Articles
Reconstructing the Old Testament: Hebrew Manuscripts
While testimony for the New Testament abounds in greater quantities, our modern Old Testaments also have a strong textual foundation. There are several repositories for reliable reconstruction, but we will first focus on the Hebrew manuscripts (MSS).
Consideration of valuable Hebrew MSS begins with the Masoretic Text (MT), particularly that which is preserved through the Ben Asher family of scribes who lived at Tiberias in Palestine over 1,000 years ago. The two outstanding representatives of this text, and also the formative basis of our modern Old Testaments, are the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex. The former was a once complete edition of the entire Hebrew Bible from over a millennium ago. Sadly, Arab riots against the Jews in Aleppo, Syria after the partition of Palestine into a Jewish and Arab state in 1947, led to the destruction of a quarter of this codex. After being removed from the ashes of the Mustaribah Synagogue, it was smuggled into Israel and is now housed at the Hebrew University. The Leningrad Codex is also over 1,000 years old and is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. It was written in Cairo, Egypt, but now resides in the National Library of St. Petersburg, Russia. While these two are overwhelmingly the most comprehensive manuscripts, other noteworthy manuscripts include the Cairo Codex, the Leningrad Codex of the Prophets, and the British Library Codex of the Pentateuch. Of course, there are also many, many more.
The particular importance of the MT lies in the fastidious and patently neurotic attention to detail that these scribes exercised in copying the biblical text. Letter counting, font size precision, vowel pointing, and arduous rules for scribal notes are just a few of the many safe-guards of this scribal tradition. In fact, the rules were so thorough, that newer copies were precise enough to allow the Jewish scribes to first hide, and then ceremonially dispose of the older, fading, and damaged manuscripts. While this certified the reliability of the copies, it does deprive us of the same textual abundance that we possess for the New Testament.
While the Masoretes have certainly proven their own conscientious transcription, rigid regulations for copying the Old Testament actually antedate this scribal tradition. A clear example of this is the mid-4th century Talmud (i.e., Jewish civil and religious law) which established these safeguards to copying Hebrew MSS:
“A synagogue roll must be written on the skins of clean animals, prepared for the particular use of the synagogue by a Jew. These must be fastened together with strings taken from clean animals. Every skin must contain a certain number of columns, equal throughout the entire codex. The length of each column must not extend over less than forty-eight, or more than sixty lines; and the breadth must consist of thirty letters. The whole copy must first be lined; and if three words be written in it without a line, it is worthless. The ink should be black, neither red, green, nor any other color and be prepared according to a definite recipe. An authentic copy must be the exemplar, from which the transcriber ought not in the least to deviate. No word or letter, not even a yod, must be written from memory, the scribe not having looked at the codex before him. Between every consonant, the space of a hair or thread must intervene; between every word, the breadth of a narrow consonant; between every new parashah, or section, the breadth of nine consonants; between every book, three lines. The fifth book of Moses must terminate exactly with a line; but the rest need not do so. Besides this, the copyist must sit in full Jewish dress, wash his whole body, not begin to write the name of God with a pen newly dipped in ink (i.e., must wipe the pen and re-dip it before writing the name of Jehovah), and should a king address him while writing that name, he must take no notice of him. The rolls in which these regulations are not observed are condemned to be buried in the ground or burned; or they are banished to the schools, to be used as reading books.”
Neil Lightfoot summarizes the value of Hebrew manuscripts and the fastidious rules which were used to faithfully preserve the Old Testament text: “The Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex are regarded as our very best Hebrew manuscripts, but they date no farther back than to the tenth and eleventh centuries. This might prove to be a difficult barrier for the Old Testament text were it not for the safeguards devised and followed by the Masoretes and the strict rules observed by earlier Jewish scribes. The Masoretes were so important in the transmission of the text that our modern Hebrew Bible is generally known as ‘the Masoretic Text.’” (How We Got the Bible, 3rd ed., 140)
In our next article, we will consider another, and older, resource for reconstructing the Old Testament, the Dead Sea Scrolls. Though older, these records only serve to authenticate the reliability of the MT and guarantee that what we have in our modern Old Testaments is indeed what God intended.
