Chapter H1
Lucifer's Rebellion
The War on the Word
––– Chapter 5 –––
The Masoretes, their OT Manuscript,
and the Dead Sea Scrolls
QUICK-NAV:
CLICK TO AUTO SCROLL
To access the launch page for all 8 chapters in The War on the Word, and to see some of the topics in each chapter, and to have the option to download the complete War on the Word as a PDF document, click the WOW navigation button above.
To rapidly auto-scroll down to a particular topic on this page, use the quick-nav menu in the black box. (This feature is neither visible nor available on mobile phones.)
Topics covered: ►The Masoretes in Tiberias agree to share the city with Muslims. ►The Masoretes not only couldn't read the Hebrew Scriptures, they had to contend with fellow Jews who converted to Christ and preached the New Testament the Masoretes rejected. ►Obstacles faced by the Masoretes when trying to learn Hebrew, which had been a dead language for several centuries. ►To make reading Hebrew easier, the Masoretes invented their own "cheat-sheet" version of written Hebrew. ►The Masoretic OT is unique for a number of reasons. ►When they finished work on their OT, the Masoretes destroyed the hundreds of OT Bible manuscripts in various languages they had gathered over the centuries so nobody could ever question their work. ►For all the hype when the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they are rarely mentioned today because they have exposed some major tenants of modern liberal textual criticism as flat wrong. Movie makers and novel writers, however, have greatly profited from the fictional stories they have invented about the Scrolls. ►Alexandrian text, Masoretic text, and KJV verse differences are shown. ►We have learned something from the Dead Sea Scrolls: the Manuscript Mess is a lot bigger than we thought! ►The Masorete's work created a never-ending argument over the name "Jehovah." For Bible believers, however, the matter was settled by the Lord Himself when His inerrant Bible arrived in 1611 AD.
Chapter 5 (7 pages)
THE MASORETES, THEIR OT MANUSCRIPT,
AND THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
TIBERIAS
Before Herod the Great died, he arranged that his kingdom of Judea would be divided into four parts (called tetrarchies) that would be ruled by his four sons (called tetrarchs). The northern tetrarchy that included the region of Galilee went to Herod Antipas (19 BC - 42 AD) who participated in the executions of John the Baptist and Christ. Galilee in those days was a poor area that lacked attractive cities. Nazareth, for example, was a poor town known mostly for its garrison of Roman soldiers, and therefore Nazareth was looked down on by many Jews (Jn 1:45,46). Herod Antipas didn’t want his Galilean capital to be a poor town like Nazareth; therefore, he built a beautiful new city (naming it Tiberias after the Roman emperor of the same name) on the western shore of the Sea of Galilee – often thereafter called the Sea of Tiberias (Jn 6:1). During the Jews’ three wars of rebellion, Tiberias was spared from destruction by the Romans because they appreciated the military help provided by Herod Agrippa II (27-96 AD) – the last of the Herodian dynasty. Agrippa had been driven from Tiberias by Jewish rebel forces during the first war, refused to surrender, raised an army, and helped the Romans defeat the rebels. The Roman armies, therefore, spared Tiberias. After the three very destructive wars, the fact that Tiberias was largely unscathed caused a hefty percentage of the relatively few Jews who decided to stay in the Holy Land to move there – which helped Tiberius become a center of culture and scholarship. Among the Jewish scholars who settled in Tiberias were the Masoretes.
When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman army in 70 AD the Bible-rejecting, “sola scriptura,” conservative Sadducees vanished from history. But plenty of Sadducee-like conservative Jews remained who shunned the old Pharisaical belief that the collection of writings in the Talmud should be used to determine what the Bible “really meant.” These conservative Jews who gave lip service to the supremacy of Scripture would become the nucleus of modern “Karaite Judaism,” which rejects Talmudic “rabbinic Judaism.” Conservative Karaites – like the old Sadducees – believed the Old Testament to be the sole authority, and a group of these Karaite scholars settled in Tiberius after the Jewish wars, and are believed to be the origin of the scholar-scribes – later called Masoretes – who, from about 550-950 AD produced the famous Masoretic Text of the Old Testament.
The work of the Masoretes was endangered in 634 AD when the spreading Muslim armies conquered the Holy Land. Muslim armies, trying to conquer the world for Allah, quickly subdued vast areas across North Africa and the Middle East for several reasons: the Roman armies were gone, the Jews were mostly gone, the region had no real national identity, and most of the territory was populated by tiny desert kingdoms, isolated squatters, and a few has-been cities like Alexandria that had no way to protect themselves from…anybody. As usual, the Muslims destroyed everything in their path, especially if it had anything to do with Jews or Christians. When they conquered Caesarea, for example, they destroyed almost all of Origen’s works, including the Hexapla. The city of Tiberias was different, though; when the Muslims got there, they liked its location and simple elegance enough to settle there. But if they killed all of its occupants, there wouldn’t be enough of a population for it to continue functioning, so the Christian-hating Muslims made an alliance with the local Christian-hating Jews in which the Jews could occupy half of the buildings and the Muslims would occupy the other half. Most of the Masoretes’ work, therefore, was done during the Muslim occupation because the European Christian Crusades wouldn’t regain control of the Holy Land until over 400 years later in 1099 AD.
THE MASORETES BEGIN WORK IN 550 AD
The three vicious wars the Jews began and lost between 66 and 135 AD backfired and were perhaps the three most ill-advised wars in history: They caused most of the Jewish population in the Holy Land to vanish; many Jews were killed, were taken away into slavery, or fled to other regions. The temple no longer existed, the priesthood was extinct, Judaism was (temporarily) outlawed, and Judea and Jerusalem were renamed. It is no surprise, therefore, that the few Jews who remained in “Syria Palestina,” and those who lived in other regions of the world, quickly lost their ability to read and speak their native Babylonian OT Hebrew. By about 200 AD it was a dead language, and Jews who inherited handwritten Babylonian OT Hebrew manuscripts had no idea how to read them, so they went outside and buried them in their back yards – thinking that was more respectful than letting them collect dust in some forgotten corner.
Meanwhile, NT Christians – many of whom were converted Jews – were using the OT verses referred to by the Apostle Paul in Acts 24:14 to convert many more Jews throughout the Middle East, which alarmed the Christian-hating Jewish scholar-scribes in Christian-hating, Muslim-ruled Tiberias and (to a lesser extent) in Babylon. The Masoretes believed Christians, who were wrongly-but-successfully using the Jews own Scriptures, were beginning to overshadow Judaism. It was offensive for the Masoretes to see “their” Bible increasingly claimed to be incomplete because it was “just the Old Testament” …which Christians were claiming had been superseded by a “New Testament.” The Masoretes were painfully aware that these upstart Christians were converting many Jews by using parts of this “New Testament” (such as Gal 3; Heb 7-10) to explain why the Jewish Messiah had to die and why this “New” Testament had to displace the “Old” Testament. These Christians were also using OT prophecy to prove that if the Jews had believed their own Bible, they’d have accepted Jesus of Nazareth as their Passover Lamb/Saviour, their Messiah, and their God (Lk 24:25-27; Jn 5:46; Ac 3:18-24; 7:52; 18:27; 24:14; Ro 1:1,2; Gal 3:24). In fact, astonishing numbers of Jews who already knew and believed the OT, had accepted Christ as their Messiah (Ac 21:20). In other words, Christians were using the Jews’ own Bible to show that many Jews were Bible rejecters…and the Masoretes resented that.
Page 2 of 7
The Masoretes weren’t alone, however; many hard-hearted, Christ-rejecting Jews thought these Scripture-using Christians were “twisting” the “true meaning” of the OT Scriptures…which helps explain why OT manuscripts, beginning about 100 years after Christ was crucified, began appearing with “young woman” in Isaiah 7:14 instead of “virgin.”
The Masoretes were worried that their traditional Jewish religion might perish. (Traditions in Hebrew is masora, from which the Masoretes got their name.) The Masoretes also thought the Hebrew-language Bible and the traditional Hebrew language, which neither they nor anybody else had spoken for several hundred years, were important to the survival of traditional Judaism. The Masoretes needed to somehow learn a dead language nobody spoke anymore, and therefore needed to find as many Babylonian OT Hebrew manuscripts as they could. They scoured the countryside collecting old unused manuscripts and parts of manuscripts, and they even dug up “buried” manuscripts from Jews’ back yards. The result was they had lots of manuscripts they couldn’t read; the text consisted only of consonants – no vowels, and all the word letters were run together. They were faced with a challenge that was compounded by the fact that the Masoretes didn’t even know the Hebrew alphabet, much less speak Hebrew. I’ll write the underlined phrase again to simulate how the Masoretes saw the thousands of handwritten, block-lettered manuscript pages:
CHLLNGTHTWSCMPNDDBTHFCTTHTTHMSRTSDDNTVNKNWTHHBRWLPHBTMCHLSSSPKHBRW
Like everybody else, the Masoretes could read, speak, and write Koine Greek. Therefore, they used the many-available Greek-language Septuagint and non-Septuagint OT manuscripts that had been translated from Hebrew as teaching aids. Over time, the more the Masoretes learned, the more they agreed with many Jewish groups – and with earlier scholars such as Origen and Jerome – that the non-Septuagint, non-Apocrypha Greek translations were more faithful to the old Babylonian OT Hebrew Bibles than were the Apocrypha-including Septuagint manuscripts of the Alexandrian family. Therefore, “ancient” Greek OT translations like the Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus from hundreds of years earlier during the second century (!) were chosen by these sixth-century Masoretes as helpful texts as they tried to figure out what words were represented by the strange block letters of the old “Hebrew” alphabet that their ancestors got from the Babylonians.
The “manuscript mess” proved to be insurmountable. The Masoretes learned that Babylonian OT Hebrew had, over the centuries, become but one of several regional dialects of Hebrew-Aramaic, so when they found different readings among manuscripts written in different regional dialects, they had no idea which, if any reading, was “the original.” So, they had three options: they could leave blank spaces, they could insert several textual possibilities, or they could insert their “best guess.” They decided option three – guesswork – looked more scholarly and authoritative. When the Masoretes disagreed with some of the Greek-manuscript words used by the ancient translators, Aquila, Theodotion, and Symmachus, the Masoretes decided those ancient translators who were fluent in Hebrew “probably” inserted incorrect vowels into the consonant-only Hebrew, which produced incorrect words. Therefore, the struggling-to-learn-Hebrew Masoretes, knowing nobody had any proof that they were wrong, produced different words by inserting vowels they thought were more “likely.” This “Masoretic method” contributed to the manuscript mess, and it caused scholars in the coming centuries (who were at least as ignorant as the Masoretes) to have massive opinion-based arguments about many different issues…that would not be settled until a thousand years later in 1611.
The Masoretes also found over time that reading a manuscript with no vowels, with all the consonants run together, and with no sentence and paragraph breaks was too difficult for them. So they invented a new “Masoretic Hebrew alphabet” with marks that indicated which vowels they thought should be inserted, where sentences and paragraphs should begin and end, and various other aids that let people know what the Masoretes guessed. This newly-invented, greatly-simplified, “cheat-sheet” version of the Hebrew alphabet – called “Masoretic script” or “Masoretic written Hebrew” – is what today’s scholars and theologians are referring to when they claim to know “the original Hebrew” of “the original manuscripts.” In reality, it is just a modified, easier-to-read alphabet that conveyed what the Masoretes thought the dead-language Hebrew said, and it is these Masoretic modifications that have helped Masoretic Hebrew survive today. This version of written Hebrew is unique because:
-
It is the only Hebrew alphabet in history that was never associated with God’s Bible-believing Hebrew saints.
-
It was the first time in history that a manuscript of God’s living word was made using a dead language.
-
It was the first time a Hebrew manuscript was drafted by unsaved men who had done the best they could to learn how to read and write a form of Hebrew neither they nor anybody else could read or speak.
-
It is the only form of Hebrew in history that God never used to create an inspired, inerrant original autograph.
-
I say again: this Masoretic Hebrew cannot properly be called “the original Hebrew” of “the original manuscripts.”
-
The Masoretic manuscript is the only manuscript that was created by men who deliberately and systematically destroyed every precious surviving OT manuscript – no matter what language they were written in – they had diligently collected over hundreds of years!
That’s right: when the Masoretes finished creating their “Masoretic manuscripts,” they shocked all Christian and Jewish scholars and all historians of every era by destroying all of the myriad manuscripts they’d spent several centuries finding, buying, and collecting so they could research God’s original “true text” – hoping their sole-surviving text (with readings such as “young woman” instead of “virgin”) would become the sole manuscript authority for the Old Testament. They did not want anyone else to ever use the many manuscripts the Masoretes collected to see if the Masorete’s research was valid or not. Was it extreme insecurity on their part, or something more sinister? We don’t know, but we do know the Masoretes didn’t have all that many places in the Hebrew OT with uncertain vowel choices; in most places the context left no wiggle room to select different words. Therefore the finished Masoretic Hebrew OT, while not inerrant, is mostly correct…and is today considered a testimony to the academic discipline of the Masoretes…even if there are reasons to question their character.
Page 3 of 7
Some of the existing manuscripts the Masoretes produced include:
-
700 AD: The Ashkar-Gilson Manuscript and the London Manuscript. These aren’t two manuscripts; they’re two small fragments from the same manuscript. They prove the Masoretes produced manuscripts at least 200 years earlier than scholars originally thought.
-
920 AD: The Aleppo Codex. For years (before it was senselessly vandalized by Muslims after World War II) this was the most complete, most accurate Hebrew-language manuscript. (Liberal scholars still “preferred” the inferior Greek-language Alexandrian manuscripts.)
-
1008: The Leningrad Codex. When the Aleppo Codex was vandalized, this manuscript became the new most complete, most accurate Hebrew-language manuscript. Its text is identical to the Aleppo – a tribute to the accuracy of the Masoretic scribes when they copied the finished works of the Masoretic translators.
Before we get to some of the arguments scholars have over whether the Masoretic Hebrew text should be preferred over the Alexandrian Greek text, let’s take a quick look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and what we have and haven’t learned from them.
THE ESSENES AND THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS
When the Hasmoneans (the Maccabees) successfully rebelled against the Seleucid Empire about a century and a half before Christ, they took advantage of their popularity and made themselves rulers and high priests, which appropriately filled some Jews with righteous indignation. Among those offended by the Hasmonean’s flagrant disregard for Scripture was a Jewish religious group called the Essenes. The Essenes agreed with the Sadducees that only Levites were to be priests and only the Bible had any authority. The Essenes disagreed with the Pharisees about the authority of oral and written “as-memory-serves” traditions; they disagreed with both Sadducees and Pharisees about politics, believing God’s people without dominion should have no political involvement; and they could not sit by and watch Greek Reason turn Biblical Christianity into well-intentioned humanistic apostasy. So little is known about these people that we cannot even be certain that we should call them “Essenes.” Because they shunned all political involvement, and because some or most of the Essenes lived quiet, separated lives in rural hermitages, they do not appear in the Bible and are almost invisible in history. Almost. It seems that, beginning about 150 BC, as the Essenes began forming separated self-reliant communal communities for themselves, they also began putting together their own reference library containing all sorts of documents – including many Bible manuscripts. One of the communities they’d been building or living in was out in the wilderness near the Dead Sea, and when the Roman army – during the three Jewish wars – began destroying Judea in 70 AD, the Essenes quickly stuffed their growing library of Bible scrolls and other documents into clay pots, stashed those clay vessels in a number of inaccessible cliffside caves, and fled for their lives from the wrath of the enraged Roman army – hoping they could survive, return in more peaceful times, retrieve their library of scrolls, and live separated lives. They may not have escaped the Roman army, however, because they completely vanished from history. Their hidden “Dead Sea Scrolls” sat in the dry desert air near the northwestern tip of the Dead Sea for almost 1,900 years. Then the accidental discovery of these Bible scrolls from 1946 through 1956 temporarily (as we shall see) restored respectability and hope to the increasingly-fragmented, discredited, and discouraged fields of modern textual criticism and Christian theology.
Many of the Dead Sea manuscripts have nothing to do with the Bible; they concern secular stuff that is of little interest to us. The Bible manuscripts did reveal some things we didn’t know before…but nothing of substance. Looking at the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls through the perspective of hindsight, it is easy now to see why the Dead Sea Scrolls have had so little impact on newly-published modern Bible versions. In fact, recent modern Bible versions have been more impacted by the shocking social fruit of equality such as “gender identity” and “diversity.” I say again, the Dead Sea Scrolls have proven to be so worthless that nonsense and bullshit have influenced Christianity much more than the Dead Sea Scrolls have – all of the bluster and protestations of theologians notwithstanding. None of this was a surprise to Bible believers: we knew if there really were any “church-helping valuable nuggets” of info in the Dead Sea Scrolls, our Good Shepherd wouldn’t have let His NT people go without it for 1,900 years.
The Dead Sea Scrolls have proven valuable in one way – $. A number of museums tried to profit from the public hype about the scrolls by purchasing and displaying some of them to attract visitors. However, most of these museum “Authentic Dead Sea Scroll” displays have been proven to be counterfeits…but they made money! You will sometimes read old articles from past decades that loudly proclaim the Dead Sea Scrolls are “the most important Biblical discovery of the 20th century.” However, if you look deeper you’ll find they are referring to Biblical archeology…which is also not true; there are numerous archeological finds supporting Biblical accuracy that surpass anything we’ve learned from the Dead Sea Scrolls – as you saw in chapter 1. The more you learn the more you’ll conclude scholars are wrong about the scrolls being truly important in any respect – because the “experts” only talk about minor details – like what they’ve learned about how scrolls were made back then, where they think the materials they used to prepare the scrolls might have come from, and about how a few minor historical details that we had already thought/concluded have now been proven. For example, many scholars had already concluded, based on manuscript evidence, that the Masoretic text was more accurate and more reliable than the Alexandrian text, so when the Dead Sea Scrolls emerged from hundreds of years before Christ to verify that, Bible-believing scholars yawned because they already knew it…and liberal scholars got childishly tight-lipped. From a Biblical text standpoint, therefore, the scrolls have turned out to be unmentionably insignificant. I say unmentionably because liberal scholars who had for years been over-hyping the importance of what we would learn from the Dead Sea Scrolls, began, as we learned more and more about them, downplaying their importance.
Indeed, the scrolls have generated more interest, made more money, and proven to be a bigger deal to businessmen who deal in fiction: Hollywood movie-makers, actors, book authors, and book publishers have capitalized on the fact that most people know that, even though the scrolls were found more than half a century ago…we have, strangely, heard almost nothing about them! Scholars did not fill that informational void with facts because almost none of it was interesting, helpful, or informative…so movie producers and book authors have filled the void with fiction by dreaming up books and movies in which scholars search for mysterious “codes,” or discover that Christ married Mary Magdalen and had several children, or that He survived the crucifixion and went into hiding for the rest of His life, or that certain important scrolls have been “suppressed” because they reveal all religions based on the Bible are bogus.
Page 4 of 7
Now that we’ve gotten the hype out of the way, let’s look at what we’ve really learned from the scrolls.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were tucked away in those caves before the NT was written, so the scrolls had little interest beyond the OT theological debate over whether we should place more value on the error-ridden, Apocrypha-containing Septuagint/Alexandrian text or on the relatively-but-not-completely-error-free Masoretic text. Therefore, when the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the insecure, low-character Masoretes had failed in their considerable efforts to destroy all OT manuscripts that might reflect on the accuracy of their work, and when early scholars found textual differences that suggested several “families” of OT texts existed before the Masoretic text came out, scholars got all excited because they hoped the scrolls would generate more interest in layman’s aids, bring some semblance of order to the unsolvable “manuscript mess,” and rekindle the flagging interest in the time-wasting quest for the “True Text.”
As the textual differences between these “families” were more closely examined, however, scholarly excitement quickly waned for several reasons. First, the differences were so minor (scribal errors) that ordinarily no unbiased scholar would assign them to different “families.” Second, there were relatively few differences in what the texts say – the texts were practically identical. Third, the vast majority of the hundreds of Dead Sea “manuscripts” are mere scraps; only 10 manuscripts that are in fairly good shape and contain a good portion of the OT survived the 1,900 years in the caves. Fourth, while some of the Dead Sea wordings did tend to support some readings in the Septuagint/Alexandrian manuscripts (more on this later), the majority of Dead Sea readings testified to the accuracy and consistency of the Masoretic text. It was pretty hard for many scholars to go along with the liberal party line that different “families” of texts existed among the Dead Sea manuscripts because they have such consistent support for the Masoretic text. Indeed, there are NT “families” that have a lot more textual diversity within themselves than exists among all of the Dead Sea Scrolls lumped together.
Scholars were also disappointed to find that these “wonderfully exciting” OT manuscripts that were older than any we’d ever seen actually added to the reputation for reliability of Masoretic manuscripts such as the Aleppo Codex of 920 AD. The Aleppo had been regarded as the most accurate ancient OT text for many years, but then when Muslim vandals destroyed 200 of its pages, the textual completeness of the Masoretic Leningrad Codex of 1008 AD made it more useful than the now-incomplete Aleppo…and therefore the familiarity/fame of the Leningrad increased. Yes, the Leningrad was almost a hundred years younger than the Aleppo (an invalid distinction because the highly-regarded Aleppo still existed as a comparison…and the two texts were known to be identical), but now only the Leningrad contained all of its pages…so the Leningrad was used in the 1970s as the basic text of the Yea, hath God said Stuttgart layman’s aid – and this Bible-correcting manual was hypocritically hyped (by scholars who knew better) by using the “newly-discovered, wonderfully-exciting” Dead Sea Scrolls. However, despite all the hopes that the Scrolls would undermine the credibility of the hated Masoretic text that was used for the vast majority (but not all) of the King James Bible’s OT, the Scrolls did the opposite by letting everybody know scholars had led them astray by saying the numerous errors in the Alexandrian/Septuagint text should be disregarded simply because the Alexandrian was 500 years older than the Masoretic text. That’s right; the Dead Sea Scrolls, written in pre-Masoretic Babylonian OT Hebrew, reveal that the “scholarly” mantra of “older is better” is utter fiction: The Dead Sea Scroll Bible manuscripts are from 400 to 700 years older than the Alexandrian/Septuagint manuscripts…and yet they testify to the overwhelming (but not complete) accuracy of the Masoretic text. That kind of textual purity and consistency is rare, especially when it spans 1,300 years from 400 BC to 900 AD, so you’d think unbiased scholars would admit how wrong they’d been to tout the Alexandrian over the Masoretic…but they have continued to exalt the younger, corrupt Alexandrian manuscripts as if they now think younger is better! There is no reasonable explanation for their inconsistencies, but there is a spiritual explanation – the war on the word.
The Dead Sea Scrolls lend credence to Jerome’s rejection of the Alexandrian/Septuagint and his use of the Babylonian OT Hebrew manuscripts that we now know are essentially identical to the Masoretic text. Perhaps because Jerome was not a Catholic, perhaps because his original Latin Vulgate was never adopted by the Roman Church, perhaps because the Vatican owns one of the main Alexandrian manuscripts, and perhaps because of the Vatican’s financial interest in the pro-Alexandrian Stuttgart layman’s aid, the Catholic and Protestant churches have continued to support the crumbling façade of textual criticism.
No matter what I say about the Dead Sea Scrolls’ overall support for the Masoretic text, we must not lose sight of the fact that we are unaware of any OT or NT manuscript or modern Bible version that is always right. Yes, we believe inerrant manuscripts existed and were used by scholars prior to the KJV (more on this later), but we modernists have never seen those manuscripts. Both the Masoretic and Alexandrian texts are usually right; the texts of both are right vastly more than they are wrong. It’s true that the Alexandrian has many more errors than the Masoretic, but that’s just a matter of degree. The salient point to remember is the difference between the mindset of humility-based, authority-respecting unenlightened saints of yesteryear…and the pride-based, authority-despising Enlightened saints of these dark last days: when old-time saints read the Bible they weren’t taught to react in horror when it said “young woman,” when it omitted “yet,” and when it omitted “and fasting.” But ever since the age of Enlightenment began in about 1300 AD, we have been formally taught and manipulated/conditioned (by scholars and theologians of all people!) to doubt, not believe that the word of God exists as He defines it; we’ve been taught to be skeptical, not faithful. When looking at the sad state of modern Christianity, we have to wonder if the KJV may be an indication that we, compared with saints of old, are so weak-faithed and vulnerable to Reason that we are in desperate need of something previous saints didn’t need – the miraculously-unique infallibility of the AV 1611. As Bible believers we are constantly reminded as we read the news and look around us that so many Christians have little understanding of Scripture-based doctrine…and are therefore groping along in the dark following tradition. We, on the other hand, have God’s word to be a lamp unto our feet and a light unto our path during these dark last days, to be a staff that steadies us as we do our bumbling best to stay on the strait and narrow way that leadeth unto life. If we worldwide NT saints didn’t have the demonstrated inerrancy of the KJV, would our Reason have convinced us, too, that modern Christianity’s broad way that leadeth to destruction is the right way? Are we spiritual cripples who couldn’t make it without the modern – and perhaps unprecedented – crutch of the KJV? And has our pride made us focus too much on our crutch rather than on our walk?
Page 5 of 7
ISSUES INVOLVING THE MASORETIC, ALEXANDRIAN, AND DEAD SEA MANUSCRIPTS
One of the most famous discrepancies between the Alexandrian and Masoretic texts:
King James Bible Isa 7:14 Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son… (When a virgin conceives and has a child, that is, in fact, an attention-getting sign.)
Masoretic Hebrew Isa 7:14 Therefore, the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Look, a young woman is with child and about to give birth to a son… (Young women get pregnant and birth children every day…and nobody thinks it’s a sign of any kind. This may mean the Masoretes deliberately eliminated a messianic prophecy.)
Alexandrian Greek Isa 7:14 Therefore the Lord Himself shall give you a sign. Behold, a virgin shall conceive in the womb, and shall bring forth a son… (This is a decent rendering, but the unnecessary redundancy of “in the womb” makes some people think the “sign” included the fact that she conceives in the womb – even though “in the womb” is where all women conceive, which makes conceiving “in the womb” a weak, confusing “sign.”)
The NT – as we expect – sometimes quotes the Masoretic OT text:
King James Bible Mt 2:15 …Out of Egypt have I called my son.
Masoretic Hebrew Hos 11:1 …out of Egypt I called my son.
Alexandrian Greek Hos 11:1 …out of Egypt have I called his children. (This eliminates a messianic prophecy.)
Sometimes you have to wonder how (or why) the Masoretes got it so wrong:
King James Bible Isa 11:10 And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.
Alexandrian Greek Is 11:10 And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, and he that shall arise to rule over the Gentiles; in him shall the Gentiles trust, and his rest shall be glorious.
Masoretic Hebrew Is 11:10 And it shall come to pass in that day, that the root of Jesse, that standeth for an ensign of the peoples, unto him shall the nations seek; and his resting-place shall be glorious.
The NT sometimes quotes OT readings that are not in any known text:
King James Bible Mt 2:23 And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.
Scholars have claimed Christ and His apostles in the NT sometimes quoted the Alexandrian OT text:
King James Bible Heb 1:6 …And let all the angels of God worship him.
Alexandrian Greek Dt 32:43 …and let all the angels of God worship him…
Masoretic Hebrew Dt 32:43 Sing aloud, O ye nations of his people…
Were scholars right – as suggested by the example above – to say Christ and His disciples used and quoted the Alexandrian Greek OT manuscripts? Well, there was no evidence to suggest they might be wrong…until a little detail was discovered about the Dead Sea Scrolls: Among the ancient Hebrew OT manuscripts and fragments there are some readings that agree with the Masoretic Hebrew text and some that agree with the Alexandrian Greek text. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, nobody knew the Alexandrian-like quotes in the NT also existed in Hebrew manuscripts. That means Christ and His disciples could have been using and quoting Hebrew manuscripts…manuscripts that we didn’t know existed that said, “virgin;” that said, “let all the angels of God worship him;” and that say – in an as-yet-undiscovered manuscript – “He shall be called a Nazarene.” That’s right; the Dead Sea Scrolls showed that the fact that Christ and His disciples sometimes quoted truths that appear in the Alexandrian but not the Masoretic text does not prove they quoted or used the Greek-language Alexandrian text…because we now know those truths were in Hebrew manuscripts that were centuries older than the Alexandrian manuscripts.
Also, since the Nazarene prophecy seems to come from manuscripts that “never” existed – and therefore according to scholars was “probably” invented – do we have any manuscript evidence that may apply? The answer is a simple one, and we’ll get to it when we look at the “manuscript ancestry” of the King James Bible in chapter 8.
Let’s review some interesting points about manuscripts:
-
The Hebrew readings in the Dead Sea Scrolls that sometimes agree with the Masoretic and sometimes with the Alexandrian, may mean the Masoretes, Aquila, Theodotion, Symmachus, and the scribes responsible for the Alexandrian manuscripts did not deliberately delete or add “virgin” or “young woman,” and may have done all their work with complete integrity to the best of their sometimes-dubious skills. In other words, the Dead Sea Scrolls showed us the “manuscript mess” is a lot bigger than we thought – even going back to a century-and-a-half or two before Christ when His people had become so apostate they wouldn’t even recognize their own Messiah. In other words, there may have been groups of Jews who, like the Sadducees and modern theologians, were so Enlightened by Greek philosophy that they rejected anything supernatural in the Bible that they, “in good conscience,” could neither ignore that which was right in their own eyes (such as “child” rather than “virgin”) nor the now-known-to-be false readings in the manuscript they were translating, and thereby produced manuscripts that contributed to the overall manuscript mess. Therefore, it might be better and more charitable for us to simply say the errors and contradictions in the Alexandrian manuscripts, the Masoretic Hebrew, the Textus Receptus, “older” manuscripts, “more reliable” manuscripts, etc., exist because no scholars have ever been able to unscramble the unfathomable manuscript mess because God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are: That no flesh should glory in his presence (1 Cor 1:27-29).
Page 6 of 7
-
When scholars say misleading things like, “There are numerous differences between the Alexandrian and Masoretic texts,” they are technically correct only because the Alexandrian contains the Apocrypha and the Masoretic does not. Both texts of Scripture are mostly in agreement with a few glaring problems such as the Masorete’s “young woman” and the Alexandrian’s making Christ a liar. Scholars knowingly avoid correctly saying, “Textual differences among the Masoretic manuscripts are very rare,” and they could correctly say (but do not), “There are many textual differences among Alexandrian manuscripts.”
Does God want us to obsess about “problems” from many centuries ago concerning the Masoretic text, the Septuagint text, and the unfathomable manuscript mess? Or does He want us to believe now is our day of salvation (2 Co 6:2) and concentrate on walking by faith in the unique inerrancy of the KJV and get about our Father’s business?
Did the same God who deliberately put a whore into the ancestry of the sinless Word of God Who would be born at the end of the OT era, also deliberately put some “whorish manuscripts” into the ancestry of the inerrant Bible that bears His name and rank that would show up at the end of the NT era?
Or did God make His holy word available only to His faithful believers of old by deliberately distributing certain inspired readings “here a little, and there a little” among various manuscripts because His faithful accept His truth as being line upon line; here a little and there a little? But they of little faith cannot accept His truth because to them it is nothing but line upon line; here a little and there a little; that they might go, and fall backward, and be broken, and snared, and taken (Isa 28:9-13). The manuscript mess has been the kind of blinding stumblingstone to they of little faith that they actually “prefer” readings that make the Lord of the universe a liar – and it doesn’t even bother them! More about how “unsupported” readings and “unknown manuscripts” reveal that He has, indeed, always preserved His inspired, inerrant word for us in chapter 8 about the King James Bible.
THE NAME ‘JEHOVAH’ …AND THEOLOGY’S ABUSE OF THE MASORETIC TEXT
Theology, because it is based on Reason rather than faith, loves unanswerable questions because no matter how cockeyed a theoretic answer to those questions may be…it cannot be disproven. One of the questions they’ve never been able to answer concerns the authenticity and correctness of the Hebrew alphabet invented by the Masoretes: The first of two main arguments raged over whether they inserted the right vowels between the consonants. The second topic of debate was the Masoretic invention of “points” – the little marks that govern pronunciation, punctuation, and sentence and paragraph breaks. Some said the works of the Masoretes should be considered just as “original” as any of the other variations in the Hebrew and pagan alphabets and languages that had been used to record the Scriptures over many centuries. Other scholars said the Masoretic Hebrew should be considered illegitimate. Those two opinions are so far apart they caused more and more scholars to invent myriad compromise opinions between the two “bookends.” One of the more popular alphabet-related topics of debate concerns one of the many names God has – Jehovah.
After the Babylonian Captivity the Jews began to not say God’s name. Like every word in the Hebrew Scriptures, God’s names were written with only consonants – no vowels…and the name at issue is the one spelled YHWH. (I say again, “YHWH” wasn’t special or different because it lacked vowels – vowels didn’t exist for any words.) The Jews became horrified by how many gods the pagan Greeks and Romans had, and they wanted to stress the fact that there is but one God by always saying “God,” which they usually did by saying “Adonai,” which means “our Lord.” They thought if they uttered Jehovah or any of His other names, pagans might assume they were referring to one of the many gods rather than to the one-and-only Lord. Over time among the Jews this well-intentioned practice created a tradition that it was blasphemy to dare to say God’s name – even though all of God’s people since Adam had been doing just that.
When the tradition-loving Masoretes were confronted with inserting vowels between the four consonants, YHWH, they were on the horns of a dilemma: Should they insert the correct vowels and thereby promote “blasphemy,” or should they respectfully insert incorrect vowels into the Book of God’s always-correct word? I’ll ignore the complexities involved in how the Masoretes took the four vowels in “Adonai,” and the way they were pronounced, and ended up inserting three vowels – YeHoWaH – and over-simplify it by just saying this: They took the three pronounced vowel sounds (as distinguished from the four actual written – but not all pronounced – vowels) from the respectful “our Lord” (Adonai) and put them into YHWH. That was the only word in the Bible they did that to; all the other words they may have tried to spell accurately with correct vowels. Their “misspelling” was deliberate; they were being respectful – according to their invented tradition, that is. But their pronunciation was accurate. Now we’ll look at how YeHoWaH became JeHoVaH.
When the Roman Empire conquered the known world, the Roman alphabet was widely adopted. Back in those days, early alphabets were borrowed from other languages and then modified to better represent the sounds of different languages. The Roman letters used to be all caps. The I was used (sometimes confusingly) to represent vowel and consonant sounds – such as the commonly-heard sounds that we think of as a soft G and J, but the letters G and J didn’t exist yet. When the ‘I’ became ‘i’ in lower case, and when the Roman numeral ‘i’ ended a string of i’s – such as the number 8 (viii) – the last i was often given a fancy flourish, as in viij. It wasn’t a j; it was an i; the letter j didn’t exist.
The sound for the modern letter V used to be written/printed as a U and as a UU (starting with Charlemagne’s efforts to increase literacy and education). Eventually the need for separate letters to represent U sounds, double-U sounds, and V sounds, caused U, W, and V respectively to become formally finalized letters.
France and England, whose alphabets derived from Latin, for centuries (until after the Middle Ages) used an I to represent J sounds just as in the Latin language. Gradually people began informally borrowing the j-shaped i from Roman numerals whenever an I was supposed to have a J sound – but that practice was not yet “officially correct.”
Page 7 of 7
In the 1500s, Germans like Martin Luther (the German language derived from Latin and Greek), took the Hebrew letters YHWH (which don’t look like YHWH in Hebrew) and wrote them using German letters that tried to imitate the Hebrew sounds – and that is how the modern YHWH that we’ve become used to seeing originated.
The name “Jehovah” first appeared in an English Bible in 1530 when William Tyndale published a translation of the five books of Moses. Because of the state of the English alphabet (no J or V), it said, Iehouah – with the i sounding like a j, and the u sounding like a v.
When the King James Bible was published in 1611, even though the English alphabet had continued to adapt to proper pronunciation, the standardized use of Js and Vs hadn’t yet become common, so the limited letters available to typesetters at printing presses continued to produce words like Iehouah, Iesus, and Dauid – using the same dual-purpose letters that had been used for many centuries. When the alphabet was modernized (which, for example, made I a full-time vowel, and J a full-time consonant) and different printing businesses became able from the early-to-mid 1700s to afford expensive new inventories of letters that included Js and Vs, subsequent printings of the KJV naturally and correctly utilized the complete inventory of letters to print Jehovah, Jesus, and David – which were pronounced the same way they’d always been for centuries when certain letters did double duty.
When the NT century of the 1800s arrived, education, knowledge, Reason, theology, and scholarship produced an unprecedented deluge of apostasy when scholars and theologians stumbled over unanswerable, trivial issues and turned them into big tempests in teapots. A few examples from just the Jehovah batch of arguments:
Some scholars “thought” it “might” have been “more” accurate (the term “more accurate” is used when they cannot say “accurate” – because they do not know) if the two vowels from hashem had been inserted into YHWH rather than the three vowels from Adonai. Hashem means “the name,” and was sometimes used as part of a respectful reference to God – without using His name. For example, they’d say to each other: “Have you prayed to the name yet?” …instead of saying, “Have you prayed to our Lord yet?” These scholars guessed inserting the two vowel sounds from hashem (rather than the three vowel sounds from Adonai) into Y^HW^H – which produced the two-syllabled YaHWeH – “might be” more respectful and hoped it was closer to the pronunciation of one of the several ancient-era Hebrew dialects (that today we still don’t know how to pronounce) than the more common pronunciation of the three-syllabled YHWH / Jehovah. In order to be more “faithful” to the laughably-inaccurate term “original Hebrew language,” others thought it better to say “Jahveh” or Iohouah, or Iohoua, or Ihouah, or Iehoua, or Iehouah; or (instead of “Jesus”: Yeshua, or Y’shua, or Yehoshua, or Iesous, or Eashoa, or Jeshua, or…and on it goes because there are no answers, but you can sure have fun trying to make yourself sound smart by giving a short-but-impressive dissertation on “the original languages” in order to convince people they should speak common street Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic or pagan Babylonian Aramaic when properly and respectfully addressing our Lord by one of His many names.
There are, of course, problems with all of these theological wranglings. For example, no known Hebrew manuscript that has ever existed used Masoretic or any other kind of markings to indicate that YHWH should be spelled or pronounced as a two-syllabled Yahweh. The two-syllabled YHWH (Yahweh) was invented not by Masoretes, but by well-intentioned modern-era scholars who “thought” they “might” know more about Hebrew than the Masoretes did when they used the three-syllabled YHWH (Yehowah/Jehovah. (It was safe for them to “think” they knew more than the Masoretes…because maybe they did – nobody knows!) Some of the other renderings used today are borrowed from other-language spellings that were used by humble saints back in various eras who never intended for saints in later eras (who would speak and read different languages from them) to always address God in their old, obsolete language.
Bottom line: It is OK to refer to God in whatever language you want. The hotly-debated unanswerable question about whether or not the Masoretes did a good job coming up with the vowel markings for YHWH that resulted in our English Jehovah was finally settled when the Authorized 1611 King James Bible’s miraculous inerrancy made the “manuscript mess” (of both OT and NT manuscripts!) irrelevant by bringing God’s “here a little, and there a little” parable-like truths that were hidden in plain sight by the manuscript mess into the historically-unique Bible whose demonstrated inerrancy made the KJV the only manuscript or version we’ve ever seen that perfectly fit God’s definition of His word. The KJV’s inerrancy gave faithful last-days Christians the Rock-solid manuscript evidence, the irrefutable proof, and the Scripture-based confidence to focus on walking the walk instead of obsessing over how ancient dead-language words ought to be spelled and pronounced today, over whether it was David or Elhanan who killed Goliath, over whether the last 12 verses of Mark…and all the other nonsense that scholars and theologians spend their lives arguing about. The AV1611, by restoring the authority of Thus saith the Lord, has given us the ability to separate things that matter from things that don’t. Anyone today who still engages in theology’s doting about questions and strifes of words is doing so because he has no authoritative Bible to guide him.
In these first five chapters, we’ve taken a quick peek at how knowledge guesswork used unanswerable questions, baseless theories, and insignificant trivia to attack the veracity of the written word of God. In some cases, you might have wondered why I went into so much detail – much of it boring. I did so because I wanted you to see with your own eyes how quickly and utterly the original-autograph epistles and manuscripts were irrecoverably lost in the hopeless quagmire of the “manuscript mess” …even way back in 200 AD when the brilliant Origen lived in Alexandria with access to more manuscripts than any other person in history. I want you to understand how tragic it is for people to pay any attention to falsely-so-called scholars, theologians, and well-intentioned layman’s-aid-using Christians…because they aren’t having faith in God and His word, and they are insulting and blaspheming the Word of God Himself who will judge us by His word. Like Eve, we don’t have a chance in this spiritual war if we try to out-smart the Devil; he is way out of our league. Our only path to salvation is to do what Eve failed to do – stick with the literal words of our living God…and that includes believing His definition of His word.
In the next chapter we’ll get into some history to show how education’s falsely-so-called knowledge promoted philosophy’s Reason, used the love of money to cause people to move into cities, and how “progress” began its subtle process of making people dependent on the world for their very survival.
Have ears that hear...
and endure to the end, comrades!