A BIBLE SCROLL – GOING BACK A THOUSAND YEARS

People often wonder about the reliability of the Biblical texts. After all, they say, the Biblical manuscripts were hand copied for hundreds of years. Surely errors and mistakes must have crept in. Without printing presses and computers and modern publishing techniques, how can we be sure the Biblical manuscripts are accurate?, they say.

Good question to be sure. However, the discovery of the Biblical scrolls in caves around the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956 gave a lot of reassurances to Biblical Scholars.

In those discoveries over 200 Biblical manuscripts or fragments of manuscripts were found, and they date back about 1000 years before our oldest existing Biblical manuscripts. And scrolls or pieces of scrolls of every book of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament were discovered except the book of Esther. (The book of Esther is the only Old Testament book which does not mention God.)

However, one of the most astounding discoveries was that of the prophet Isaiah. It was discovered in 1947 in the very first cave by a couple of Bedouin shepherd boys. And amazingly, it contains all 66 chapters of the book of Isaiah and it is at least 1000 years older than any previously existing manuscript of Isaiah.

So the question is, is there any major difference between our contemporary book of the prophet Isaiah and the copy found in cave 1 around the Dead Sea? And the answer is, no. The scrolls are essentially the same.

Here is what outstanding Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, James Vanderkam, says about the Isaiah scroll. “Despite the fact that the Isaiah scroll was about a thousand years older than the (contemporary version) of Isaiah, the two were nearly identical except for small details that rarely affected the meaning of the text.” (The Dead Sea Scrolls Today, P. 126)

Of course this is a great tribute to the countless scribes, priests, rabbis, scholars and monks who faithfully hand copied the Isaiah scroll for centuries, even before 100 B.C. when this current Dead Sea Isaiah scroll was copied. For Isaiah’s first prophecies began around 742 B.C.

The Dead Sea Isaiah scroll, also called Scroll A or The Great Isaiah Scroll, can now be seen in the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem. It truly is a treasure, and was hidden and unknown for over 2000 years. And Biblical scholarship has benefitted from this and other scrolls that have taken us back 1000 years before our oldest known Biblical manuscripts.