeremiah are classic
examples of the variations of “biblical” texts that existed in the mid to late
Second Temple period.
Two important scrolls [of Jeremiah]…reflect a Hebrew text that is very
different than the Masoretic form of Jeremiah from which modern Bibles have
been translated…[being] very similar to the Hebrew text from which the
Septuagint (LXX) was translated…[These two scrolls] and the Septuagint present
a version of Jeremiah that is about 13 percent shorter than the longer version
found in modern Bibles.[4]
On the basis of such irrefutable evidence, most scholars recognize that there were at least two editions of the book of Jeremiah, both of which are attested among the Dead Sea Scrolls. One is an early edition that closely resembles the shorter version found in the Septuagint. The other is a later edition that closely resembles the Masoretic text.
What’s the point? In
the late Second Temple period (i.e., the first century CE, during the days of
Jesus’ ministry and the early Jesus movement), there was no unified
biblical text; that is, there was no “Bible”. While the evidence of the
Dead Sea Scrolls indicates that the 23 of the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible (or 38
of the 39 books of the Protestant New Testament) were respected as authoritative,
there were various editions of several of these texts in circulation. Also, there
were other books, that were seen as authoritative among at least some
Jews, that are not found in our modern Hebrew or Protestant Bibles (e.g.,
Tobit, Jubilees, 1 Enoch, etc.). Yet, some of these were seen as
authoritative by at least some of the authors of the New Testament books, as we
will see in Part 4 of “What is the Bible?” series.[5]
[4] Martin
Abegg Jr., Peter Flint & Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible
(New York, NY: Harper One, 1999), 382. Note: I think that while
this is a very helpful book, I wish they had not titled it thus, because these
texts were not collected together as “inspired” or “authoritative” by whoever
was responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls collection. In fact, it is clear that other
texts, not found in our modern Bibles, were revered as authoritative among at
least some Jews and the early Jesus followers.
[5] It is my opinion that any reasonably serious
student of the Bible (or Jesus follower) would want to be at least somewhat
familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls, not just in terms of the “biblical texts”
but also with respect to the entire collection. I would recommend: (1) The
Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls by VanderKam and Flint, and (2) Understanding
the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Hershel Shanks, and (3) The Dead Sea
Scrolls Bible by Abegg, Flint and Ulrich.
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