The Scrolls

Then there are the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe you have heard the fascinating story of how a Bedouin shepherd boy in 1947 was out with his flock along the cliffs on the northwest side of the Dead Sea.

He thoughtlessly threw a rock into one of the caves.

He heard something break. He investigated and found ancient scrolls stored in large pottery jars.

The lad had accidentally stumbled across the greatest manuscript discovery of modern times. Many of these scrolls date back to before the time of Jesus, and they include copies of sections of every Old Testament book except Esther. There is an almost complete copy of the book of Isaiah. Up until the discovery of the scrolls, the oldest available copies of the Hebrew scriptures dated from around 900 AD. These Dead Sea scrolls provided Hebrew text that was one thousand years earlier and would show if the text had been corrupted and changed over ten centuries. So it was a priceless opportunity to see if copies done so much later in any way resembled much earlier copies, that were themselves, of course, that much closer to the originals.

So, just how well had the scribes done their job over so many generations? Scholars analyzed and discovered there were some differences. That is not the surprising part.

What is surprising is that there were so few differences and they were primarily on small matters such as minor spelling variations. This is so amazing that it would almost seem impossible. The first ancient Qumran texts led to just thirteen minor yet clarifying alterations in the modern Revised Standard version of the Bible.