Reposting: Hebrew Voices #15 – The Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls

NOTE: This is a very scholarly discussion but one that is defintely worth listening to… It may take a few “Listens” to get it all.

In this episode of Hebrew Voices, The Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Nehemia Gordon talks to Professor Emanuel Tov, the world’s foremost scholar on the Dead Sea Scrolls and author of the definitive “Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.” Gordon and Tov’s discussion yields an enlightening mix of 101 material as well as fascinating (and accessible) post-doctoral details. Vyomi wrote: “Thank you Nehemia! That was fascinating information.”

If you think you know the history of Bible texts, you might want to hang tightly onto your hat. Tov explains the “five families of text” that are progenitors of the Tanakh—their histories, spelling systems, adherents, the liberties taken by their respective scribes, and the events that led to the Masoretic Text becoming the only Bible of Judaism.  An accident of history or Divine Providence? Tune in and decide for yourself.

http://www.emanueltov.info/ This is the website referred to in the discussion. And this https://www.accordancebible.com/ is the software program

Hebrew Voices #15 – The Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls

Hebrew Voices #15 – The Bible of the Dead Sea Scrolls

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon with Hebrew Voices, and I am here at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with Professor Emanuel Tov, who in my humble opinion is the foremost scholar in the world in the field of the Dead Sea Scrolls and what’s called “textual criticism”. In fact, he wrote the book called Textural Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, which is a textbook of universities around the world, when people study textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, of what Christians call The Old Testament.

I was looking at his CV, his list of accomplishments, and it’s unbelievable! He’s worked in the past on something like 26 projects, each one of those any scholar around the world would be extremely proud to lay claim to. I’m just going to mention a few of them. He was the editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication project beginning in 1990. My small connection to the Dead Sea Scrolls was as Emanuel Tov’s assistant many years ago. I was his humble student and assistant, and I’m very proud of that.

He’s the co-director of the Computer Assisted Tools for the Septuagint Studies, the co-director for many years of the Hebrew University Bible Project. That is just a small number of the things that he’s done. He’s presently the co-director of a series called the Textural History of the Bible, it’s like a 2,000-page encyclopedia. He’s a senior scholar in the Green Scholars Initiative. Emanuel, shalom. I’m very honored to be here with you and talk today about the text of the Bible.

Emanuel: It’s a pleasure, Nehemia, to be with you again.

Nehemia: After many years.

Emanuel: After some time. You make me very humble when I listen to you mentioning these achievements. It’s a pleasure being with you.

Nehemia: Tell us about some of the things that you’re doing today.

Emanuel: Well, today I’m retired, and I’m in a very special position, because even though I’m retired I still do teach, and basically I continue working and I’m still involved in several projects. I edit the Dead Sea Scroll fragments, some of them personally, but mostly I oversee the work of others. I have a small team of people who for the Green Scholars Initiative published 13 small fragments, really small – 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 lines.

Nehemia: But even those are important in studying the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Emanuel: They are important, as all fragments are important. They’ve come to the market say, in 1990, in 2000, and these particular fragments will be published in the year 2016.

Nehemia: Wait a minute. You’re talking about publishing fragments. Are you telling us that today, in 2015, there are unpublished fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls, after all these years?

Emanuel: Yes, after all these years.

Nehemia: Wow! And you’re overseeing the publication of some of those fragments?

Emanuel: That’s correct.

Nehemia: Wow!

Emanuel: I’m not the only one, because there are two or three other groups in the world, one in Norway and two other ones in the United States of America, where simply organizations or rich people have bought these fragments – they were on the market. In fact, if you or anyone has a few pennies to spare, a few thousands…

Nehemia: Is it really thousands or millions? Okay. [laughing]

Emanuel: Yes, a few millions to spare, then I can arrange it for you to buy…

Nehemia: You heard it here. He could arrange for you to buy actual Dead Sea Scrolls. How did they get onto the market? In other words, the original Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in a cave at Qumran. Then the archaeologists went and they excavated and found more scrolls, the 11 caves at Qumran, and then at approximately eight other sites around the Judean desert in addition to Qumran. So how is it that these appeared on the antiquities market?

Emanuel: I can’t say they are secrets, but basically, I don’t know. Some of these were probably illegally held back.

Nehemia: But we don’t know that for a fact.

Emanuel: No, we don’t know these things. But they were dug up and then they somehow did not get to the people who were supposed to get them in 1948 or ’50. We don’t know these things.

Nehemia: What you’re saying is that there are benefactors, if we can call them that, who have bought these scrolls and said, “You know what? I don’t just want this to sit in my living room in a display case. I want it to be published.”

Emanuel: Oh, yes. These are good people who do this for the sake of scholarship.

Nehemia: That is great. Right now, you’re working on 13 fragments. I know some of my listeners out there, they’re into conspiracy theories and things like that. Are these unpublished scrolls, because there’s something in them like the Vatican is covering them up, or something like that? You’ve probably heard these stories. I’m going to officially ask you, is there some kind of grand conspiracy that’s preventing these final scrolls from being published?

Emanuel: Ever since I started with my work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, I’ve heard these stories. They’re all nonsense. I say nonsense about conspiracies. This basically started, I would say, about 1950 already, maybe 1960.

Nehemia: Really, that early the conspiracies?

Emanuel: That early. My view of this is that I think that certain people were disappointed in the 1950s that Jesus’ name was not found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. There were such high expectations that such an enormous amount of scrolls would not have the mentioning of Jesus in those scrolls coming from the same area, so that theories developed that the Vatican did not want certain theories to be aired, because there could be bad press for Jesus. They said, “Well, the Vatican confiscated or burned certain scrolls.”

Now, this has been in the press for a long time, and all bona fide scholars say this is pure nonsense, including all Catholic scholars who are close to the Vatican. So until today, there’s no one who takes these claims as serious, and they started with John Allegro, who was…

Nehemia: Who was he, for those who don’t know?

Emanuel: The enfant terrible of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: That was in French. Some of my listeners might not know what that is. What was he?

Emanuel: He was the enfant terrible, the naughty boy.

Nehemia: You know what? Let’s move on, past that. [laughing] But that wasn’t because of some kind of agenda to cover something up, it might have been because he had some personal issues, or something like that.

Emanuel: He did have some personal issues.

Nehemia: Let’s not deal with that. But it wasn’t some Vatican conspiracy. I could give my own testimony here, that when I was working for you as an assistant, you had me and another assistant dig through these books looking for fragments that maybe somebody forgot to publish. Not only was there no conspiracy, there was an attempt to find some little scrap of paper that maybe had a half a letter on it. Did somebody forget to publish that?

It’s possible that there are unpublished scrolls that were just overlooked, but it wasn’t a conspiracy, right?

Emanuel: No, no. You, Nehemia, you helped us out, and you have seen with your own eyes how meticulous we were.

Nehemia: Meticulous is an understatement. [laughing]

Emanuel: How meticulous we were to really do justice to the smallest piece of inscribed material. Actually, there are also people who work on uninscribed material, because even uninscribed material could have information on something.

Nehemia: Wow. I know you’re working on a lot of projects. He has a list of 51 pages on his website, emanueltov.info, and we pulled it up and he said, “Well, it’s not complete. Today, it’s actually 53 pages.” These are his publications and projects. I’m humbled by this! [laughing] These are academic publications, each one of which is peer-reviewed and goes through this process. It’s amazing. What are some of the other things that you’re working on?

Emanuel: I’m very proud of a book that I’ve written 11 years ago. It’s called The Scribal Habits of the Fragments, the scrolls that were Found in the Dead Sea Area. It’s a single book that can still be bought, that describes to the smallest details how the scribes wrote, how they made errors, how they made paragraphs, how they corrected the errors, et cetera. So it’s a whole description of all those things that we today learn in schools. It’s a handbook. It has become a handbook for all those who now work…

Nehemia: Meaning a handbook, it’s a textbook. Like this is the definitive work if I have a question or an issue. You mentioned paragraphing, and some people might be dozing off. But guys, pay attention. There are biblical passages where the interpretation hinges on, is there a space in the manuscript which indicates a new paragraph? You went and you actually studied how this was represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls and things like that?

Emanuel: I studied this for all the years that I have been editor-in-chief, and I worked with every single editor. I worked with 60 or so editors. I sat with everyone and worked with his or her text. I made notes on the side when I learned something about a certain text. I’d say, “Gee, that’s interesting for me.” Late at night I integrated that information into the book that eventually I published.

Nehemia: We’re going to post a link on my website, nehemiaswall.com, to the book. The other book, if you want a serious book about understanding the texts of the Bible, it’s called Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Like I said, they teach it in universities around the world. I’ve been working through this book the last few weeks, and I’ve got to tell you, I was brought back all these memories. I felt like I was a student. I’m taking pages and pages of notes, and I’m going late into the night. I don’t want to put it down, it’s such an amazing book. There’s more information in some of these footnotes than many people who spend their lives on the Bible know, meaning, there are people who will spend their whole life on the Bible and you have more information in some of your footnotes than those people know. It’s amazing stuff here. I really want to recommend it.

The other book, The Scribal Habits, I’m going to have a link for both of those books on nehemiaswall.com on my website. Are there any projects that you’re working on?

Emanuel: I’ll say a few things about this book, the Textual Criticism of the Bible. This is a book that I started in 1989 in Hebrew, and from the Hebrew it found its way into English. I translated it myself. From there, into German. I did not translate that myself. Into Russian. It is now being translated into Portuguese and into Korean. Just two weeks ago it was published in an electronic edition with Acordance Company. The electronic edition is really something…

Nehemia: Tell us about that.

Emanuel: Because you can do so many things that I have never been able to do with it, all kinds of very interesting searches. We had a scholarly meeting two weeks ago. I said, “One of my principles in life is, if you don’t know something, write about it.”

Nehemia: [laughing] What does that mean?

Emanuel: That means, people had a good laugh like you just did. And I really meant it. When I knew about the areas of the textual criticism of the Bible, I knew about several areas, obviously, because I started writing about it. But like the area of the Syriac Bible, I didn’t know much.

Nehemia: That’s the Aramaic Bible written by Christians in the Syriac script, for those who don’t know.

Emanuel: Or about the Masorah, which is the…

Nehemia: The Masoretic…

Emanuel: The mediaeval commentary around the Hebrew texts.

Nehemia: Oh, the Masoretic notes, you’re talking about?

Emanuel: Yes.

Nehemia: The scribal notes.

Emanuel: I didn’t know much, so at first, I thought, “I’ll ask someone to do that for me.” Then I thought, “No. Really it doesn’t work. It has to be part of my system.” So I learned and then I wrote about it. That’s what I meant when I say, “If you don’t know something, write about it.”

Nehemia: When you say you learned, you don’t mean you picked up somebody else’s book. I think usually what you do is you do original research. You’re talking about how there were 60-plus editors, and each one was an expert on a specific text. But you got this overall picture because you were the editor-in-chief and you got to deal with all the texts.

Emanuel: Yes. My way of learning is I start from the beginning. If you could see my hands you could see how I built from the beginning with the building stones, very beginning, and then make it from the basis to a large overall picture. That’s how I made my book. Really, I’m very proud of it. It’s a description of what the Hebrew text is. It is technical, and I realize one day I should write a less technical book, but it is understandable also for those who do not understand every technical detail.

It tells you what the text of the Bible is, how it has been transmitted through the different generations, what the scribes were, and what the liberties were that the scribes took when they transmitted the Bible. If you come to a verse like in Genesis chapter 2, “Vayechal Elohim beyom hashvi’i,” that’s the Masoretic text. That’s a text that you know. “And God finished his work on the seventh day.” That’s the verse you know. You would not expect that there are basically texts that say, not that God finished His work on the seventh day, but that read, “God finished His work on the sixth day,” because God did not finish His work on the seventh day. Because God forbid God should work on the seventh day. The Jews are not allowed to work on the seventh day, so why should God Himself work on the seventh day?

Because of this somewhat difficult reading, a secondary reading developed that said that God finished His work on the sixth day. That means on the end of the sixth day. Nevertheless, the reading in our Hebrew, French, English Bible is correct, because it really means that God finished His work something like by the seventh day.

But the Greek Bible, the Samaritan Bible, the Syriac Bible, have, “God finished His work on the sixth day.” This is an example showing you how a theologically different reading developed long, long ago – you might say 2,000 years ago, it’s actually probably 2,300, 2,400 years ago – and if you know these things, you know a little bit about the development of the Biblical texts. Now, this is a small detail, and there are many large details…

Nehemia: Let me just summarize. What we have here in Genesis 2 is this verse that says, “And God finished creation on the seventh day.” What you’re saying is that probably sometime around 300 BC, some scribe, maybe a righteous scribe who thought he was doing the right thing, he came along and he said, “We can’t have God working on the Sabbath. We’ve got to fix this.” Maybe he even thought it was a mistake that he was fixing. So, what he did is, he “corrected” the text making an easier reading, which is that God finished it on the sixth day – even though in the original Hebrew it probably means He finished the creation by the seventh day.

What you’re saying is, this exists in the Septuagint and in the Samaritan version of the Bible, but what we have preserved in the Masoretic text it’s probably the original reading. This is a principle that we call in Hebrew a “hagirsa hakasha adifa”, I think they say in Latin, “dificilio electio,” I may be mispronouncing that, that the more difficult reading is preferable. I remember learning this and thinking, “Wow. Wait a minute. So when I read the easy reading, that actually might be a righteous scribe who thought he was fixing it and actually corrupting the text. That’s an incredible concept.” This is the type of thing that you talk about in your book.

Emanuel: Right. This is an example about which we can have an opinion. There are also details about which I think we cannot have an easy opinion.

Nehemia: In other words, in this one there’s no question that what’s preserved in the Masoretic text and the standard English translation is the original. You’re saying other ones aren’t so clear cut?

Emanuel: No. How tall was Goliath?

Nehemia: Yeah, I don’t remember. How tall? [laughing]

Emanuel: Well, now I’m not sure exactly what is written where, but there’s one version where it says that he was four cubits tall, and in another version it says that he was six cubits tall. So one will be the Masoretic text and the other will be a Qumran scroll, and also it will be the Septuagint. The question is, how tall was he, two meters or three meters? How will we ever know? How will we ever know? There definitely is a relation between the two. Either someone changed two meters to three meters…

Nehemia: To make it sound like it was a more impressive feat of killing him, right?

Emanuel: Or someone said, “No, three meters, that’s too much.”

Nehemia: That’s not possible.

Emanuel: “We don’t someone who is three meters tall, because God is so good, He can also work with someone who’s only two meters.” That’s again a theological issue.

Nehemia: The verse here is 1 Samuel 17:4 in the Masoretic text, it in fact says, “He was ‘shesh amot vazeret.”’ I love that, vezaret. “He’s six meters and a pinkie.” [laughing] It’s very specific. You were saying there’s another version which says he’s four meters.

Emanuel: That’s in the Septuagint.

Nehemia: In the Septuagint. One of these is, someone had theological issue to change it, and as a scholar you have no way of knowing what the original text was, whether it was our Hebrew Bible as preserved today, or the Septuagint.

Emanuel: That’s my view.

Nehemia: That’s your view, okay.

Emanuel: Other people might say, “The difference is simply a scribal error.” That’s a very important thing in our field. There are so many differences of opinion, and you can never say who is right and who is wrong. It’s a slightly technical area, of course. But there is much room for human views.

Nehemia: There’s a certain amount of textual criticism which is subjective, is what you’re saying.

Emanuel: It is very subjective. This is the area that we call “judgement, evaluation”. The evaluation is subjective. It’s always subjective.

Nehemia: I see. Very interesting. Now, one of the interesting things I read about in your book is that I guess there’s a standard explanation that many scholars have, that the text of the Bible – and we’re talking here about the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible – was originally very fluid, and then there was a process of stabilization, which eventually led to what we have, called the “Masoretic Text”. You have a very different view on that. I hope this isn’t too technical. Guys, pay attention to this, this is actually really important.

In the Rabbinical literature we’ll have these discussions about the most minute letter having significance and meaning, and what you find in the Dead Sea Scrolls is things were a lot more fluid back then.

Emanuel: I will talk about this, but I will say to your listeners that if you don’t get it exactly, this is a very difficult thing, and you may have to read my book, or to read other things, because I’m going to tell you some things which are part of a much larger issue.

Nehemia: Listen, guys. I want you to listen to this two or three times. This is really important stuff, please.

Emanuel: Basically, one of the principles is that the text of the Bible is not just one text. That’s a fact. That is, the text that you have in your hand in Hebrew, in English, is the so-called “Masoretic text”. So you will have in your hands the English text, which is a modern version, like the New Revised Standard Version, and all these English versions derive in some way from the King James Version. But they are all based in some way on the Masoretic Hebrew text, a little bit different reading or not, but it’s the medieval text.

Nehemia: For those who aren’t familiar with this, basically if you walk into the bookstore in Israel or you go into somebody’s home and they have a Bible in Hebrew, that’s the Masoretic text.

Emanuel: Now you go back some. You have the Middle Ages, you go back to the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So we go back 2,000 years. At that time, if you would walk in the streets of Jerusalem, if you would go to the community at Qumran, if you would go to any other community in ancient Israel, you would not find one text, you would find many texts. This is a major issue for scholars to understand. Which texts would you find? Well, that’s my task. If there’s anything about which Emanuel Tov thinks the whole day, that’s the issue. I think about which texts the people had in their hands in the year 200 Before the Common Era, the year 100 Before the Common Era, the year 0. That’s what I’m thinking about.

Nehemia: Just to be clear, for example, if you’d walk into the library at Qumran when it was a city – or a village – 2,000 years ago, and you’d open up one copy of Isaiah and another copy of Isaiah and compare them, they would not be identical. Actually, you can go to the Israel Museum today to the Shrine of the Book and see that’s a fact.

Emanuel: All these things are facts, because you’ll have the text that I call the “Masoretic text”, something like it is found at Qumran, and actually more so in the places, what we call “sites”, in the sites around Qumran. For example, on top of the Masada, places called Nahal Hever, Murabba’at, et cetera. This is really a marvel. Maybe it’s not a marvel, it’s a man-made marvel, but the Masoretic text that we’re using today, without vowels, mind you, is found 2,000 years ago already in the Judean Desert.

Nehemia: That’s significant, and I think some people would call that the “proto-Masoretic text”, to use the term “M-like text”, the Masoretic-like text. But basically what we have today in the Hebrew Bible that’s in any synagogue here today in Israel, or that you get in a Hebrew bookstore, a form of that already exists 2,000 years ago. In fact, 2,250 years ago, according to what you wrote. But you’re saying in addition to the Masoretic text, there are other texts?

Emanuel: First of all, I can’t stress enough how important it is, and you did not allow me to slam the table. I will not do that…

Nehemia: Because then it comes across as this boom in the recording. [laughing]

Emanuel: …how important it is. I would say also for religious reasons, that the Masoretic text was there already 2,100 years ago in the Judean Desert. Equally important for scholars, maybe not for religious reasons, is the fact that other Hebrew texts existed in ancient Israel in the Judean Desert at that time. I cannot name them exactly. One of them would the Hebrew source of the Greek translation, of the Septuagint.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting, because a lot of times we’ll see the Septuagint is different from the Masoretic text, and I think the assumption of many people is, “Well, the Greek got it wrong.” What you have shown is that in many cases, the Greek was translating a Hebrew text which existed.

Emanuel: Yeah, the Greeks did not get it wrong. In certain books, we can clearly follow that, like in the Book of Jeremiah, in the Book of Deuteronomy, in the Book of Samuel. We can clearly follow that translation. That is clear. So that is one source. We have the so-called “Samaritan Pentateuch”.

Nehemia: The Pentateuch is the Five Books of Moses, yeah?

Emanuel: That existed already in the Judean Desert at that time. Then we have an endless number of scrolls in the Judean Desert, mainly in Qumran, that are different from all these. So it’s an endless number of texts that we know not from 500 Before the Common Era, from 250 Before the Common Era until the year 0, until the year 100 after the Common Era. Now, what happens? How do I see the development of these texts? It is here is that scholars differ in their opinions.

Nehemia: Basically, up until now, this is fact. I’m just going to throw some statistics out that I copied from your book. I counted them as five families of text. You’ve got the proto-Masoretic text, or Masoretic-like text, 55 scrolls, the pre-Samaritan text, which is only the Five Books of Moses. It doesn’t have the Samaritan theological changes about Mount Gerizim, but other than that it’s very similar to the Samaritan-type of text.

Another five scrolls, proto-Septuagint, six scrolls – meaning it’s in Hebrew, but it’s the source of the Septuagint. You call them “unaligned,” 55 scrolls. And then the QSP, which we’re going to talk more about, Qumran Scribal Practices, I’m going to try to get him to talk about that. That’s really interesting to me, 28 scrolls. That’s out of about approximately 210 scrolls of the Bible at Qumran. That’s really interesting.

Then you wrote here on page 110, “A textual plurality in the country as a whole. The Qumranites paid no special attention to textual differences.” Wow.

Emanuel: From here onwards, it’s all a matter of personal opinion.

Nehemia: So, this was fact, guys. You can like it or not, but these are facts. Now he’s going to give the interpretation with his expertise.

Emanuel: There are different views, because certain scholars, I would say most scholars, say there has been a movement of what they call “stabilization” towards the Masoretic text. Now, what does stabilization mean? That slowly, the inhabitants of ancient Israel realized that the main text of the Bible should be the Masoretic text. That is called stabilization, and that’s why today we have the Masoretic texts.

Nehemia: In other words, there were many different texts. According to many scholars, it eventually moved in the direction of just one text.

Emanuel: My view is somewhat different, because I say the Masoretic text was always there. It is an important text, and in my view it’s a very good text. In my view in the Five Books of Moses – and this is something new – in the Five Books of Moses it’s clearly the best text. Not in all books, but in the Five Books of Moses it’s definitely the best text.

Nehemia: Best meaning closest to the earliest form, is that what you mean?

Emanuel: Closest to the earliest form, yes indeed. But there were certain historical developments, because of which the Masoretic text survived and not the other ones. To be clear, if in the year 200 Before the Common Era, we have all these different text forms, there were certain things that happened in the Land of Israel. In the year 70, simply, the Temple was destroyed, there was a great chaos and many people were killed. The people who were at Qumran who had all these beautiful scrolls were killed, and there were no followers who had in their hands all these scrolls that were different from the Masoretic text.

The only ones who survived the chaos of the destruction of the Temple were the official representatives of Judaism, or the representatives of what became official Judaism, which is Pharisaic Judaism, and they had the Masoretic texts. So there was no stabilization of the text, it was a historical accident, because of which streams of Judaism did not continue having their text. Because on the one hand, as I said, the people in Qumran were killed. On the other hand, the people who had in their hands the Greek text, the Septuagint, they were not part of Judaism anymore.

Nehemia: What happened to them?

Emanuel: They became Christians. It’s as simple as that. For one generation, the early Christians were Jews, and then they became Christians. The Samaritans, they were together with the Jews for some time, but after some time they became a completely separate stream within Judaism, so…

Nehemia: I believe you wrote in one of your footnotes, if I’m not mistaken, that that happened when John Hyrcanus destroyed their Temple sometime in the 2nd century BC.

Emanuel: Right. From that time onwards, the Samaritans, they had their own Bible text, so their texts were not within Judaism anymore. So the only ones who had the Hebrew Bible according to the Jewish belief, were the Rabbis, so-to-speak. The Rabbis had the Masoretic text. So there was, in my view, no stabilization. Other people, it maybe makes no big difference, let’s say, for the general public, because at the end, the result is the same.

Nehemia: Here’s the difference. If I understand you right, if I would go to a rabbi… Not a rabbi, a proto-rabbi, whatever existed before the Rabbis in 250 BC, and I would ask him, “Show me your copy of the Book of Genesis,” his Genesis will look essentially like the Genesis in my printed Bible today?

Emanuel: Yes.

Nehemia: Whereas if I went to somebody in Qumran – they weren’t there in 250 BC – but if I went to the predecessors in 250 BC and I said, “Let me see your Bible,” it would depend on which scroll he happened to pull off the shelf, and each one might be different.

Emanuel: And if you would go to a Bible store, if there were one, in the…

Nehemia: Or a professional scribe.

Emanuel: In David Street, in the ancient city of Jerusalem, and if that man had in his store four copies of the Book of Genesis, it could be four different copies.

Nehemia: Unless he was a proto-rabbi in which case they’ll probably be all four the same.

Emanuel: Unless he was a proto-rabbi, they would be all the same.

Nehemia: I love this, because this is on page 30, footnote 16. This is amazing information. [laughing] I can’t emphasis this, guys. In this footnote he has on page 30, it is more than many scholars in the world, or people who are called scholars, know. It’s unbelievable stuff.

You talk here about how it is that in 250 BC, or whenever, that these proto-rabbis would have had, and you actually said they might be related to the Sadducees – I think you said somewhere in one of the footnotes – in the Temple. How did they have this uniform form of the Bible, this one stream within Judaism, where everybody else had this plurality? How did that come about? That’s fascinating to me, this information.

Emanuel: It is fascinating, Nehemia. But being a scholar, I should stress once again that this is all hypothesis.

Nehemia: Okay. But you’ve got some sources, which admittedly were written down later, that refer to these processes that would have kept the uniform text for one stream of Judaism.

Emanuel: In my view, I base myself on the fact that in the Judean Desert, if we find three scrolls that are really identical, three scrolls of Genesis that are identical, I ask myself, basing myself only on the argument of logics. Logics is the same in the whole world at any time. How could three scrolls be identical? They can only be identical if they are copied from the same base. Where could the same base be situated? Only in the Temple.

Nehemia: I think there’s even more than that. In other words, A, they have the same base and B, there’s a scribal practice of saying, “I have to get this exact.” For example, 1 QIsaa, which is the complete scroll, you mentioned in one of the footnotes here or somewhere, that could have been copied from the Temple scroll, he just didn’t mind changing things. Is that right?

Emanuel: That’s right.

Nehemia: There was this fluidity when he copied these freely copied texts that if there’s a word here that was used in ancient Hebrew, and in the Hebrew of the era in which he copied it wasn’t used, maybe he’ll replace it with a more common word, or something like this.

Emanuel: At that time, or at any other time, there were simply different approaches, two main different approaches in ancient Israel, maybe anywhere else in the world you could say the same. One is one of precision, and one is of not precision, of a liberal approach to the text. One of precision is the one that prevailed, and the approach of precision said, “We all copy our text from the text that was in the Temple.” And we have several verses, quotations, references, in the Talmud that talk about a copying from the Temple scroll, but we should not forget – and that’s why I say this all hypothesis – that these verses in the Talmud, the Jewish legal late body of Rabbinic exegesis, that these are late.

Nehemia: But it may preserve earlier traditions. I know scholars love to say that. “It’s a late book but it may preserve earlier traditions.” [laughing] If people want to look that up, it’s in the Babylonian Talmud Ketuvot 106A. It says, “magihim,” which I guess is something like proofreaders, “of books in Jerusalem received their fees from the Temple funds.”

So there was this category of something like proofreaders who would make sure the Bible text was copied exactly. That was one approach, this precise approach. Maybe they were a little bit autistic and they said, “We’ve got to get it exactly right, every letter.”

I know other scholars make a bigger deal of this. You kind of downplayed, I think, that there were examples where very trivial details are corrected in the direction of the Masoretic text with a little Vav added above the line. I think you kind of downplay that, but I know other scholars make a big deal about that, that somebody was clearly proofreading these proto-Masoretic scrolls. Would you say that’s fair?

Emanuel: Let’s not confuse those matters, because later on, within the Masoretic tradition, there were many corrections of that type. But that was only within the Masoretic tradition.

Nehemia: Right. We’re talking now about the Masoretic-like text. That’s what you called the “precision”. And that’s amazing. I want to read something you wrote here. This is page 30. “The Temple employed professional magihim (correctors) to safeguard the proper distribution and precise copies of scriptures. These Scrolls must have been used everywhere in Israel for public reading as well as for instruction.”

What this means is that when – and now I’m going to direct this to the Christian listeners, if I may – when Jesus went into the synagogue of Nazareth according to the Gospel of Luke, and they handed him the copy of the Scroll of Isaiah, if it was a Pharisee, for example, who handed him the copy of Isaiah, then he probably read the same Isaiah that we have today, down maybe even to the letters. But if was somebody like a Qumran person, then it may have been a little bit different.

Emanuel: I have often thought about this passage in Luke, and I think in my mind that the copy that Jesus had in his hand would not have been like the Isaiah Scroll that is displayed in the Israel Museum, because that copy is a very faulty copy. It’s a free copy, many mistakes. He would have had in his hand like a Phariseic copy, like 1QIsab, or even more precise than that, and people should think about that, because it is very easy for the public to think, because of this beautiful copy – that’s not beautiful – but this complete copy in the Israel Museum might mislead people to think that that’s the copy that Jesus could have hand in his hand.

But I don’t think so, because the rabbis would never accept that copy as a kosher copy, as an acceptable copy, because there are too many corrections in every column. The rabbis did not accept a scroll as acceptable if there were more than three mistakes per column.

Nehemia: In one of your notes somewhere in the book you mention that this might not just have been the Pharisees, this might have also been the approach of the Sadducees in the Temple. In other words, when we say “Pharisees”, it doesn’t necessarily mean just the Pharisees, but there were streams within Judaism who said, “If we’re going to read a scroll in the synagogue, it has to be one based on exactly what’s written in the Temple.”

But then there was an entirely different approach, and now let me ask you to talk about the QSP, the Qumran Scribal Practices, of which I think we said there were 28 scrolls of the Bible that you identified, I believe it was, that followed this really different, very liberal, free approach. What are some of the characteristics of that approach?

And guys, when you go to the Israel Museum, they have on display the main scroll in the center – which by the way is a photograph – but the main scroll in the center there is 1QIsaa. There’s a real piece of it on the side, which isn’t a photograph. You’re saying that is not a scroll that would have been read in public. That is something that followed these Qumran Scribal Practices. Tell me about these scrolls that you categorize as QSP, the Qumran Scribal Practices.

Emanuel: There were some real surprises when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. One of the great surprises were scrolls that were written in a spelling system that is completely different from anything we knew so far. Now, what is spelling?

Spelling is when you write the word “night” N-I-G-H-T. When you write that in American English like N-I-T-E, that’s exactly the same.

Nehemia: Or maybe it’s like “color”, C-O-L-O-R versus L-O-U-R.

Emanuel: Now, we have these scrolls from Qumran, just like the large Isaiah Scroll, has completely wild spellings, spellings that we would call in modern Israel “completely wrong”. If there are people among you who know Hebrew, you know the word “ki”, that means “because”, Kaf-Yud. In that scroll it’s written Kaf-Yud-Aleph, completely wild.

If you have the word “zot”, that means “that” in English, and that is written instead of Zayin-AlephTav, it could be written Zayin-Vav-Tav, et cetera. If you have the word – and that’s already not spelling, but it’s a form – you have the word for the English word “he,” which in Hebrew is “hu”…

Nehemia: [laughing] That’s confusing, but yeah. Meaning he, the person he is “hu” in Hebrew.

Emanuel: That is written as “hua”. There are several of those cases. These forms are probably dialectal forms. This was completely unexpected, and this shows this is a sign of the freedom of that particular scribe, because you don’t really write today a Bible with the word “night”, N-I-T-E, et cetera. It’s not very honorable to do so. But at that time, they had all the honor in the world for the Bible, but they thought that you can just do that. So, there’s a whole spectrum of things you can do to the Holy Bible through the fully acceptable Bible that is read by everyone and accepted by everyone. But the concepts of what you can do with it were different at that time.

Nehemia: At Qumran, and maybe other places. But you find that primarily at Qumran, you said, and you said that there were, again, manuscripts of the Bible that were found in, I think it was 25 manuscripts of the Bible found in eight other locations, and those were all Masoretic-like texts, whereas at Qumran you had this specific type that was very free and liberal. So, it depends who you were, basically.

In other words, what you just described might have been certain people who would have done that. But again, if you would go to the Temple and ask somebody, “Show me your Bible,” it wouldn’t have looked like that – or even the synagogue in many places.

Emanuel: Right. Well, our information is very limited…

Nehemia: Right, of course.

Emanuel: …and there must be socio-religious differences between the people in ancient Israel. First of all, we think that most of the written material, the scrolls on leather and papaya, must have perished from that period. But the little we have – and that is a lot, because from Qumran alone we have something like 230 remnants of 230 Biblical scrolls. That little is still a lot, but it’s only from a few places. So if you would come to Qumran you would find a library of very different texts. If you would go to Masada, there would be only one type, the Masoretic text.

If you go to Nahal Hever, it would be only one type. If you would go to Jerusalem, you would find them of many types. If you go to the Temple, you will find them, in my view, only of one type. So it would depend where you would go.

Nehemia: Very interesting. You made the statement that it was an accident of history that this one type survived, the Masoretic text. As a scholar, of course that’s how you look at it. I think I could make a theological statement and say from my perspective, it’s providence. But as a scholar, that’s outside your purview.

Look, guys. Here are the facts and here’s the information. Decide for yourselves. Now, you were also involved in a computer program called “Accordance”, which my listeners know because my friend Keith Johnson calls it “the tap-tap-tap program”. When we were doing these podcasts, he would say something, ask me a question and say, “Look up Nehemia in your Bible program.” I would go on my computer, tap-tap-tap, and you could hear the tapping in the recording. That’s Accordance, that’s the program I learned about from you, that you were involved in designing some of the modules and creating them. Tell us about what that is. It’s a really powerful tool.

Emanuel: For me, Accordance is the very best. It’s a program that was designed for the Macintosh, and for two years now, it’s also on the PC platform.

Nehemia: I have it here, I’m using Windows 10 and I have it on the PC.

Emanuel: Oh, great.

Nehemia: Yeah, right here.

Emanuel: This is a program that is much around the Bible, but there are many, many other things. I won’t talk about all the modules that I have for the Christian world, for the Jewish world. I’ll stay close to home, to my own world, which is the Bible world.

What you can do here, you can work with the Hebrew Bible text and around it, in parallel columns, the Greek, and the Aramaic, three, four or five different Aramaic texts, Latin text, maybe 100 different translations. And one of the things, the text, the module that you refer to, Nehemia, is one module that I developed with my team in the 1980s.

This was a project that I had in conjunction with the University of Pennsylvania. It was called CATSS, a good Jewish name, Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies, and it was my concept. It sounds like long ago, and it’s a concept that in the meantime has been followed by several other projects, of having in parallel lines one word of the Hebrew and one word of a translation, or of another text. So you have, “In the beginning, bereshit…”

Nehemia: That mean the words, “In the beginning” which in Hebrew is “bereshit”. Yeah.

Emanuel: “Bara, created.” It goes according to the sequence of the Hebrew. So this is a comparison of the Hebrew and the Greek, and together with reconstruction of the Hebrew parent text of the Septuagint. Then, of course, you should realize that what you need for this purpose, you need morphological analysis and an analysis of all the base forms of all the Hebrew words, because the computer doesn’t know that the English word “went” is derived from “to go”. The same for the Hebrew word, “vayelech”, the computer doesn’t know that it is derived from “halach”. So you need all that morphological analysis for the Hebrew and for the Greek.

You can do really marvels with it. This accompanies me day and night. A book that has all those equivalences is called a “concordance”, and I don’t use my concordances anymore. I can now sit in an airplane and prepare my Septuagint classes, and do this. If I have a good flight from Tel Aviv to New York, I can prepare my classes pretty well.

Nehemia: I can’t emphasize how powerful a tool this Accordance is. In simple terms, the words in the Hebrew and in the Greek are tagged. I use this literally every day, multiple times a day. It’s funny, because I remember when I was in high school and I had a paper concordance, and the front cover would come off, and the back cover would come off, it was used so much. I would spend weeks trying to research what is the meaning of a certain word in Biblical Hebrew based on how it’s used, and the word might appear 300 times, and I have to look up every one of the 300 verses in its context. Now, I push on a button and I get them all on the screen. I can compare that, how is that translated in the Aramaic? How is it translated in the Greek? It’s unbelievable, it’s really powerful and amazing. You were involved in developing that, it’s really impressive. People are going to be using this for generations to come, and you did it. [laughing]

Emanuel: You can find this somewhere under Accordance Bible Software, or Oak Tree Bible Software. In that program, incidentally, there’s a module which has my book, The Textual History of the Bible.

Nehemia: Yeah, and you were saying you can do powerful things now with this electronic module.

Emanuel: Very powerful.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s amazing.

Emanuel: This, if you read my book, then it has hyperlinks to the Biblical text in Accordance.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s pretty cool. If you want to look up a certain verse or something, and see if that verse is referenced in the book, I’m assuming you can find that, as well?

Emanuel: That would be the other way round.

Nehemia: Yeah. I’ll give you an example here. Exodus 20 verse 24, one of my favorite verses, where God says, “In every place I will cause My name to be mentioned. There I will come and I will bless you.” You talk about that on page 88, how that’s slightly different than the Samaritan version. So if you were doing research on that verse, you could plug in Exodus 20:24 and it will pop up, “Yes, that appears in Emanuel Tov’s book, page…” and it will bring it to you?

Emanuel: That, I don’t know. I think that’s possible, but that would be called a note within Accordance, and that probably would have to be prepared. That, I don’t know.

Nehemia: For example, I know in the Gesenius module which I have, I can look up a verse, and if that verse is in there, you can search by English content, by Hebrew content, by what they call Scripture, meaning a reference like Exodus 20:24. So I’d be surprised if you can’t do that in there. Anyway, there’s amazing powerful things you can do.

It’s been a real honor to talk to you, Professor Tov. This has been an amazing, fascinating discussion. I just want to remind people that you have the book Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Another book is the Scribal Practices and Approaches Reflected in the Text Found in the Judean Desert. These are actual textbooks that people use in universities, but a layman could read them too. You probably need to put in a little bit more effort if you’re a layman to read it. Read it a few times. It’s really powerful stuff. I’m going to have a link for both of those books on nehemiaswall.com on my website.

Guys, his website is emanueltov.info. I’ll have a link on nehemiaswall.com. This has been an amazing discussion. Thank you very much, Professor Tov.

Emanuel: You’re welcome. It was really a pleasure for me.

Nehemia: Shalom.

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