HebMSS

Text Box: Every English Bibles is a translation because no biblical Source wrote in English. The biblical Sources wrote their documents in Aramaic, Greek and Hebrew. None of these documents are known to exist and neither are they mentioned in the writings of early Christians or Jews. Historians tell us that soon after the original documents were made they were copied by members of different communities and passed around to other groups. Copies of those copies were made and then copies of those copies. This process continued for many centuries.

The earliest known Hebrew biblical manuscripts are the Cairo Codex and the Leningrad Codex of the Prophets. The Cairo Codex was made about 895 CE and the Leningrad Codex of the Prophets in 916 CE. The Codex of the Pentateuch (tenth or eleventh century CE) is another Hebrew manuscript that has been important manuscript for translators and is kept at the British Museum . The oldest known manuscript that contains the entire 39 books of the Old Testament is the Leningrad Codex, which was completed in 1008 CE. There are many other manuscripts, but the foregoing are the primary witnesses to the Hebrew text.

Until the age of the printing press, the Hebrews scriptures were laboriously copied by hand. Jewish history records how the ancient Hebrew scribes oversaw the process of copying with an almost fanaticism. There developed at an early age various groups of Jewish scholars who were dedicated to the purity and preservation of the Hebrew text. From this group came Jewish scholars who became generally known as the Masorites. Their work consisted of editing and correcting the Hebrew text during the period from the seventh through the tenth centuries CE. It is from their work that the modern Masoretic Text comes; these are the texts found in synagogues today. One fact that we must be of is that there is more than one Masoretic Hebrew text and they are no all identical.

The Masorites were not the only group copying the Hebrew text. The Samaritan Pentateuch was made about 400 BCE. There are also the Aramaic Targums and the Syriac Peshitta that were made about 50 CE and the Latin Versions that were made about 150 CE. The first and most famous translation of the Hebrew text into Greek was made about 250 BCE in Alexandria , Egypt . It is called the Septuagint or LXX because it is believed that seventy scholars took part in creating the translation.

Text Box: Young Bedouin shepherds searching for a stray goat in the Judean Desert made a monumental discovery in 1947. They entered a long-untouched cave and found jars filled with ancient scrolls. That initial discovery by the Bedouins yielded seven scrolls and began a search that lasted nearly a decade and eventually produced thousands of scroll fragments from eleven caves. During those same years, archaeologists searching for a habitation close to the caves that might help identify the people who deposited the scrolls, excavated the Qumran ruin, a complex of structures located on a barren terrace between the cliffs where the caves are found and the Dead Sea . Within a fairly short time after their discovery, historical, paleographic, and linguistic evidence, as well as carbon-14 dating, established that the scrolls and the Qumran ruin dated from the third century BCE to 68 CE. They were indeed ancient! Coming from the late Second Temple Period, a time when Jesus of Nazareth lived, they are older than any other surviving biblical manuscripts by almost one thousand years.

Jews in Judea produced the Dead Sea Scrolls during a momentous time. They contribute to our understanding of this time period, and represent broad aspects of both ancient Judaism and early Christianity. From these texts, it is possible to trace the development of the Hebrew language, to learn about the different manuscript traditions, including knowledge of scribal practices in use by the community. This data can enable a fairly accurate historical reconstruction of this formative time period. This period was significant in the history of what later developed into Rabbinic Judaism and the Scrolls are concurrent with the origins of Christianity. With respect to the study of Second Temple Judaisms, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the single most important discovery of our time.