Although we have manuscripts in the original language of Greek going back to within a century or two of the original documents of the New Testament, documentation for the Hebrew Bible in its original Hebrew and Aramaic has historically been much later. The oldest manuscripts still in existence were as late as the 10th and 11th centuries CE, about a millennium and a half after the last books were supposed to have been written.[1] This textual tradition is called the Masoretic text, and is the basis for most modern Bibles.[2] But then our textual evidence would get moved back by more than a millennium, in the middle of the 20th century, when the so-called Dead Sea Scrolls in the desert near Qumran were discovered in caves, documents which were written between the 3rd century BCE up until the Roman destruction of the community around 68 CE.
Many believing scholars were elated to discover that, among the scrolls, the textual tradition of the Masoretic text found such ancient support. However, scholars were also surprised to find other textual traditions, which could be quite different in places. By the count of some scholars, the manuscripts of the Torah that paralleled the Masoretic tradition only account for 48 percent of the scrolls; for the other biblical books outside the Torah, it was only 44 percent.[3] What was perhaps even more surprising was the realization that we actually already had evidence of some of these variant traditions! And it should be noted that these were not the sort of minor differences you find in wording between the various translations of modern Bibles. These differences were much more substantial.
The First Greek Bible?
Many of the variant traditions found at Qumran were actually already known in the Septuagint,[4] the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that began to be made around the 3rd century BCE,[5] probably with the five books of the Torah; the translation of most of the other books was probably completed by the next century. Our oldest manuscripts of the Septuagint are nearly as old as the Septuagint itself. Until the Qumran discovery, scholars had simply assumed that the Septuagint translators had been quite maverick with the way they handled the Hebrew text. Although we certainly have ample evidence that the Septuagint translators could be very free with their “translation”, that did not in fact explain all of the differences between the Septuagint and the much later Masoretic text.[6] One of the clues scholars should have paid attention to before the discovery of older, alternative Hebrew manuscripts at Qumran was that the Septuagint version was often shorter, sometimes much shorter, than the Masoretic text. Recall that one of the tendencies of spurious variants is that they are almost always additions, not subtractions.
Many textual errors are clearly visible in the Masoretic text. A few of the books, such as Samuel, are badly damaged and have many doubtful passages. Modern textual critics and translators will often use ancient versions, such as the Septuagint and the Targum, an ancient Aramaic translation, to try to fill in the gaps; when they do so, typically there will be a marginal note explaining the variant. However, the tendency in scholarship has been to assume the correctness of the Masoretic text, and only look to the other sources when a variant in the Masoretic text appears wrong.[7]
However, several glaring spurious variants never got fixed at all, even the most blatantly obvious ones. We saw a few examples of alterations that have been left in the New Testament, even in the most modern translations, but there are many more in the Hebrew Bible. One of the most striking ones that probably gets missed in most Sunday schools is when 2 Samuel 21:19 says that Elhanan killed Goliath, despite the earlier account that David did it;[8] the parallel passage in 1 Chronicles 20:5 seems to be an undamaged text, which says plainly that Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath. Because the histories often parallel each other, we can find several more similar examples of what appear to be scribal slips, such as 1 Kings 4:6 saying that Solomon had 40,000 stalls of horses, while 2 Chronicles 9:25 puts the count at 4,000, a difference of only a single character in Hebrew; 4,000 seems more likely based on the context that he had 12,000 horsemen.
But many variants were intentional and significant alterations to the text. Some of these may have been originally a marginal note, which with enough time were incorporated into the actual text. Other additions were entire chapters, many examples of which are cited throughout this book. Some scribal insertions have a rather obvious motivation. For example, 1 Kings 15:5 was originally simply a praise of David, but it seemed to be at odds with 2 Samuel 11, so a scribe added “except in the matter of Uriah the Hittite” to the Masoretic Text.[9]
As mentioned above, there were only a few passages of any significant length in the New Testament that appear to be added by scribes. Since our sources for the Hebrew Bible were far later until the discovery at Qumran only a few decades ago,[10] one would expect at least the possibility that the Hebrew Bible had far more opportunity for variants to be snuck in. Believing writers on biblical origins will often point to the careful copyist practices of the Masoretes,[11] but they lived from around 500 to 1000 CE; how careful they were is not relevant if what they copied was not well preserved for multiple centuries before they got it. What is often glossed over in biblical origin books like the one cited above is that we know virtually nothing about earlier copyist practices or the scribes who performed the task. There are a few places in the Bible where there are mentions of scribes preserving the “book/scroll” of God, but no significant details regarding how careful they were, or even what book was being referenced! One would expect that they would be careful, but at times they obviously weren’t. Otherwise, we would not find variant textual traditions as far back as we have evidence for. Even the Bible itself testifies that, for a time, they lost the “book” of the law![12] That’s not exactly being careful with it.
How could variants get stuck into the holy writings of YHVH? There are several possible explanations. We’ve already noted the difference in information technology that made it harder for the ancients to compare multiple manuscripts to help eliminate errors. There were periods in Israel’s history when YHVH’s priests were not in power and did not even serve in the Temple, and the people predominantly did not follow YHVH. There’s that whole issue of the captivity when they were enslaved and the Temple destroyed; just how many writings were lost then? I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard someone complain that they lost some item during a move from one domicile to another; imagine how much more you’d lose if you were forced to move because a foreign army attacked and burned your home and carried you off naked into slavery….
But perhaps most appalling for modern believers, it would appear that many alterations to the text were due to a totally different attitude toward it.[13] This book covers myriad differences between more modern concepts of inspiration and ancient ones. Where the medieval Masoretes may have even tried to preserve the size of letters, for example, earlier scribes, who originated those letters of varying size, obviously did not take such pains; worse, there is much evidence that the ancients were much more liberal in the sense that many of them believed that they were allowed to add to inspired books![14] One of the greatest pieces of evidence we have for a different attitude of the ancients toward holy texts comes from Qumran itself: in some cases, differing traditions of the same text were found in the same caves! They knew about the differences, and yet they didn’t seem to have a problem with them; there are no marginal notes in the alternative traditions to indicate which they preferred. And there were alternative versions for more than half the books of the Hebrew Bible![15] Both versions of each book were no doubt holy to many of them. This same attitude is found when the New Testament authors quote the Septuagint, even when it differs from Hebrew texts that were available to them at the time (more on this below). Right, wrong, or indifferent, these are clear evidences that the ancients often had a different attitude toward holy texts, even if they revered them. It was the message that mattered, and so scribes would often add to the texts to make the message even “better”, or more in agreement with other texts, such as the additions to the book of Esther in the Septuagint, and in modern Bibles that contain the Apocrypha, since Esther originally must have bothered many Jews, as it had no explicit mention of God in it. Similar additions were made to Daniel in the Apocrypha, and other apocryphal books flesh out stories found in the Hebrew bible that the authors seemed to feel were missing details, such as the origin and nature of the Nephilim. So to say that earlier scribes must have been very careful since they revered the holy writings, just like the Masoretes, flies in the face of a great deal of evidence.
Sometimes we see evidence that that the ancients did care about differences, though, at least later in Israel’s history: it wasn’t always a total free-for-all to add to the holy books. In the Letter of Aristeas, written around the 3rd or early 2nd century BCE, we see possible testimony that there were “bad”, flawed copies of the Hebrew texts,[16] and that they would have to be careful which ones they chose to produce the Greek translation of the Hebrew books that became the Septuagint; while the document is now taken by modern scholars as a fictionalized account, obviously not historical in many of its details, the detail of damaged Hebrew texts not only seems reasonable, but also even runs counter to the idyllic storyline of the narrative, which seems to suggest that everything was in favor of them getting this “perfect” new Greek translation that was without flaw. Note that this love of a “correct” text is in the Hellenistic period; while we know far less about the views of sacred Scripture before this period, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence per se, we do know that the focus on authorship, canon, and closure of the canon did not come along until after the Fertile Crescent had undergone one of the most significant (for us today) transformations the world has ever seen: Hellenization.
It would be helpful to understand the nature and motivation for additions, to help us spot them better. Scholars tend to agree that the additions to Esther and Daniel, for example, appear to be just that: in other words, the shorter version is more “original”. Such additions appear to serve certain functions, as we’ve already noticed. Who could pass up a story of Daniel slaying a dragon without using a sword? (14:23-30)[17] Likewise the Apocrypha’s alternative versions of narrative found in the Hebrew Bible add choice juicy bits. They answer questions that inquiring minds want to know. Perhaps I can draw an analogy that will not appear too crass: such additions are sort of like the tabloids, which take actual news events (like the divorce of celebrities), and throw in extra juicy details, such as quotes that they never said. Or aliens. And if this seems too ridiculous an analogy, consider that the Apocrypha does indeed embellish our understanding of angels, extraterrestrial beings, where the earlier documents of the Hebrew Bible can be frustratingly laconic. Inquiring minds wanted to know indeed, and they got their own books by the latter half of the first millennium BCE. The nature of many additions, then, should be kept in mind as we consider some possible additions to the Masoretic text below, along with such motives for adding them.
Before delving into the topic of what Qumran can show us about textual variants, we should make one more note: we’ve been speaking of scribal additions, as if the documents of the Hebrew Bible were each initially written by a single scribe, but this is not the case. In fact, many of the books of Hebrew Bible appear to be highly composite works, such as the histories of Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles; and of course the Psalms. I will leave the evidence for redaction of the Torah for later. For now, we will only focus on scribal alterations to what appears to be a finished work, regardless of whether it was composite before the alteration. So when we speak of an “original” rendering, I simply mean an earlier one, as opposed to an alternate added later. To try to reach back further than our most ancient extant documents would require redactional criticism, a topic that is fascinating and sometimes useful, but mostly beyond our scope here.
So, what can we learn from the alternative families of texts at Qumran? Many of the variant readings were actually already found in the Septuagint: the translators did not make them up, but got them from these alternative Hebrew texts, which we now have copies of! We cannot always state with 100 percent certainty which variant is the oldest, but we should often lean toward the shorter variant, as intentional removal of material is extremely rare. We will look at two significant examples. Internal evidence can also help us distinguish spurious variants.
Jeremiah
The book of Jeremiah is approximately 1/6th shorter in the Septuagint. Although a handful of manuscripts of Jeremiah found at Qumran parallel the longer version of Jeremiah found in the Masoretic text, two of them[18] support the Septuagint’s shorter version. In other words, the Greek translators didn’t always create variants, but actually often had older, Hebrew manuscripts which already contained them.
What is the internal evidence regarding which version of Jeremiah is more “original”? Some of the extra material in the Masoretic text is found in 33:14-26 and 51:44b-49a, which are clear interruptions of the narrative; these are totally missing from the Septuagint. Besides missing material, there are many other differences as well, such as a different ordering of the material; one such passage is the oracles against the nations, chapters 46-51, which are found after 25:14 in the Septuagint and the alternative Hebrew manuscripts of Qumran; some scholars argue that the reason that the Masoretic text would change the order seems obvious: the role of Baruch (chapters 36-45) would otherwise be the last words, since chapter 52 is an obvious addition on the end of the scroll, a copy of 2 Kings 25, and the end of Jeremiah chapter 51 is a perfectly sensible conclusion.[19] (We’ll save for later more explanation of the scribal practice of tacking on extra material to the end of scrolls, another indicator of the ancients’ attitude toward biblical documents.) I have seen at least one fundamentalist explain the two versions of Jeremiah by simply assuming that Jeremiah wrote two versions. So there you go.[20]
Samuel
Likewise, there is a fair amount of material found in the Masoretic tradition of Samuel that is not found in the Septuagint. Recall that Samuel is one of the most damaged books among the Masoretic texts. Among the fragments of Samuel found at Qumran, none reflect the Septuagint’s omissions, unlike the book of Jeremiah; however, several fragments at least contain variants only found in the Septuagint and not the Masoretic text, so it’s quite possible that if we had the complete, undamaged documents of Qumran, they would in fact support the shorter version of Samuel. Now that we’ve seen with Jeremiah that the Septuagint writers were often using actual shorter Hebrew texts that do not align with the Masoretic text, we can now perhaps take the alternative, shorter Septuagint version of Samuel seriously, and consider whether the Masoretic text contains additions.
Some of the material that the Septuagint omits is found in the David and Goliath story, in 1 Samuel 16-18, which is only 49 verses long in the Greek, but 88 in the Hebrew. In other words, it’s almost half as long. The extra content in the Masoretic text actually contains contradictions that I’ve seen Christians puzzle over, such as Saul meeting David for the first time twice, in 16:17-23, which is found in both versions of the story, and in 17:55-58, which is only found in the Hebrew. Saul’s extra attempt to kill David (18:10-11) is only found in the Masoretic text, and appears to be a repeat of Saul’s desire to kill David found in chapter 19, which is found in both the Greek and Hebrew. The love between Jonathan and David in 18:1-4 is also not found in the Greek. Recall that some additions are embellishments designed to appeal to the emotions of the listener, or fill in details which were omitted in the earlier version; in the case of Jonathan’s love, we have both, as it touches the heart as well as explains why Jonathan later helps David in the story.
To put in perspective how much material appears to be added to the Hebrew version of 1 Samuel, here are even more parts that are totally missing from the Greek version: the account of David delivering food to his brothers, his first hearing of Goliath’s challenge, and his analysis of risk versus reward (17:12-31); Jonathan and David’s covenant (18:1-5); and the story of Saul’s evil spirit (18:10-11). And 2 Samuel contains even more. There is one instance for which we have evidence of a rare removal of text: in 2 Samuel 15:8, the Greek text has Absalom say that if God brings him back to Jerusalem, then he will worship YHVH in Hebron! The Hebrew text omits “Hebron”. The internal evidence suggests that including Hebron is the original text, since in the preceding verse, he said that he had made the vow in Hebron. And it’s obvious why it would be omitted, since the Deuteronomistic historian spends so much time saying that there is only one legitimate place of worship. More on that later. Second Samuel has even more additions in the Hebrew, including one which bolsters the emphasis that Jerusalem is more emphasized as the center of YHVH worship.
I find it ironic that many Protestants reject the Apocrypha, yet have books in their own Bible that contain so many obvious additions that serve some of the functions that the apocryphal works serve. When the Dead Sea Scrolls became widely available in the last three decades, we saw no movement to take significant sections out of the book of Samuel, and I don’t believe that it is because the textual evidence is weak, but because tradition is strong. Publishers publish what people want to buy.[21]
In the following chapters, we will go way beyond the idea that mere textual variants have altered the Scriptures, as we consider the evidence for not small alterations, but extensive editing and redaction of some of the Bible’s most important and ancient core documents, especially in the Torah. Some of these I’ve seen comfortably admitted by fundamentalists, as being performed by inspired prophets. Fair enough. However, some of these are not so comfortably admitted, as they can sometimes result in severe contradiction, and even display very human motives.
Textual Variants in the Torah?!
What may concern the modern fundamentalist more than spurious textual variants in books like Jeremiah and Samuel are the ones found in the Torah itself. For instance, there are two “Tabernacle accounts” in Exodus: the first is chapters 25-31; the second 35-40. The first gives an incredible amount of detail regarding how they are to build the Tabernacle; the second appears to repeat much of those details as they build it. I have even heard Christians ask in Bible class why there seems to be a duplication of the giving of the extensive design of the Tabernacle. The two sections are separated by the narrative of the golden calf incident, and the breaking and replacement of the tablets. It has been observed that these two Tabernacle accounts in the Septuagint appear to be translated from an alternative Hebrew version, with variants from the Masoretic text.[22] Significant differences particularly appear in the second account, which is shorter in the Greek, and often has a different ordering of the laws. This Greek version also has similarities to the Hebrew manuscript 11QT2 from Qumran. It would be hard to see how these differences are not significant, since these are supposed to be precise laws given by YHVH. The Septuagint’s version of Numbers also has a more sensible ordering of chapters 33 to 36.
For much more evidence for extensive development of the Torah, see by book When Humans Wrote Scripture.
[1] Many scholars today put the last writings/editings of the Hebrew Bible as late as the 2nd century BCE. However, I am going to only look at the timeline that the biblical authors claim for the moment.
[2] Textual traditions should be seen as collations of many similar/parallel texts, not as the testimony of a single text. Within the extant Masoretic texts, for example, there are variants.
[3] When God spoke Greek, by Timothy Law, ch.3.
[4] The Septuagint was not a static thing, like a particular edition of a book printed today, which will be the same whether you buy a copy in New York or California. The Septuagint, like the Masoretic text, should also be viewed as a textual tradition. And there would be other Greek translations later that were not part of the Septuagint line.
[5] Currently it is popularly taught among biblical scholars that to use the term “Bible” to refer to biblical documents before the first century CE, or even up to a few centuries later, is anachronistic.
[6] It should also be noted that although some translators would paraphrase and even add to the text, some of the translators could in fact be quite literal and faithful to the Hebrew, sometimes to the point that it could be difficult to read in the Greek if you didn’t understand Hebrew.
[7] Again, see When God spoke Greek, by Timothy Law, ch.3.
[8] I have seen great scholars of the Hebrew Bible call this a contradiction in the accounts (which do actually occur quite frequently, as we’ll see), rather than merely damage to the text by a copyist. I believe they should at least mention the possibility of the latter.
[9] See the Septuagint. Another possible variant is where the term ammi in the prohibition against interest in Exodus 22:25 was ambiguous, being able to refer to “people” in general, or to the “peasantry”; one could imagine how wealthier, more powerful individuals would not want a blanket ban on interest; however, even if not motivated by money, one could see why a scribe might add the explanatory phrase “to the poor among you” to eliminate the ambiguity. Strong’s 5971; Cf. Isaiah 3:15; Psalm 72:2; Nehemiah 5:1; “Inner-biblical Interpretation”, The Jewish Study Bible. However, I’ve had difficulty finding the JSB’s reasoning for this, other than internal evidence.
[10] The caves began to be found in the late 1940s, but most of the text was actually not fully released to the scholarly community until the 1990s!
[11] E.g., How We Got the Bible, by Neil Lightfoot, pp. 131-134.
[12] 2 Kings 22
[13] Of course, a fundamentalist might argue that anyone who alters God’s writing must be an apostate. This seems logical enough. However, I will present a great deal of evidence below that many of the alterations to the text were in fact made by those who had a high regard for Yahweh and his word.
[14] See the following sections that cover some of the extent to which biblical documents were edited.
[15] When God Spoke Greek, by Timothy Law, ch. 3.
[16] § 29. The text actually states that defective copies should be repaired. While this could of course refer to physical damage, it seems quite reasonable that this could be a reference to actual textual criticism, especially since at least part of the reason given for their damage is that they have never had a king’s care to protect them (§ 31).
[17] Versions that include the Apocrypha and can be found on free Bible websites include Douay-Rheims, New American Bible, New Jerusalem Bible, and the New Revised Standard Version.
[18] 4QJerb,d
[19]When God Spoke Greek, by Timothy Law, ch. 3. I keep citing this work because it is one of the most accessible for the lay reader. This should not be misconstrued as an indicator that these assertions are not widely accepted in the scholarly community, and even among some fundamentalist scholars, for they are. Most preachers simply don’t mention them, even when they know about them. If you really want to delve into what we can learn from the Septuagint, check out the much more advanced and highly respected scholarly work Translation and Survival, by Tessa Rajak.
[20] I speak ironically, but to be fair to that view, the book itself speaks of multiple additions. (See Jeremiah 36.)
[21] I also find it interesting that the minority canon, the Protestant version, actually has the most buying options: you have more options for features like type of binding, thin-line, size of text, number of versions, etc. I tried to purchase a Bible that included the apocrypha the other day, and I had multiple parameters like these, and found that my options kept being narrowed down to Bibles that didn’t contain the Apocrypha.
[22] “Textual Criticism: Textual and Literary Criticism and the Book of Exodus: The Role of the Septuagint”, by Alison Salvesen, from Biblical Interpretation and Method: Essays in Honour of John Barton, editors Katharine Dell and Paul Joyce.