The Dead Sea Scrolls: the ancient scribes

Before the introduction of printing, some 500 years ago, scrolls and books had to be copied by hand.

Scribes worked at this task from the earliest days. Jewish scribes developed their traditions and practices from the time of Moses, through the Babylonian captivity, through the time of Jesus and into the Middle Ages when they were called Masoretes.

They were not allowed to write anything from memory. They took a ritual bath before starting and they could not be disturbed – even by the king. After copying, every word and letter had to be counted to check against the original. If they did not match then the copy was destroyed.

Hebrew scribes spent their lives copying the biblical texts

Scribes had to be strictly observant Jews and had to follow meticulous rules in their work.

No originals remain. The earliest copies that we have – prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls – were copies of copies of copies. They are the Cairo Codex (895 AD), the St Petersburg Codex (916 AD), the Aleppo Codex (929 AD) and the British Museum Codex (950 AD).

The Dead Sea Scrolls pre-date these texts by nearly one thousand years, and prove how remarkably accurate the scribes have been through the ages.

The archaeological dig at Qumran.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were found in caves around the site of this monastic settlement of the Essenes. Clay inkwells and reed pens were found in the ruins.

Because inaccurate copies had to be destroyed not many copies of the Hebrew Bible have survived. There is more abundant and precise manuscript evidence for the New Testament – in fact, more than for any other book from the ancient world.

New Testament copies

We have 4,969 handwritten copies of portions of the New Testament. Some fragments can be dated to as early as 125 AD.

By comparison, there are only 643 copies of Homer’s Iliad, 49 copies of Aristotle’s Works, 20 copies of Livy’s History of Rome, and 10 copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars. Liberal scholars try to discredit the Bible, but they accept these other works, with far fewer copies, as authoritative. They discredit themselves with such inconsistency.

While manuscript copies of Caesar’s Gallic Wars and Aristotle’s Works are about 1000 years old, there are New Testament copies, like the John Rylands Fragment, the Papyrus Bodmer II, the Codex Sinaiticus and the Codex Vaticanus that can be dated to between 1660 and 1890 years ago. No other writings from the past can be compared with the Bible in terms of overwhelming evidence.

God has preserved His Word for us. Our faith rests on a solid foundation.