No original autographs of the Hebrew Bible [1]
There are no original autographs (original manuscripts) of the Hebrew Bible. We only have copies and there is difficulty determining the reliability of the copy. There is no way of knowing what the original of the text says. The earliest extant manuscripts date to the third century BCE and comprise the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint - a 3rd century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew. There are various textual traditions:
The Dead Sea Scrolls are very big on apocalyptic thinking as a way of making a political statement. In order not to make the point that they were criticising the present day establishment too obviously, for example in mounting a critical commentary on the Roman Empire, a common ruse was to set a scenario in the distant past (by way of example, the story of Enoch, one of the patriarchs who is said to have “walked with God”); or alternatively in the future, as a means of making adverse comment on the present..
The Masoretic Text (MT) is the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible. In modern times the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown the MT to be nearly identical to some texts of the canon of the Hebrew Bible dating from 200 BCE but different from others. The MT was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries CE. It has numerous differences of both greater and lesser significance when compared to extant 4th century manuscripts of the Septuagint.
The Hebrew word mesorah refers to the transmission of a tradition. The oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century CE, and most of the Hebrew Bible is based upon them. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls came along, there was no original manuscript. Accordingly, they revolutionised the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, but only fragments of the Hebrew Bible now remain, and the remainder can’t be resurrected. Therefore how close is what we now have to the original Hebrew Bible? Some observers favour the Septuagint (the Greek translation), others the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Dead Sea Scrolls fulfil a role by indicating how the Hebrew text changed.
The Masoretic text was an attempt to fix the text, the Masoretes deciding to work together as a committee for this purpose. There were no verbs and no divisions between words in the original Hebrew. They were all run together. The language was originally spoken, but Hebrew was a dead language by the time of the Roman Empire, and although knowledge of Hebrew had disappeared, by the fifth century, the Masoretic text was recognised as the authoritative text for the Hebrew Bible.
The Hebrew Bible in the first century BCE was not the same as the Hebrew Bible and Christian text we have today. In the present text, there are some 330 references to writings and other works outside the Hebrew Bible. The Old Testament as it presently stands is also not the Bible of Jesus, and most of these outside works are drawn from the Septuagint, the Greek version. Scrolls were found in Alexandria in the first century BCE, including many books ultimately rejected for inclusion in the Bible, for example the Book of Judas. Judas also refers to a testament of Moses.
The Bible of Christianity grew away from the Hebrew Bible in the Middle Ages. The Book of Nehemiah was not included. It was not considered authoritative enough, and in the Greek version, the Book of Jeremiah is shorter than in the original. In other words, the Christian Bible is not a standard text, and the notion of what constituted Wisdom as divine scripture was not fixed, whereas the Torah was. The Dead Sea scrolls therefore become very important in the interpretation process, and we now know that the Septuagint, the Greek version, was based on an earlier Hebrew text, older than the Masoretic version of the Middle Ages.
The Aleppo Codex is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible[2]. The codex was written (about 930 CE) in the 10th century A.D. It has long been considered to be the most authoritative document in the masorah ("transmission"), the tradition by which the Hebrew Scriptures have been preserved from generation to generation. Surviving examples of responsa literature (a body of written decisions and rulings given by legal scholars in response to questions addressed to them).show that the Aleppo Codex was consulted by far-flung Jewish scholars throughout the Middle Ages, and modern studies have shown it to be the most accurate representation of Masoretic principles in any extant manuscript, containing very few errors among the roughly 2.7 million orthographic details that make up the Masoretic Text. For these reasons, many scholars view the Aleppo Codex as the most authoritative representative of the masoretic tradition, both its letter-text and its vocalisation, although most of its Torah section and many other parts of the text are now missing.
The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem purchased the codex about a hundred years after it was made. During the First Crusade, the synagogue was plundered and the codex was transferred to Egypt, whose Jews paid a high price for its ransom. It was preserved at the Rabbanite synagogue in Cairo, where it was consulted by Maimonides, who described it as a text trusted by all Jewish scholars. It is rumoured that in 1375 one of Maimonides' descendants brought it to Aleppo, Syria, leading to its present name.
The Codex remained in Syria for five hundred years. In 1947, rioters enraged by the UN decision to establish a Jewish state in Palestine burned down the synagogue where it was kept. The Codex disappeared, then re-emerged in 1958, when it was smuggled into Israel by Syrian Jew Murad Faham, and presented to the president of the state, Itzhak Ben-Zvi. On arrival, it was found that parts of the codex had been lost, although aome 60% still remains. The Aleppo Codex was entrusted to the Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The Samaritan Pentateuch, Genesis to Deuteronomy, was written prior to the Babylonian captivity. It was in an earlier form of Hebrew, and in the Samaritan Deuteronomy, the place names Gerizim or Schechem occur whenever Jerusalem was mentioned. As recounted, the Jews, thinking of themselves as having pure blood, came back from Babylon with Ezra, bringing in settlers to settle the land, but the Samaritans resident there thought of themselves as the direct descendants of the original Northern Kingdom. The Jews had to reconstitute their identity, and the sacred canon of the Hebrew Bible is about their survival, one of their principal concerns, according to Nehemiah, being the loss of their language.
[1] Unless the context indicates otherwise, this is an edited summary of material from Dr Susan Glover’s WEA course: It Ain’t necessarily so – The Hebrew Bible in crisis.
[2] This material on the Aleppo Codex is an edited summary of material appearing at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_Codex
- the Septuagint,
- the Dead Sea Scrolls,
- The Samaritan Pentateuch (a version of the Hebrew language Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, traditionally written in the Samaritan alphabet and used by the Samaritans)
- and the Masoretic text.
The Dead Sea Scrolls are very big on apocalyptic thinking as a way of making a political statement. In order not to make the point that they were criticising the present day establishment too obviously, for example in mounting a critical commentary on the Roman Empire, a common ruse was to set a scenario in the distant past (by way of example, the story of Enoch, one of the patriarchs who is said to have “walked with God”); or alternatively in the future, as a means of making adverse comment on the present..
The Masoretic Text (MT) is the authoritative Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible. In modern times the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown the MT to be nearly identical to some texts of the canon of the Hebrew Bible dating from 200 BCE but different from others. The MT was primarily copied, edited and distributed by a group of Jews known as the Masoretes between the 7th and 10th centuries CE. It has numerous differences of both greater and lesser significance when compared to extant 4th century manuscripts of the Septuagint.
The Hebrew word mesorah refers to the transmission of a tradition. The oldest extant manuscripts of the Masoretic Text date from approximately the 9th century CE, and most of the Hebrew Bible is based upon them. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls came along, there was no original manuscript. Accordingly, they revolutionised the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible, but only fragments of the Hebrew Bible now remain, and the remainder can’t be resurrected. Therefore how close is what we now have to the original Hebrew Bible? Some observers favour the Septuagint (the Greek translation), others the Samaritan Pentateuch, and the Dead Sea Scrolls fulfil a role by indicating how the Hebrew text changed.
The Masoretic text was an attempt to fix the text, the Masoretes deciding to work together as a committee for this purpose. There were no verbs and no divisions between words in the original Hebrew. They were all run together. The language was originally spoken, but Hebrew was a dead language by the time of the Roman Empire, and although knowledge of Hebrew had disappeared, by the fifth century, the Masoretic text was recognised as the authoritative text for the Hebrew Bible.
The Hebrew Bible in the first century BCE was not the same as the Hebrew Bible and Christian text we have today. In the present text, there are some 330 references to writings and other works outside the Hebrew Bible. The Old Testament as it presently stands is also not the Bible of Jesus, and most of these outside works are drawn from the Septuagint, the Greek version. Scrolls were found in Alexandria in the first century BCE, including many books ultimately rejected for inclusion in the Bible, for example the Book of Judas. Judas also refers to a testament of Moses.
The Bible of Christianity grew away from the Hebrew Bible in the Middle Ages. The Book of Nehemiah was not included. It was not considered authoritative enough, and in the Greek version, the Book of Jeremiah is shorter than in the original. In other words, the Christian Bible is not a standard text, and the notion of what constituted Wisdom as divine scripture was not fixed, whereas the Torah was. The Dead Sea scrolls therefore become very important in the interpretation process, and we now know that the Septuagint, the Greek version, was based on an earlier Hebrew text, older than the Masoretic version of the Middle Ages.
The Aleppo Codex is a medieval bound manuscript of the Hebrew Bible[2]. The codex was written (about 930 CE) in the 10th century A.D. It has long been considered to be the most authoritative document in the masorah ("transmission"), the tradition by which the Hebrew Scriptures have been preserved from generation to generation. Surviving examples of responsa literature (a body of written decisions and rulings given by legal scholars in response to questions addressed to them).show that the Aleppo Codex was consulted by far-flung Jewish scholars throughout the Middle Ages, and modern studies have shown it to be the most accurate representation of Masoretic principles in any extant manuscript, containing very few errors among the roughly 2.7 million orthographic details that make up the Masoretic Text. For these reasons, many scholars view the Aleppo Codex as the most authoritative representative of the masoretic tradition, both its letter-text and its vocalisation, although most of its Torah section and many other parts of the text are now missing.
The Karaite Jewish community of Jerusalem purchased the codex about a hundred years after it was made. During the First Crusade, the synagogue was plundered and the codex was transferred to Egypt, whose Jews paid a high price for its ransom. It was preserved at the Rabbanite synagogue in Cairo, where it was consulted by Maimonides, who described it as a text trusted by all Jewish scholars. It is rumoured that in 1375 one of Maimonides' descendants brought it to Aleppo, Syria, leading to its present name.
The Codex remained in Syria for five hundred years. In 1947, rioters enraged by the UN decision to establish a Jewish state in Palestine burned down the synagogue where it was kept. The Codex disappeared, then re-emerged in 1958, when it was smuggled into Israel by Syrian Jew Murad Faham, and presented to the president of the state, Itzhak Ben-Zvi. On arrival, it was found that parts of the codex had been lost, although aome 60% still remains. The Aleppo Codex was entrusted to the Ben-Zvi Institute and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The Samaritan Pentateuch, Genesis to Deuteronomy, was written prior to the Babylonian captivity. It was in an earlier form of Hebrew, and in the Samaritan Deuteronomy, the place names Gerizim or Schechem occur whenever Jerusalem was mentioned. As recounted, the Jews, thinking of themselves as having pure blood, came back from Babylon with Ezra, bringing in settlers to settle the land, but the Samaritans resident there thought of themselves as the direct descendants of the original Northern Kingdom. The Jews had to reconstitute their identity, and the sacred canon of the Hebrew Bible is about their survival, one of their principal concerns, according to Nehemiah, being the loss of their language.
[1] Unless the context indicates otherwise, this is an edited summary of material from Dr Susan Glover’s WEA course: It Ain’t necessarily so – The Hebrew Bible in crisis.
[2] This material on the Aleppo Codex is an edited summary of material appearing at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleppo_Codex