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Dead Sea Scrolls Vs Bible

Gods Word Is Trustworthy

How the Dead Sea Scrolls “Bible” Differs from the Traditional Hebrew Text

I hope you see that the Dead Sea Scrolls are simply a confirmation of what God has already declared in his word. The Dead Sea Scrolls are another reminder that you can trust Gods word. God has not only been very meticulous in giving us his word, he has also watched over and preserved his word. Here is a Scripture that will remind you about the word of the Lord:

The grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of our God endures forever .

What the Dead Sea Scrolls did was prove that this is true. When it is all said and done, Gods word will remain. You can count on it and you can trust in it. Sometimes it takes man a little while to catch up to where God is. Gods word did not become true in 1947, it was true from the moment God spoke it. Gods word is living and active and it will accomplish what God has set it out to do.

So is my word that goes out from my mouth:It will not return to me empty,but will accomplish what I desireand achieve the purpose for which I sent it .

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Dead Sea Scrolls Add Assurance Of Accuracy

What is so special about these scrolls, and how do they help us prove the Bible is true? Until the discovery of the scrolls, the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Scriptures dated from the 10th century, about 2,500 years after the time of Moses. How can we be assured of the integrity of a document after so much time?

Considering the carefulness of the copyists is one way to be assured of the accuracy of the preservation of the Bible.Considering the carefulness of the copyists is one way to be assured of the accuracy of the preservation of the Bible.

We believe that the Jews were given the responsibility for preserving the Hebrew Scriptures. The apostle Paul wrote: What advantage then has the Jew, or what is the profit of circumcision? Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God .

The Hebrew Scriptures that make up the Old Testament were preserved by a group of Jewish scholars called Masoretes. Their manuscripts are known today as the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were meticulous in their preservation, so when a copy became worn, a new copy was created. Once its accuracy was confirmed, they would destroy the old one. Because of that, the oldest of these manuscripts available today is the Aleppo Codex, dating from A.D. 935.

But how can we prove that a copy from 935 faithfully represents the original writings? The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides important confirmation.

The Scrolls Are In Several Languages

Most of scrolls are in Hebrew using the standard square script, that is similar to todays Modern Hebrew. Several are written in paleo-Hebrew, an ancient script from the First Temple period. The collection also includes many Aramaic and Greek texts, as well as some Arabic texts and a small number of Latin fragments.

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Search For The Qumran Caves

Early in September 1948, Metropolitan bishop brought some additional scroll fragments that he had acquired to professor Ovid R. Sellers, the new director of ASOR. By the end of 1948, nearly two years after the discovery of the scrolls, scholars had yet to locate the original cave where the fragments had been found. With unrest in the country at that time, no large-scale search could be safely undertaken. Sellers tried to persuade the Syrians to assist in the search for the cave, but he was unable to pay their price. In early 1949, the government of Jordan granted permission to the Arab Legion to search the area in which the original Qumran cave was believed to exist. Consequently, Cave 1 was rediscovered on 28 January 1949 by Belgian United Nationsobserver captain Phillipe Lippens and Arab Legion captain Akkash el-Zebn.

Museum Exhibitions And Displays

Spring 2012

Small portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls collections have been put on temporary display in exhibitions at museums and public venues around the world. The majority of these exhibitions took place in 1965 in the United States and the United Kingdom and from 1993 to 2011 in locations around the world. Many of the exhibitions were co-sponsored by either the Jordanian government or the Israeli government . Exhibitions were discontinued after 1965 due to the Six-Day War conflicts and have slowed down in post-2011 as the Israeli Antiquities Authority works to digitize the scrolls and place them in permanent cold storage.

The majority of the Dead Sea Scrolls collection was moved to Jerusalem’s Shrine of the Book after the building’s completion in April 1965. The museum falls under the auspices of the Israel Antiquities Authority, an official agency of the Israeli government. The permanent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition at the museum features a reproduction of the Great Isaiah Scroll, surrounded by reproductions of other fragments that include Community Rule, the War Scroll, and the Thanksgiving Psalms Scroll.

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Who Wrote The Dead Sea Scrolls

Resolving the dispute over authorship of the ancient manuscripts could have far-reaching implications for Christianity and Judaism

Correspondent

Israeli archaeologist yuval peleg halts his jeep where the jagged Judean hills peter out into a jumble of boulders. Before us, across the flat-calm Dead Sea, the sun rises over the mountains of Jordan. The heat on this spring morning is already intense. There are no trees or grass, just a few crumbling stone walls. It is a scene of silent desolationuntil, that is, tourists in hats and visors pour out of shiny buses.

They have come to this harsh and remote site in the West Bank, known as Qumran, because this is where the most important religious texts in the Western world were found in 1947. The Dead Sea Scrollscomprising more than 800 documents made of animal skin, papyrus and even forged copperdeepened our understanding of the Bible and shed light on the histories of Judaism and Christianity. Among the texts are parts of every book of the Hebrew canonwhat Christians call the Old Testamentexcept the book of Esther. The scrolls also contain a collection of previously unknown hymns, prayers, commentaries, mystical formulas and the earliest version of the Ten Commandments. Most were written between 200 B.C. and the period prior to the failed Jewish revolt to gain political and religious independence from Rome that lasted from A.D. 66 to 70predating by 8 to 11 centuries the oldest previously known Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Tell A Remarkable Story And Provide Evidence That The Bible Is True What Do You Need To Know About These Amazing Documents

How can we prove that the Bible is true and inerrant?

The doctrine of inerrancy, as commonly understood, states: Inerrancy is the view that when all the facts become known, they will demonstrate that the Bible in its original autographs and correctly interpreted is entirely true and never false in all it affirms, whether that relates to doctrines or ethics or to the social, physical, or life sciences. This statement was articulated in the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy 1974.

Many churches list this as one of their fundamental beliefs. But what does it mean? Is the Bible true, or is it simply a compilation of myths?

Lets examine that question further in this second article in the series Is the Bible True? This article will examine the second of five proofs, showing how the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that the Holy Scriptures have been preserved extraordinarily accurately for thousands of years. We believe this is clear testimony to Gods involvement in this book He inspired to serve as our guide.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls Are Biblical Apocryphal And Sectarian Works

The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient manuscripts discovered between 1947 and 1956. Archeologists found about 950 different manuscripts of various lengths, mostly in fragments, though some were intact. The manuscripts have been classified into three main categories: biblical, apocryphal, and sectarian. The apocryphal books include such works as Tobit, Judith, the Book of Jubilees, and the Fourth Book of Ezra. The sectarian scrolls included interpretations of Pentateuch laws, various biblical stories, and the Prophets.

Some Scrolls Were Destroyed By The Bedouins Who Found Them

What Is Actually Written In The Dead Sea Scrolls?

The Bedouin shepherds first discovered the scrolls by accident after mindlessly throwing a rock into a cave. They heard the shatter of pottery and went to investigate. After finding seven scrolls, the shepherds returned to their camp and showed them off.

There was a rumor that some of these scrolls were destroyed. John C. Trever interviewed the shepherds who first found the scrolls and learned that the Community Rule scroll was accidentally damaged. But none of the original seven scrolls were destroyed.

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The Dead Sea Scrolls And The Septuagint

The scrolls also shed light on the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint , which differs at times from the Masoretic Text. Most differences between the two are minor, such as the addition or changing of an individual word. Such differences rarely change the meaning of the text in question. However, there are also large-scale differencessuch as additions or omissions of whole sections of text and, in some cases, reordering of entire sections of texts within a book . Notably, the New Testament often quotes the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. But is the Septuagint a reliable translation?

Some of the biblical scrolls from Qumran reveal the existence of a Hebrew base text for readings found in the Greek translation, suggesting the Septuagint is a faithful translation of a Hebrew text that existed during that time. For example, two Jeremiah manuscripts, 4QJerb and 4QJerd, attest to a Hebrew text tradition underlying the Greek version of Jeremiaha shorter text with some sections of text arranged in an order different from mt. Simply put, the variant readings attested in the biblical scrolls from Qumran indicate that the Septuagint translator carefully worked from a Hebrew text tradition that differed from the Masoretic Text.

The Dead Sea Scrolls And The Masoretic Text

The Dead Sea Scrolls play a crucial role in assessing the accurate preservation of the Old Testament. With its hundreds of manuscripts from every book except Esther, detailed comparisons can be made with more recent texts.

The Old Testament that we use today is translated from what is called the Masoretic Text. The Masoretes were Jewish scholars who between A.D. 500 and 950 gave the Old Testament the form that we use today. Until the Dead Sea Scrolls were found in 1947, the oldest Hebrew text of the Old Testament was the Masoretic Aleppo Codex which dates to A.D. 935.5

With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now had manuscripts that predated the Masoretic Text by about one thousand years. Scholars were anxious to see how the Dead Sea documents would match up with the Masoretic Text. If a significant amount of differences were found, we could conclude that our Old Testament Text had not been well preserved. Critics, along with religious groups such as Muslims and Mormons, often make the claim that the present day Old Testament has been corrupted and is not well preserved. According to these religious groups, this would explain the contradictions between the Old Testament and their religious teachings.

Despite the thousand year gap, scholars found the Masoretic Text and Dead Sea Scrolls to be nearly identical. The Dead Sea Scrolls provide valuable evidence that the Old Testament had been accurately and carefully preserved.

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Physical Publication And Controversy

Some of the fragments and scrolls were published early. Most of the longer, more complete scrolls were published soon after their discovery. All the writings in Cave 1 appeared in print between 1950 and 1956 those from eight other caves were released in 1963 and 1965 saw the publication of the Psalms Scroll from Cave 11. Their translations into English soon followed.

Controversy

Publication of the scrolls has taken many decades, and delays have been a source of academic controversy. The scrolls were controlled by a small group of scholars headed by John Strugnell, while a majority of scholars had access neither to the scrolls nor even to photographs of the text. Scholars such as Norman Golb, publishers and writers such as Hershel Shanks, and many others argued for decades for publishing the texts, so that they become available to researchers. This controversy only ended in 1991, when the Biblical Archaeology Society was able to publish the “Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls”, after an intervention of the Israeli government and the Israeli Antiquities Authority . In 1991 Emanuel Tov was appointed as the chairman of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, and publication of the scrolls followed in the same year.

Physical description

Discoveries in the Judaean Desert

A Preliminary Edition of the Unpublished Dead Sea Scrolls

A Facsimile Edition of the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Facsimile Edition by Facsimile Editions Ltd, London, England

The Forgeries Missing Source

Archaeology and Biblical Studies: The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls ...

Though the report delves into the fragments makeup, it does not investigate their provenance, or the proven chain of ownership tracing back to their place of origin. For Justnes, the post-2002 fragments missing backstories pose a greater concern than any chemical evidence of forgery.

We should perhaps really hope that are fakes … If they are fakes, we have been duped, he says. But if they are authentic, unprovenanced artifacts, they must have been looted, they must have been smuggledthey were tied to criminal acts in some way.

The authentic Dead Sea Scrolls trace back to 1947, when Bedouin herders found clay jars in Palestines Qumran caves that held thousands of parchment scrolls more than 1,800 years old, including some of the oldest surviving copies of the Hebrew Bible.

To better understand the fragments’ surface features, researchers photographed the pieces under many different wavelengths of light, a technique called multispectral imaging.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are inarguably the most important biblical discovery of the last century, Kloha says. That pushed our knowledge of the biblical text back one thousand years from what was available at the time, and showed some varietybut especially the consistencyof the tradition of the Hebrew Bible.

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The Old Testament Manuscripts Of The Dead Sea Scrolls

The most celebrated of the Scrolls have been the Old Testament manuscripts. Although some scholars have asserted that fragments of certain New Testament verses can be located, most scholars agree that no New Testament copies, quotations, or fragments exist among the Dead Sea Scrolls.While the Qumran community did in fact exist at the time of Jesus and the Apostles, there is no evidence that any of the Dead Sea Jewish communities were aware of the early Christian movement. This means our discussion of biblical evidence must focus on the Old Testament. We shall begin by discussing the numbers of manuscripts we possess before moving to consider issues relating to the canonicity of the Old Testament.

Almost All Of The Hebrew Bible Is Represented In The Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls include fragments from every book of the Old Testament except for the Book of Esther. Scholars have speculated that traces of this missing book, which recounts the story of the eponymous Jewish queen of Persia, either disintegrated over time or have yet to be uncovered. The only complete book of the Hebrew Bible preserved among the manuscripts from Qumran is Isaiah this copy, dated to the first century B.C., is considered the earliest Old Testament manuscript still in existence. Along with biblical texts, the scrolls include documents about sectarian regulations, such as the Community Rule, and religious writings that do not appear in the Old Testament.

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What Are The Dead Sea Scrolls

In case you are not familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls let me help you understand what they are. The story of their discovery almost plays like a Hollywood movie script. In 1947 there were a group of teenagers who were taking care of their sheep and goats. These teenagers were near the town of Qumran which is located on the shore of the Dead Sea It is because of the location of the discovery that they got the name the Dead Sea Scrolls.

One of the young shepherds, while looking for his lost goat, happened to throw a rock into a cave and heard some pottery shatter. This led him to investigate, which led him to discover a collection of jars in a cave some of which contained these scrolls.

These scrolls contained texts that were more than 2,000 years old. Because of their discovery, archeologists came to the region, where they were able to recover thousands of additional fragments. When these fragments were all combined, they made up somewhere between 800 and 900 manuscripts.

Biblical Manuscripts By The Numbers

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All Judean desert sites show a special respect for the Law of Moses. The Pentateuch represents 87 of the some 200 biblical Qumran scrolls, and 15 of the additional 25 texts discovered outside Qumran are of the Pentateuch.10 In other words, 45% of the total number of texts from the Judean desert are Pentateuchal. The Major Prophets represent 46 additional manuscripts, and the Minor Prophets 10 more. So Prophetic books account for nearly one-quarter of the whole. This leaves 25-30% for the rest of the Old Testament.

The Historical Books did not fare as well, with only 18 copies. To illustrate, just one small fragment about the size of a human hand represents all of 1 and 2 Chronicles, and no copies were identified of the Nehemiah section of Ezra-Nehemiah or of the book of Esther. The Poetic Books, excluding Psalms, represent 14 manuscripts. But 39 manuscripts of Psalms alone were discovered, 36 of which are from Qumran. Broadly speaking, the popularity and dispersion of biblical scrolls in the Judean Desert matches very closely what we observe among the books quoted in the New Testament.

Biblical Book

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