The Dead Sea Scrolls ?
By paranominal
Published: September 7, 2009
Tagged with: Bible, Dead Sea Scrolls, What Are The Dead Sea Scrolls
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The Dead Sea Scrolls were written between the third century B.C.E. and the first century C.E.
Prior to their discovery some 60 years ago, the earliest Hebrew manuscript was the Aleppo Codex, dating back to 930 C.E.
With the exception of a few fragments, no other Hebrew manuscripts have been found that date to the intervening period of several hundred years.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in caves near the Dead Sea in 1947 and in the years that followed. They were of great value in demonstrating the essential accuracy of the text of the Hebrew Scriptures and in shedding light on religious conditions in Palestine when Jesus was on earth. (Isaiah 40:8)
While some manuscripts were published reasonably quickly, in 1991 almost 400 manuscripts were still unpublished and unavailable to most scholars. Many felt, like Professor Ben Zion Wacholder, “frustrated by the realization that at the current rate of publication we shall all be dead when the corpus of Dead Sea texts become available to the world.”
But that situation changed in September 1992. First, Professor Wacholder and an associate, Martin Abegg, announced that they had ingeniously used a computer to reproduce the closely guarded texts. Then, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, U.S.A., announced that they had photographs of the original manuscripts and would make these freely available to reputable scholars.
Evidently, a number of photographic copies of the scrolls had been made to ensure their preservation. Sets of photographs had been stored in different locations, and eventually one ended up in the Huntington Library.
One scholar called this turn of events ‘the scholarly equivalent of breaking down the Berlin Wall.’
Official editors called both the publication of the computed text and the releasing of the photographs ‘stealing.’ Likely, the argument about ethics will rage for years.
Meantime, it appears that many additional scholars are finally able to consult the whole body of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Amazingly, a comparison of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Masoretic text, (prepared many centuries later by scribes called Masoretes), shows no doctrinal change. Many of the differences simply involve spelling and grammar.
This confirms that he meaning of the text was unchanged after a thousand years of copying! Concerning the text of the Hebrew Scriptures, scholar William Henry Green could therefore say: “It may be safely said that no other work of antiquity has been so accurately transmitted.” Similar comments have been made about the accuracy of transmission of the Christian Greek Scriptures.
True, it would be exciting to find the actual document that Moses, Isaiah or ANY of the original scribes wrote. But we really do not need the originals.
The important thing is not the document but its contents. And miraculously, despite the passing of many turbulent centuries and much copying and recopying, we can be confident that the Bible still contains the information found in those ancient original manuscripts.
Noteworthy is the Tetragrammaton—the four Hebrew consonants making up the divine name "Jehovah", appears consistently in the Isaiah scroll.
Essentially, they are the oldest known copy of the Bible – although they aren’t complete and they consist of other documents that are not included in today’s Bible.
They are transcripts of the original writing of the bible. Though not complete, they do prove the authenticity of our current bible as accurate….>
They were documents written by the Essenes.
The Dead sea scrolls refers to the fragments of Parchment and scrolls discovered at Qumran.
They include most of the old testament and some community laws from what is believed to be the Essenes.
No new testament writings were discovered there. Their significance is great because the texts verify that most translations today are quite accurate.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were found by accident by a shepherd boy going in search of a missing animal. He threw stones into the mouth of a high cave in Qumran and heard the sound of something shattering, it was one of a number of old manuscript pots which had been hidden away a long time previous.
When this cave was explored they found a whole lot of jars with manuscripts in them. Some were nothing to do with the Bible but others like the manuscript of Isaiah were. But the manuscripts had stood there so long that they were fragile and crumbling and had to be rescued and preserved.
The manuscript of Isaih is in the Dome of the Script(?) museum at Jerusalem and we have seen it. It is impressive because it shows that the translations which we have today do not differ in any significant detail.