Selected Passages from the Prophets & Has the OT Been Copied Carefully?

_{Handout 25}

Isaiah 9 & 11

A son in the line of David will rule upon David’s throne forever.

Isaiah 19:19-25

Egypt and Assyria (!) will be blessed along with Israel (esp. v. 25).

Isaiah 42:1-7

The Servant of Yahweh → will be a covenant for the people, a light to the Gentiles.

   See similarly Isaiah 49:6; also 55:4-5 ← the context here is Davidic.

Isaiah 52:13-53

The Righteous Servant who suffers for transgressors and who is consequently lifted up and highly exalted.

Isaiah 56:3-8

Foreigners who serve and love Yahweh will be accepted. They will come to his temple and offer sacrifice which Yahweh will accept. [See similarly Isa. 14:1-2.]

Jeremiah 4:1-4

Yahweh looks at the heart. Those of Judah & Jerusalem must circumcise their + 17:9–10 hearts, or Yahweh’s wrath will break out against them. The Point:

Jeremiah 9:25-26

Yahweh will someday punish all those who are only __.

Jeremiah 12:14-17

God speaks of His judgment upon, but then the future restoration of, the nations.

Jeremiah 31:31-34

The New Covenant. Its two main provisions:

1. __
2. __

Jeremiah 31:35-37

There will be a __ as long as the present order of creation continues.

Jeremiah 33:14-26

The 3 Covenants of Promise In the context of the New Covenant, we are told:

• The covenant with David …
• God will never completely destroy …
• A son of / David …

Daniel 5

Records the fall of Babylon to the Persians (539 BC); the “writing on the wall.”

Ezekiel 1-11

The glory of God departs the Temple.

That glory was part of which covenant? __ .

This is what Ezekiel’s vision of a “wheel in a wheel” represents - see 1:4-28. But what is the point of the vision?

Ezekiel 34–37, in general.

• 34:20-31 “David” will be the prince over the flock (vv. 22-24); there will be a covenant of peace (v. 25).

• 36:22-32 This passage is the OT backdrop for the NT passage:

   Ezek. 11:16–21 is similar.
  

• 37:24-28 Again, David will be King over them in the land Yahweh gave to Jacob forever;

  Also, they will …

Ezekiel 47:21-23

This passage is the OT background for what NT passage?

In a vision of the restored temple & land, aliens who settle within Israel are to be:

• Considered (v. 22) as …
• They are to be given an inheritance …

!! Gentiles are viewed as Israelites, will dwell with Israelites, and receive an inheritance in “Israel’s” land.

The idea that God-fearing Gentiles will be fellow-heirs with believing Israel does not(!) originate in the New Testament; it is anchored in the Old Testament.

Amos 9:11

Micah 6:6-8, esp. v. 8 .

Micah 7:18-20

God will be true to the mercy he pledged to __ in days long ago.

Zechariah 2:10-13

“Many nations will be joined with the Lord in that day, and will become my people.”

Zechariah 6:9-15

A vision of a priestly king who will build Yahweh’s temple and rule on the throne.

What does this call to mind?

Zechariah 8; esp. 20-23

Ten men will implore one Jew to let them go with him, because they have heard that God is with them (= the Jews).

Zechariah 9:9

“Behold, your king comes to you … riding on a donkey … on the foal of a donkey.”

Zechariah 12:10

“They will look on me, whom they have pierced … .”

Malachi 3:16-17

Yahweh’s treasured possession will consist of __ .

Recall the phrase "treasured possession" from Exodus 19:5 & Deuteronomy 7:6.

_{Handout 26}

A. Where does the ‘text’ of our Bibles come from?

When a publisher prints a new translation of the Bible, someone has to decide which words are actually going to go on the page. In the modern world, translators work from well-established printed editions of the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament (your prof has a copy of each with him).

Those modern printed editions are themselves based on earlier printed editions. The printed editions go back to about AD 1500; but in the end, all of the printed editions are based on earlier hand-written manuscripts. We currently possess Old Testament manuscripts dating from ≈ AD 1400 back to about 200 BC (they are kept in the archives of museums, universities, and major libraries; some are in the Vatican, etc.).

B. The Two Main Problems:

1. Textual Variants. No two major manuscripts are identical to each other; there are differences between them. This is the case for both the Greek NT and the Hebrew OT manuscripts. The different readings are called textual variants. The scholarly endeavor to sort through the textual variants in order to identify the words that were most likely the original text is called “textual criticism.” This is a neutral term used by scholars who believe the Bible (“conservatives”) as well as by scholars who do not.

2. The ≈ ‘1,000 Year Gap’. In the case of the Old Testament, up until about World War II, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Old Testament we possessed dated to AD 1008. After that date, we have a fairly good supply of large OT manuscripts. But before that date, while we do have a few important large manuscripts, most of what we have are small manuscript fragments which cover only a few verses. So there is roughly a 1,000 year gap from our major OT manuscripts back to the time of Jesus, who told us that the Scriptures of his day were trustworthy. But was the Old Testament copied carefully over that 1,000 year ‘gap’?

C. The Evidence: ( … as concerns the Old Testament)

1. Re: The Textual Variants:

   1. There are a lot of them. Modern printed editions of the Hebrew OT commonly list textual variants in footnotes at the bottom of each page. In the current standard edition of the Hebrew Old Testament (printed in Stuttgart Germany in 1977), there are typically 10-20 some variants cited per page. Since the edition is over 1,500 pages long, that yields approx. 25,000 variants cited for the Old Testament. Yes, you read that right.

   2. However, vast majority are insignificant, and do not even affect the specific meaning of the verse they occur in.

      The majority reflect such things as:

      • Differences in spelling of names or places.
      • Differences between “you-plural” versus “you-singular.”
      • The difference between mentioning someone by name, or just referring to them, such as: “and the Lord said to Moses …”, versus “and the Lord said to Moses and Aaron …”; versus “and the Lord said to them …”.
      • The use of a synonym: “So Moses went to Sinai …” ↔ “So Moses walked to Sinai …”; etc.

   3. Those variants which do affect the meaning of a verse rarely affect the overall sense of the passage, let alone larger matters of doctrine.

      This is the view of Bible interpreters whether they are Jewish, Protestant or Roman Catholic. They agree that that no substantial matter of doctrine is affected by any textual variant.

2. Re: The Evidence from the “Ancient Versions” of the Old Testament:

   The 1,000 year gap in Hebrew manuscripts is not completely empty; there are many manuscripts in other languages from that time.

   While there are few OT manuscripts in Hebrew from the period before AD 1000, there is other evidence. Just as the Bible has been translated into several thousand! languages today, so also the OT had been translated into a number of other languages before AD 1000. These translations are referred to as the “ancient versions” of the Old Testament, and they provide us with a lot of manuscript evidence. Here are the major ancient versions, in their likely chronological order:

   The Greek Septuagint (often abbreviated “the LXX”). It was translated by Jews for Jews, mostly in ancient Egypt, around 200 BC. [Eventually, it became the version of the OT used most often by the early church, because so few of the early Christians knew Hebrew.]

   The Aramaic “Targums” (the word “Targum” is simply the Aramaic word for “translation.”) After the exile, Aramaic gradually replaced Hebrew as the language which Jews actually spoke (see for example Matt. 27:26). The Aramaic translations of the OT were well established by AD 300–400.

   The Syriac Versions

   Syriac was the ancient language in modern-day Syria. It is not known whether it was initially translated by Jews or by Christians. It was in use by Syriac-speaking Christians by around AD 400.

   The Latin Vulgate

   The Vulgate OT was translated from the Hebrew by St. Jerome around AD 400. It became the standard for the Roman Catholic church for over 1,000 years. There are thousands of Vulgate manuscripts.

   These ancient versions clearly show that the content and structure of the OT was well established. Their overall agreement with each other and with the Hebrew manuscripts is substantial.

3. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has bridged the gap.

   In 1947 scrolls were discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea, near an ancient community called Qumran. Subsequent exploration has yielded roughly 200 OT manuscripts; these are the “Dead Sea Scrolls” (in scholarly circles they are often referred to as the Qumran scrolls). They date to approx. 100–150 BC; most of them are in Hebrew. Most of them are small and fragmentary, containing a portion of a chapter. But a few are larger; the largest is a complete scroll of Isaiah, roughly 24 feet in length. All of the major ones have been translated, studied in detail, and carefully compared to the Hebrew manuscripts.

   • Q: The obvious Question was: How close will the text of these scrolls be to the text of the standard Hebrew manuscripts - from which they are removed by over 1,000 years?

   • A: The Answer: We cite statements from two important scholars:

   Millard Burrows (a professor at Yale University, in north-eastern USA), was the author of two major early works on the DSS (1955, 1958). He said this about the complete Isaiah scroll (which is sometimes called the “St. Mark’s manuscript”):

   “The conspicuous differences in spelling and grammatical forms between the St. Mark’s manuscript and the [traditional Hebrew] text makes their substantial agreement in the words of the text all the more remarkable. Considering … what a long time intervened between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the oldest of the medieval manuscripts, one might have expected a much larger number of variant readings and a much wider degree of divergence. It is a matter for wonder that through something like a thousand years the text underwent so little alteration.” (Burrows, The Dead Sea Scrolls, New York, 1955; p. 304).

   Gleason Archer (a world class Hebrew & OT scholar, whom I knew personally), studied the text of the two major Isaiah Dead Sea Scrolls. He concluded,

   “The two copies of Isaiah … proved to be word-for-word identical to our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95% of the text. The 5% of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling.” (Archer, A Survey of OT Introduction, Chicago, 1994 edition; p. 29).

D. Conclusion:

The Dead Sea Scrolls provide solid evidence that the text of the OT was indeed copied faithfully over the 1,000 year ‘gap’. Scholars no longer debate this. Our modern translations of the OT are based on a text that has been copied very carefully over centuries and centuries.