 We're listening to the Naked Bible Podcast. To support this podcast, click at NakedBiblePodcast.com and click on the support link in the upper right-hand corner. If you're new to the podcast and Dr. Heizer's approach to the Bible, click on New Start Here at NakedBiblePodcast.com Welcome to the Naked Bible Podcast, Episode 104, How We Got the Old Testament. I'm the layman, Trey Strickland, and he's the scholar, Dr. Michael Heizer. Hi Mike, how are you? Very good, very good. This is one of my favorite subjects. The Old Testament? Go figure it. Yeah, I like textual criticism stuff and we had Rick Brannon on earlier talking about the New Testament and trying to inject some sanity into some of the conspiratorial stuff that goes on with that. So here we are with Equal Time and like I said, I just like this subject. I think it's really interesting and hopefully listeners will too. I can guarantee you we all think it's interesting, so please. Well, we'll find out. Well, I want to start off by talking, I'm going to try to go from composition, like, okay, how do we get the Old Testament? Books in terms of them being composed or written and they do a little bit with the editorial process. Some of the things that went into that and then talk about how the things that were produced, the books that were produced were recognized again as canonical or as inspired or given sacred status. Just a little bit on that and then we'll talk about transmission, which a lot of people when you say, let's talk about how we got the Old Testament, it's what the scribes do, what about all these manuscripts and whatnot. So we'll hit that as well and that's pretty involved, but I think again, really interesting subject that once we get to that point, we will be able to touch at least a little bit on conspiracy land. So there is some of this with the Old Testament. But then once the text was transmitted by hand, you do reach a certain point where it begins to be published, things like the printing press and all the way up to the modern day, the actual sort of official published editions of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament. And we'll end by mentioning that, hey, even though we've got a lot of this stuff published, there are actually three in the case of Old Testament, three ongoing Old Testament text projects as we speak. So you might wonder, well, isn't the job done? Don't we have the Hebrew Bible? Yeah, we do. But as we'll learn when we get especially into manuscript transmission, there are different approaches that people take. Scholars have taken with regard to producing a particular edition of the Hebrew Bible and there are naturally disagreements on approaches and sort of methods. And so that's what a lot of the current work is doing to people just taking different approaches on how to produce a useful Hebrew Bible for today. But let's just jump in kind of at the beginning with composition and editorial activity. And chronologically, again, this is something, again, if you take a conservative view of Mosaic authorship, whether that means Moses lived and wrote something or Moses wrote the whole Torah, right away you get into a chronological issue is that roughly 1400 BC, that would be the early date of the Exodus, it would be 1446. So authorship of what we think of as the Torah, the initial books, at least in that reconstruction would be around 1400. But if you take the late date, then it's around 1200. So just going with the early date, the books of the Hebrew Bible, again, and the Hebrew Bible is essentially like a library. It's composed of many books that began again in the lifetime of Moses. We're talking 1400 or 1200 BC and it continues all the way into the second century BC. Now that is especially true if, again, you assign late authorship to a book like Daniel. A lot of people don't. Daniel, you get big controversy, was it written in the 6th century BC or was it written in the 2nd century BC, whatnot. But I'm giving a 2nd century BC date also because even if Daniel was written in the 6th century and you have other books that are written maybe in the 500s and the 400s, books like Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, those sorts of things, you're still running right into around 400 BC for the original compositions. But then you have editorial activity that begins in the exile and moves on for a few centuries that, again, to the best estimates of scholars, this is a process that went on for a couple of centuries. And so a 3rd century going down into the 2nd century BC is typically when scholars of all varieties, whether they're confessional or not, they would sort of say, well, the whole thing was kind of wrapped up by this point at least as far as the Old Testament goes. So you've got a good 1,000 years, let's say 1,400 to 200 BC, that's 1,200. But even at the late date, you still got 1,000 years course of time for the creation of the books of the Hebrew Bible. Now, what are they doing? Well, when we talk about composition, some books would have been composed in the Old Hebrew script. We're going to talk about scripts a little bit, both now and a little bit later. But folks need to realize that when you look at Hebrew today, you see a picture of the Hebrew Bible or you actually have a Hebrew Bible or you see it online or whatever, the style of letters, the script that's used was not the original Hebrew script. The original Hebrew script looked quite a bit different. If you know anything about the history of the alphabet, again, you know where this comes from. The Semitic alphabet has Egyptian origins. And then it moves into different parts of Syria, Palestine where Semitic peoples are using this particular alphabet. It often gets assigned to the Phoenicians. Well, the Phoenicians weren't the ones who invented the alphabet, but the style that they came up with was widely used, again, throughout the ancient world, including Israel, including the biblical lands. So you do have some books written in the Old Hebrew script. The block script, that's the script that we're accustomed now, the way Hebrew looks to our eye now. That was something that came about during the exile. So during the exile, you might have a book written in that script and not the old one. But eventually, during and after the exile, again, over the course of a few centuries, you're going to have books that may have been written in the Old Hebrew script. They have to be updated. They have to be reproduced in the new script. So that's part of composing and editing. You also have instances where you're taking oral tradition and you're codifying it. You're putting it into writing. And if you take a non-Mosaic view of at least parts of the Torah, you might say something like, well, Israel's early history, the patriarchs, that was something that was put into oral, from oral tradition into writing during the exile. Others would say, well, Moses could have done that. He doesn't have to invent that stuff. He would have known the oral history of his people. And so he did it. But regardless, some books, when they're written, are not just written from scratch, so to speak. They're actually reproductions. They're written codification of oral tradition. So that's part of how books were composed. Sometimes you get a book that's quote, unquote, complete, and then it gets added to. In our last episode, we talked about Moses and the serpent and the wilderness. And I said, my preference is to see Genesis 1 through 11 as written later than Moses during the exile and then added to the Torah. Sort of a primeval history added prior to the history of the people of Israel, which begins with Abraham and whatnot. And so again, if either that's the case or some other instance, we're going to talk about a few of these instances. Then you have books that were quote, unquote, complete. But then they get added to or they get changed. They get edited so that something else can be fit in there. That happens in the creation of a biblical book. When I talk about editing, some of that that I've already talked about is part of the picture. Well, we got something to add here, so we need to change some wording here and there so the addition makes sense. And because we've added something, we might need to change a word or two down the road a little bit again so that it all makes sense. You have kind of traditional editing like that. And we'll look at some examples. But you also have the kind of editorial activity that only people who are either reading the text in Hebrew or who know Semitic languages would recognize. And that is Hebrew is like any other language. It evolves over time. It's vocabulary changes. That's the most obvious change that most people know about a language even over the course of our lifetime. English has changed every year. They give awards to new words invented that get added to the dictionary. Which one is the best one or the most popular one? Words like Internet didn't exist when I was in high school. Worldwide Web was a term that just didn't exist. All sorts of things. Smartphone didn't exist when I was in high school. So you have vocabulary changes. They're the easiest ones to understand. But you also have grammatical changes. And Hebrew, because Hebrew is a very old language, the grammar used in earliest Hebrew is not quite the same as we find in the Hebrew Bible. So sometimes in the Hebrew Bible you'll be reading along and you will see what scholars call an archaic form. That there's an old form, an old grammatical form in the text that never got changed. And sometimes that helps you data text. Sometimes it doesn't. But it happens. It's evidence that either the editor, some editor who was updating it to go from old Hebrew language whenever this book was originally written, now we're updating it into biblical Hebrew prose, quote unquote classical Hebrew, that they either missed that or they let it go for some specific reason. And then scholars like to try to figure out why is it still here and that sort of thing. But you get that. One of the more prominent examples of this would be vowels. Hebrew originally had no vowels. It doesn't get dots and dashes like we are used to seeing today for Hebrew vowels. That doesn't happen until the Middle Ages. But prior to that, Hebrew used certain consonants to do double duty as vowels. And that practice of using certain consonants to also function as vowels varied over time. It was more common in earliest Hebrew as opposed to the Hebrew Bible we have today because once the dot and dash vowel system was invented, the scribes didn't see a use for making consonants do double duty. That's why a biblical Hebrew passage will have different letters, different spelling than like a Dead Sea Scroll. And again, we'll talk a little bit more about all these things, but I'm just giving you kind of an overview of the things that you have to think about or the things that are happening even when you're trying to just write the text out, when you're trying to produce a book to be copied and transmitted. All of these things are happening. Yes, prophets, prophetic voices in the believing community, people called by God, sit down and write stuff. They do that. But what they write will get re-fashioned. It will get updated either by script or by grammar, by vocabulary. All of these things happen over the course of time as scribes take what exists and then modify it according to what people are reading or are able to read at their particular time. Over the span of 1,000 or 1,200 years, this just happens. In other words, the text of the Hebrew Bible doesn't just drop from heaven. It is the product of human beings, again, that God chooses, God calls. And to produce a readable thing by the end of that 1,000 year period, you've had all sorts of things happen to it. You've had all sorts of hands touch it. Again, scribes, people who know what they're doing, and they produce what we call in scholarship as the quote, the final form of the text. And the final form of biblical books, again, you can pretty much say, okay, 300, 200 BC. Hebrew Bible is in its final form around that time. That's a safe number. Now, let's talk a little bit about some of the specifics here when it comes to, you know, content editing. Again, just giving you some examples of how things in the text have to be changed. I'm not going to go into grammatical forms and, oh, this is what the first common singular used to look like and that just doesn't translate well to podcasts and it also requires a certain knowledge of, you know, Semitic morphology. I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to give you some substantive examples of how the Hebrew Bible itself informs us that it did have editorial hands in it. Example, you know, just a couple from content editing. Ezekiel 1. I've used this example in other discussions before. It might be familiar to listeners, but if you open your Bible and you go to Ezekiel 1, the first three verses, I'm going to read it to you and just ask yourself if anything sounds unusual here. So here we go. In the 30th year, in the fourth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I was among the exiles by the Kivar canal, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. On the fifth day of the month, it was the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiakon, the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Boozy, in the land of the Chaldeans by the Kivar canal and the hand of the Lord was upon him there. Okay, that's Ezekiel 1.1 through 3. What's odd about it? What's odd is that in three verses, you have a change from the first person. I was among the exiles. I saw visions of God. To the third person, the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel, that guy over there. The hand of the Lord was upon him. It doesn't say the word of the Lord came to me. It doesn't say the hand of the Lord was upon me. After the first person. It doesn't do that. It changes from first person to third person. Just in the span of three verses. And you actually have the Kivar canal mentioned twice, once with the first person references and once with the third person references. This is just point blank evidence that someone did editorial work. So we could have had a text that Ezekiel himself wrote in the first person and a scribe comes along. Maybe they collected a lot of Ezekiel sermons or whatnot and they want to fashion them into a readable book. So we'll leave the first person in here. Ezekiel gets to introduce his own book. But now we have to start filling in some gaps here to tell a story about Ezekiel. So it switches to third person. So someone, again, is working with the text with resources, whether they be sermons written down by somebody, a stenographer or a scribe or what I mean, Jeremiah had Baruch the scribe. There was a school of the prophets, where people were trained to do what prophets do, which was preach. So somebody's writing stuff down and then somebody has to fashion it into a book. And this is just, it's a very easy example to see how this comes about, how this happens and how it's reflected in the text. Here's another one. You'll read in the Psalms at Psalm 72 verse 20. The prayers of David, the son of Jesse, are ended. Really? Because you'll find Psalms after Psalm 72 that are Psalms, prayers of David. Oh, there's an air in Psalm 72, 20. You know, because there are Psalms of David that come afterwards. Oh, this is an air. No, what it tells you, again, if you look at the Psalms, it's actually composed of five separate books. The book of Psalms is actually five distinct books. And they were collected over time. And so at some point, the collection ended at Psalm 72, 20. And a scribe, an editor, said, hey, the prayers of David, the son of Jesse are ended. This is what we got. Well, maybe somebody living 100 years after him said, hey, there's more of these. You know, David wrote more of them and we need to put them in there too. And so they get added to the end. Okay, that's just the way it is. And they don't bother, again, to correct the language of 72, 20. It just stays in there. Again, it's just, it's proof of, again, editorial activity, or in this case, it's proof of more material being brought into a book. And then this kind of language, again, is just left untouched. You know, for whatever reason, scribes do what they do. They have reasons for not doing or doing something because they're people, right? We just are dealing with the product of their decisions. We also have in Psalms changes in the Divine Name or at least unusual patterns. For instance, in the Psalms, Psalm 1 to Psalm 41. So you got 40 Psalms there. And then Psalms 90 through 106 use the term Yahweh, the Divine Name, Y-H-W-H, almost exclusively, almost 100% of the time. But in between those two groups, remember, I just said Psalm 1 to 41 and then Psalms 90 to 106. In between that, Psalms 73 to 83, you almost never see Y-H-W-H. You see Elohim instead. Why is that? And then afterwards from Psalm 84 through Psalm 89, you get both. And then you're going to have both scattered along the way as you keep going in the book of Psalms. Why these patterns? Why do you have clusterings of Yahweh in some sections to almost an exclusive way? And then in another section, it's completely flipped around. You never use Yahweh. You only use Elohim. Scholars refer to these sections, the ones that use Elohim as the Eloistic Psalter. Again, that it was put together by a different group or a different scribe or scribes than the ones who collected and edited the other group. And they just had a preference for what are we going to use? We're going to use the divine name. We're going to use Elohim. And we're just left to look at and observe the product of their decisions. But these patterns are there. They're not contrived. They're just there. There's also duplicate Psalms. Why does Psalm 53? Why is it the same as Psalm 14? Why is Psalm 70 the same as Psalm 40? Sections are that. Psalm 108, similar to sections in Psalm 57. I mean, almost word for word. Why is that? Well, nobody really knows. But for some reason, you have duplication going on as well in the Psalms. Someone had to either decide to produce the duplication or just leave it in and not take it out. These are just, again, editorial decisions. Another example. And this is a common one. And I'm going to mention an article here and read from it because I think it's a good overview of this issue. And plus, I know the author and he's a good guy, Mike Grisanti, who teaches at Master's Seminary, wrote an article a number of years ago called Inspiration, Inerrancy, and the Old Testament Canon, colon, subtitle, The Place of Textual Updating in an Inerrant View of Scripture. Now, whether you like the word inerrancy or not isn't the issue here. I mean, in my view, you don't even have to use it to understand this article and to get a lot of benefit out of the article. But what Grisanti does in the article is show examples of how the Biblical text was updated. And then he knows that, you know, you could point this out to people, point out the content of his article to people and they might be troubled. How can I believe the Bible is a trustworthy source? If these things were changed, they wouldn't have been changed unless they were errors. So he tries to correct some of the, frankly, poor thinking that goes into that, hence the title of his article. But let me just read from Grisanti and give you a few examples. That's all the process of composition, all the process of, quote, achieving the final form of the text. That's what we're talking about. How do we get our Old Testament? Well, first you have to have the final form of all the books and then they're put together in this thing we call the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament. So this is where we're starting. How do we get the final forms of the books? What's going on? What's happening to them? What's the process? Again, just giving you little glimpses of the process. The place name Dan often appears in the historical books as a reference to the northernmost point of the Promised Land. He gives a few references. Judges 1829, 21, 20 verse 1, so on and so forth. And is part of the common geographical expression from Dan to Bear Sheva, like in 1 Samuel 320. It is customarily identified with Tel El-Kadi. That's Q-A-D-I. This ancient city was known as Laish in the Egyptian execration texts and the Mari texts. Let me just stop there. Execration texts were, it was kind of a form of sympathetic magic where Egyptians would, you know, priests or whatnot, and they would write names of either people or places, you know, cities on like pieces of pottery, you know, their enemies, and then they would smash the bowl and stomp on it and grind it to a powder. Like, that's going to make them go away now. This is part of defeating my enemies. So, execration texts were these, this kind of stuff written on, again, pieces of pottery or even, you know, you know, in theory you could have it written on anything and just destroyed, but a lot of the execration texts we know come from discoveries of the pottery or you put them back together and that's what you got. So, Grisanti mentions, well, this place that everybody, you know, pretty much identifies with Dan, used to be known as La'Ish in the Egyptian Execration texts. The number of them, you know, predate the Mosaic era. The Mari texts certainly do. And Grisanti continues, the city of Dan received its name in the settlement period when the Danite tribe migrated north and conquered the city of La'Ish. That's in Genesis 1414. You will specifically, again, you read that reference. Okay, now here's the kicker. Consequently, it appears that this place did not receive the name Dan until after the Mosaic period. If you look at Judges 1829, it says this. This is after the tribe of Dan migrates from the south to the north. It says, and they named the city Dan, after the name of Dan, their ancestor, who was born to Israel, but the name of the city was La'Ish at the first. It actually says that in the Bible. So, when you have Dan used of this spot, this location, prior to this period, somebody after the name change occurred had to update the text. This is, again, what Grisanti is pointing out. He continues, Genesis 1414 mentions Dan as the ending point of the first phase of Abraham's Abrams, pursuit of lots, captors. From Dan, Abraham and his men divided into two groups and pursued the enemy as far as the region to the north of Damascus. We may assume that Moses originally wrote La'Ish, which was later changed to Dan when the place name was actually changed. The geographical parameter, another kind of proof of this, the geographical parameter of Gilead, this is a quote from Deuteronomy 341, Gilead as far as Dan in Deuteronomy 341, and the placement of the blessing for the tribe of Dan, Deuteronomy 3322, after the blessings promised as Zebulun, Issachar Gad, and before the blessings promised to Asher, all of those were northern tribes, suggests a similar updating. Here's the point. So when Moses, if Moses is supposed to be writing Deuteronomy, Moses is using, at least when we look at our Bible, you have references in Deuteronomy, supposedly again from the hand of Moses, using the term Dan. But that place only became Dan in the period of the judges, which is well after Moses. Again, because of what it says in Judges 1829, it was changed in the period of the judges from Dan or from La'Ish to Dan. So it was changed after Moses was long dead. So Moses would not have used the word Dan, he would have used the word La'Ish because that was the name of the place when he was living. So in our Hebrew Bible, where it says Dan everywhere, instead of La'Ish, for what Moses was supposed to have written, either Moses didn't write it or somebody had to update the place names. One of these views of Deuteronomy is that Moses wrote it and that someone again, in this case a place name, had to go through the text and change the name of these locations so that people who were reading it in the period of judges and beyond would know what the text is even talking about. Okay, because if they kept using La'Ish, if they kept the text as it was, no one living in the period of judges or later is gonna know where that place is because there is no La'Ish anymore. It had been renamed. So scribes, this is the kind of thing they do. They will work through a text and they will update place names. Sometimes they will do it with personal names, but typically this happens with place names so that their readers know where these things happen, what the text is even talking about. You have phrases like unto this day in the Hebrew Bible. This is also from Grisanti. The statement that Bashan was called Havoth Yair unto this day in honor of Yair the son of Manasseh who was influential in the conquest of that region and that information comes from Deuteronomy 314. That statement would make little sense in the time of Moses when that region was first taken over by Israel. This phrase suggests the passage of some time. Again, so in Moses' day, it would have been called one thing and after Moses' day it would have been called another. So when you see the more recent name in a Mosaic text and you know it shouldn't have been there because it only got changed after Moses died, somebody else had to do that. The text gets edited and that's all we're talking about. So when it comes to achieving the final form of the text, the books of the Hebrew Bible go through a considerable process. Again, there's updating of the script. We have to basically rewrite everything that had been written in the old Hebrew lettering script because now for the people alive here in the exile, the Jewish community right here, nobody can read that. So we need to use the new script, the block script that we are familiar with but that was adopted during the exile because that's what people in Babylon were using for Aramaic, which was the, again, the language of commerce, the language of the day. Everybody knew Aramaic and this is the way Aramaic was written. So the Hebrew scribes adopted the script and they converted the text of the Hebrew Bible into that script so that people living during that time and of course beyond would be able to read their Bible. So that just happens. Grammatical changes happen. Vocabulary changes happen. Place name changes happen. Arrangement of material gets edited. New material gets added. All of these things just happen. They are part of the process of producing the final form of the Hebrew Bible. Each book has undergone to some degree this kind of process. And again, we have to get away from this notion that when we look at it at a Hebrew text and in some cases people even think this way with the English Bible, it just wasn't dictated. It just didn't drop from heaven. That is not the way you got it. It just isn't by virtue of its own testimony. The features in the text. This has nothing to do with, oh, do you believe there's a God or not? Do you believe in inspiration or not? Do you believe science or not? It has nothing to do with any of that talk. This has to do with what you actually find in the text that has to be accounted for. And, you know, theologically, this is not a troublesome thing. Why? Because you know what it means? It means that God used people to produce the Bible. What a novel thought. Hey, news flash, that's what the Bible actually says. Okay, God used people to produce it. And people use drum roll please, human processes. Okay, they're not like supernaturally gifted. They don't become mutants. They don't go into trances. They write and they edit. And frankly, they do a good job. I mean, the Bible in terms of literary quality is a wondrous thing. Even if no one assigns any theological or religious validity to it, it's as long been recognized as a thing of wonder just in terms of the literary output. They knew what they were doing. So, this is how the final form of the text, we get it. Now, once you have it, then you get into the issue of, okay, there's lots of other stuff being written. How do we know, like the books that are in the Hebrew Bible, how do we know we got the right ones, that we got the inspired ones and no others and we didn't miss any of the inspired ones and all that kind of stuff. And again, for those who have had a little theological background, this is gonna sound familiar because I think it's a very kind of understandable model. But the belief was within the believing community and the people who were serious about their faith, they believed that the Spirit of God, God would use the Spirit of God over time, not like to zap them with a lightning bolt if they made a wrong choice, but over time, the believing community would successfully recognize the books that God wanted preserved and elevated to the level of Scripture. In other words, there was just this belief that the Spirit of God would do this. God would work it out. He would use people to get the job done and get it right. And that means along the way, and not every book was discussed and debated. Most of the books of the Hebrew Bible were like no-brainers to the believing community. There were some outliers. There were some that people wondered about. We'll get to those in a second, but for the most part, this was an easy task, but there was some discussion, but they just believed that, look, God is going to work through his people and the Spirit of God is gonna make sure we do this right and over time, there's a consensus achieved and that was good enough for the Jewish community. Now, having said that, there are historical references to parts of this process. For instance, around 400 BC, there's a reference in 2 Maccabees, chapter 2, verses 13 and 15, that says to the effect that they found a library or founded a library and collected books about the kings and the prophets and the writings of David. Books about the kings and the prophets, historical books, books of Samuel, books of kings, books of chronicles, writings of David, there you're gonna have a reference to the Psalms and so it's just a reference to the fact that there are people collecting this material and putting it into a library form and they're just telling you, okay, here's what we've got. There's just a little snippet of history that they were actively doing this. You'll also get a reference to a quote, great assembly, which was actually 120 scribes and Jewish authorities, theological religious authorities that did what they did. They functioned as a group from roughly 200 BC to 70 AD when the temple was destroyed, but they are described and given credit by tradition as being the ones who sort of kind of shook the whole process out. They were the ones that would discuss again, well, why do some among us not think that the Book of Esther should be in here or something like that? So they are the ones who had the discussion and so when you get into 200 BC or so, most of it's fixed, most of the sense of, okay, what is canon, what is sacred is fixed. You've got the final form of the Hebrew text, it's recognized for what it is. Again, the discussion on a couple items went a little bit longer than that, but by the time Jesus and the apostles, the Jewish community has a Bible, they have an Old Testament. And what they did, what you actually see in the Gospels, for instance, let's just take a few examples. The Torah, the Torah was accepted by all of the major Jewish groups, the Pharisees, the Samaritans, the Sadducees and whatnot. Prophets in the writings, again, there are some historical references to people wondering about certain books. Again, I've mentioned Esther, I'll mention a couple more here in a moment. So there was a little bit of disagreement there. There wasn't with the Torah, but some of the other ones, again, there's some ongoing discussion. Jesus recognized the three-fold division, the Law of the Prophets in the writings, that's Luke 24, 44. So again, that's evidence that Jesus recognized what would become the three-fold division of the Hebrew Bible that we're familiar with. So he would have been in the camp, that's how he looked at things. There are little books. Again, there are references to this in Jewish writings of the Second Temple Period, the Inter-Testamental Period. Some ancient sources like Second Exodus give the number of the books of the Hebrew Bible at 24. Josephus gives the number at 22. The modern Hebrew Bible has 36. The modern English Old Testament has 39. If you go with the Septuagint, again, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the translation came from a Hebrew Bible, a Hebrew text. If you go with the Septuagint as a translation product, that had 46 books of the Old Testament written in it. So it's like, what is going on here? Well, what's going on here is a couple of things. Some Old Testament books could either be separated into two books or put together in one. For instance, we have Ezra and Nehemiah. In a lot of ancient traditions and text manuscript evidence, those two are one. Well, that's going to affect your count number. Same with the books of Samuel. Is it one book or is it two? Kings, is that two books or one? Chronicles, two books or one? You have things like this that affect the counting number. So these historical references to really a wide divergence of the numbering of the books of the Old Testament should not be taken as evidence that people couldn't figure it out. What it actually is, is evidence of how they are divided or not and then how they are counted. Now, the exception of this is the Septuagint, because the Septuagint is going to have books that the Jewish community ultimately is not going to approve of. Books like First and Second Maccabees. And when I say they don't approve of, I mean they don't view at the same level as sacred books as the canon, as the ones that are inspired. So you will have, you know, most of the Jewish community reject extra books like, you know, the Maccabees book and, you know, Ezra, you know, Fourth Ezra, and Esdras and, you know, Judith and Tobit and the things that you find in the Septuagint that you also find in the Catholic Old Testament. We'll talk about, you know, what the relationship is there in a moment. But the Jewish community, again, far and away, they're dealing with the same list. If we take the Septuagint out of the picture for the moment, the Jewish community has the same set of books. It's just, okay, how do we divide them or combine them and then what's the count? So don't be misled, again, by historical references like this that make it seem that basically got a bunch of keystone cops running around here, nobody knows what to count and what, you know, not to count. That isn't the case. The Septuagint, again, is its own thing. And that, you know, since that became the Bible of the early church, that, you know, was a factor as well to how the Jewish community settled. I mean, they had already settled on the books they wanted. But then you have, again, Christians come along and, you know, certain people who preferred the Septuagint because they were better Greek readers and that had more books in them than the rabbinic community wanted. And so there was an issue there of competition. But for the most part, the Jewish community, again, has their Hebrew Bible. You know, certainly by the time of Jesus and the apostles, it's recognized, it's produced around 200 BC, then it's recognized again. You have these debates going up to the first century. But it's a secure collection. The only issue is, well, what about this thing called the Septuagint? Now, there were a couple, a handful of other outliers that I should mention. If you go, again, if you look at what's going on with the Dead Sea Scrolls, with this particular Jewish sect, okay, living out in the desert, collecting ancient books. There are books. There are pieces of writing. There are texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls that will quote the book of first Enoch as an inspired book. That does happen. Happens with the future church fathers, too. But it's an outlier because this is the only place you're going to find it. They also looked at what's called the Temple Scroll. And they quote the Temple Scroll, which is something that the community would have created, really, and they viewed that at the same level, again, as scripture. They quote it as scripture. So the people at Qumran, again, I'm referring to them as outliers, because that's kind of what they were in this regard. They are citing things that nobody else cites as scripture, but it's part of the record. They did do that. We can look at that and say, well, some Jews thought this way, and they did. Books that were questionable. Books that are getting debated. I've already mentioned Esther. We say, well, why would Esther be debated? Why did some people have questions about that? Well, a number of different reasons. I mean, one of them would be Esther's conduct. She is the heroine, and she does save the Jewish people, but she sleeps with the king, the Gentile king, to do this. And so some people thought, well, is this really a book that we ought to have in the canon? Let's prompt someone to record this and give it the same status. And eventually the book of Esther was considered by the masses of the community as, yeah, that one belongs. And so the belief was, again, that God will lead us to a consensus, and we're going to go with that. That'll be our consensus. Song of Solomon, same reason that a lot of the sexual language, the erotic language there. By the way, the Song of Solomon is not about the relationship of Israel and the church, or Israel to God or the church to Jesus. This is not the purpose of the Song of Solomon. How do we know that, especially the relationship of Christ to the church, that that is not the point? Well, it's pretty simple. The New Testament writers talk about the bride of Christ and things like that, and never once do they quote the Song of Solomon to make the point. They had plenty of opportunities to make the point using the book, and they never do. In fact, the Song of Solomon is never cited at all. So can we dispense with this sort of modern, I don't know, view that tries to allegorize the book and not treat it for what it is. This is a book about erotic love poetry. That's what it is. But for that reason, again, in the ancient Jewish community, it's like, well, this one's not like all the other ones. So what do we do with it? And there were debates over it. Ezekiel 40 to 48, people voted expressed an opinion that, hey, these chapters at the end of the book of Ezekiel, should we let them in there? Should that be part of the canon? You say, well, what's the problem there? Well, it's because the dimensions of the temple don't match under the other temples. So it's like, did they get that wrong? What is it? What's going on here? And so there were people who actually wondered about that. Ecclesiastes was another one. Why? Well, because it's so pessimistic, or at least it sounds that way. You can read Ecclesiastes optimistically as well. Eat, drink and be married because tomorrow we're going to die. That can cut two ways. Either let's enjoy the life that the Creator has given to us to the fullest because life is short, or you can read it pessimistically like, oh, everything's going to hell in a handbasket, so who cares? But the fact that you could read it so negatively, and it seems to say certain things, and it seems to question certain things about faith, about God's operation history, about the life of the believer, and all this kind of stuff. It became an object of discussion. Is this an inspired book? But anyway, these are just examples of the books that got, there was some question over them. And during these couple hundred years, again leading up to the time of Jesus when these debates are getting hashed out, this is what you'll run into, what you'll read. Now, when you have Jesus and the church born, okay, and since the church incorporated gentiles into it, that really made the Septuagint the Bible of choice because most gentiles could not read Hebrew, or they could not read Aramaic. Aramaic would be an Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible. They were called Targums, and the Jewish community is either going to be reading Hebrew or Aramaic. But when you get gentiles into the church, and there were a lot of them, I mean, think about the missionary journeys of Paul, the whole surrounding Mediterranean. There were lots of people coming to embrace Jesus as Messiah. Paul starts, who knows how many churches. There's a need for a translation of the Bible as it existed, which was the Old Testament at the time, that everybody could read, whether you were a Jew or a Gentile. And the answer to that dilemma was the Septuagint because it was written in Greek and everybody could read it. And so that became the Bible of the early church by convenience, by historical happenstance, you could say by providence, whatever. That was the Bible of the early church. It just was. If you recall, this particular edition, this particular Old Testament, had books that the Jewish people, again, who might be coming into the church, that Septuagint has books that we don't recognize. I mean, you got 46 of them in there, and we have a lesser number than that. What's going on here? Well, again, when through historical circumstance, the church grows, eventually it becomes not persecuted. It becomes legalized. It just sort of swallows up the whole Roman world with Constantine's influence, the decree of Theodosian, and all these historical circumstances. Well, the Old Testament of the Septuagint becomes the Old Testament for Christians everywhere. And that's why when the Bible gets put into Latin, Jerome produces the Vulgate, and the church becomes the, quote, Catholic church after several centuries. This is why, even today, the Catholic Old Testament has those extra books. This is just the way it was. Now, when you get to the Reformation, okay, when you get to the Reformation, and there's this reaction against Catholicism, what the Reformers did, I mean, you could look at them and say, well, what can we do to poke the Catholic church in the aisle? Let's cut some books out of the Old Testament. That's not, that's simplistic. It's not what they did. What Luther wanted to do was, and other Reformers, it's not just him, their sort of litmus test was, okay, let's just have, as our Old Testament, the books that we know to exist in Hebrew. That we know, we have a Hebrew text, you know, that corresponded to them. Okay? Let's just do that. And so, that's what they decided to do. That was actually the ancient Jewish method. The books that could be witnessed in Hebrew, and there was a clear manuscript history in Hebrew for these books. Those are the ones that the predominant Jewish community adopted as their Old Testament. Okay? But there were other Jews open to these extra ones being created in between the Testaments. This is the Hellenistic era. They're being written in Greek, but they're being added again to the Septuagint, which was this translation of the Old Testament. So there were some Jews, and of course, a pile of Gentiles that said, no, you know, this is our Old Testament. It's the Septuagint thing with these extra books. That is our Bible. That is the Old Testament. Whereas the mainline Jewish communities like, no, we're only going with the ones we know that were produced in Hebrew originally. This is what we want. So when you get to the Reformation period, that's what the Reformers do. We're going back to the Old Jewish standard. We're going back to the Old Jewish litmus test. Was it originally composed in Hebrew? If it was, thumbs up. If it's not, it ain't in. And so that is why today, if you're not a Catholic, you have the Protestant Bible, ESV, NIV, whatever the English translations are, King James. Although the King James did originally have the Apocrypha produced with it in kind of a nice concession to people who were used to that. But if you buy a King James today, you can buy one with an Apocrypha as part of the edition, but most of the King James aren't going to have it. Most of them are going to be published in the Protestant tradition, like most modern English Bibles that are not affiliated with Catholicism. That's what you're going to get. You're going to get the Old Jewish standard books, the ones that were originally composed in Hebrew. And our number for them is 39. That's the way we divide them up in the history of English Bible production. So that's why the Protestant Bible is different than the Catholic Bible even today. Again, it's a circumstance of history. But let's go back again to, okay, here we are. At the time of Jesus, we'll just say, these debates have shaken out and we're just about done wrangling over these few outliers. Should we have Enoch? Should we have Ecclesiastes? Whatever. Again, most of the books, they were no brainers. So all that's kind of settling out, settling down around the first century. So now what? Well, now it's time to copy this. Now it's time to preserve it by hand in the enterprise of copying. This is what scribes do. So we're going to talk about textual transmission. And to do that, we have to sort of transport ourselves into the modern world in the 20th century. That might sound odd, but it's necessary. Because when it comes to the Hebrew Bible, the key date is 1947. Before 1947. So imagine you're living around World War II. Okay. Before 1947, the witnesses to the Hebrew Bible were few, but they were well known and they were also all the product of the Middle Ages. Yes, you heard me correctly. There was no Hebrew Bible, no manuscript of the complete Hebrew Bible. Older than 1008 AD. And we know that date because the scribe put it in there. Okay. The person who produced that particular thing. So before 1947, here's what you had. The oldest, mostly complete edition of the Hebrew Bible was the Aleppo Codex. And what we call the Aleppo Codex now. It has everything in the Hebrew Bible except for most of the Torah. It has a few chapters of Deuteronomy. The Torah, most of the Torah was destroyed to fire. At least that's the story that history has told to us. There have been scraps of Aleppo Torah that have surfaced in recent years. And so people have wondered, well, is this just a scrap that somebody managed to pull out of an ash heap somewhere? Or is more of the Torah of the Aleppo Codex preserved somewhere and nobody knows about it? Well, again, nobody does know about it. But what we know is the Aleppo Codex is incomplete. It's missing most of the Torah and that dated to the 10th century. So 900s, 900s AD. It is considered even today the most authoritative and accurate manuscript in what we call the Maseridic tradition. You can actually go look at it online. If you go to Aleppo, A-L-E-P-P-O, Codex, C-O-D-E-X.com, AleppoCodex.com, you can look at it in facsimile, in high resolution. It's kind of nice. The oldest complete Hebrew Bible, though, was a manuscript known as Leningradensis. It is housed in Leningrad. It's known as L for Leningradensis. It's also known as B-19 to textual critics. This is the one that was dated to 1008 AD. It is complete. It's the oldest complete Hebrew Bible still in existence. But in 1947, this was the best you could get. There were other manuscripts known in 1947 that came from a place, a thing, a storage room called the Cairo Geniza. Geniza means hiding place, or storage. It's a storage room. This was discovered in the late 1800s, 1896 to 97. In this storeroom, it's the world's largest and arguably the most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts ever. There were in all 193,000 manuscripts in this storeroom when it was discovered. The storeroom was actually built in 882 AD, and you actually have manuscripts that old. They began using it right away, and they used it all the way up into the 19th century there in Cairo. Now, a lot of the stuff is not biblical. A lot of it's like rabbinic liturgies, because this was part of a synagogue. There's marriage contracts and letters and all this kind of stuff. But there were additions to the Hebrew Bible in there. Here's your date range from the 800s AD all the way up into modern history. But again, this is what you got. This is what you're dealing with. Prior to 1947, if you wanted a complete Hebrew Bible, you're looking at Leningradensis. That's your choice. Even if you liked Aleppo, you might prefer Aleppo. That's maybe a century earlier. But it's 10th, 11th century AD. That's what you've got. Now, if you want to go beyond Hebrew material in 1947, you do have the Septuagint. And some of those fragments are as old as 2nd century BC. But they're not Hebrew. They're Greek. Again, they don't count as Hebrew Bible witnesses, but at least they're the Old Testament. And you also have, lastly, the Torah used by the Samaritans, the Samaritan community, the oldest copy of that. Again, in 1947 and still today was around the 12th century AD so that it's medieval. So basically, here's what you've got in 1947. You've got three Hebrew Bible traditions. You have what is known as the Maseritic text. The oldest representative, the oldest complete representative of that text is 1008 AD, Leningradensis. You have number two fragments of the Septuagint that are much older than Leningradensis, but they're in Greek. Not Hebrew. And so you're wondering like, boy, there had to be a Hebrew manuscript that somebody used to produce this Septuagint thing. I, you know, I wish we had that because we can look at the Septuagint and then we can look at Leningradensis and we know that there are places they don't agree. So whoever did the Septuagint was using a different Hebrew text. Boy, it'd be nice if we could recover some of that. Yeah, wouldn't it? It would be nice. But in 1947, that was all you could say. Wouldn't that be nice? And then thirdly, you have the Torah, the Hebrew Torah used by the Samaritan community, which is very idiosyncratic. It changes, you know, like it changes the mountain location to Gerazim, just like the Gospel of John does. There are things about it that are very Samaritan because, hey, it's their Bible. So they change certain place names to fit with their tradition. But you can just pick one up and know it's Samaritan if you read a certain certain passages because that's what they do. But nevertheless, they, you know, that was part of the part of the toolbox. So what is it about 1947 that matters to all this? Well, as you probably have guessed, 1947 was the year that the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered and they were slowly extracted from the caves from 1947 onward and more caves were discovered after that year. But at Khumran, the main location for what we think of as the Dead Sea Scrolls, there were 11 caves in all. There were lots of manuscripts. Some of them were scrolls, you know, put in large, you know, pieces of pottery, large mason jars, if you want to use that term, and in relatively good condition. Most of it, though, were little pieces, little fragments, maybe as big as the palm of your hand down through the size of your thumbnail. And in the case of cave four, they were buried under lots of bat guano. Okay, so as important as it was, they're not just laying out there. It's not just like, oh, we discovered a library. Let's pull some books off the shelf. That is not what you're dealing with at the Dead Sea Scrolls. You're dealing with manuscript fragments. Again, most of it's written on animal skin, things like that. That's what you're dealing with. It might be whole, but most of it's in pieces and you have to figure out how in the world to put it back together. Biblical stuff, scholars could pick up portions and read it. Okay, that comes from the Bible, so this is a biblical scroll. That helped because you could compare the Dead Sea Scrolls against an existing Hebrew Bible, and you could at least read it, and again, try to put the puzzle together, put the pieces together. But a lot of it was non-biblical. That all had to be sorted out. There were other locations, Wadi Murobat and Nahal Hever, again, other text discoveries. They get lumped in with what we call the Dead Sea Scrolls, and that went on into the 50s and even the early 60s. People still discovering things. So that was a key event though, because once scholars started to realize what they had, especially when it came to the biblical material, they could see right away. These were dated with carbon-14, other methods, they were dated by paleographical analysis. Again, scholars had made tables of the style of handwriting of various different texts that have historical things in them, like a name, a place, a date, or an event, that kind of thing. And you could plot out tables, kind of like the way you would look at fonts today, of how every letter in the Hebrew alphabet was written according to which text, and if that text was dateable, then you knew that during this time period, this is how they would make the letter dolet. This is how they would make the he. Scholars actually spent decades creating typologies like this so that texts could be cross-dated by that method, not just carbon-14 and some of the other scientific methods. But when this started to happen, and they started to realize what they had, this is why they're important. All three of the textual traditions known prior to 1947, remember that's the Maseridic text, the Septuagint, whatever the Hebrew was that underlined the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, all three of those text traditions were found in existing manuscripts at Qumran. So they actually did find Hebrew manuscripts that aligned with the Septuagint against the Maseridic text. So they found remnants of whatever the Hebrew Bible looked like that the translators of the Septuagint had to produce their translation. And they found plenty of texts that aligned with the Maseridic texts, and they found texts that aligned with the Samaritan Pentateuch. They found all of it, all three of it. And they also found lots of texts that didn't match the other three. Those are called by scholars, un-affiliated texts. So what this does is it shows us that the time of Jesus, some of these date to 1st and 2nd century BC, the biblical material here. So in the inter-testamental period, toward the end of the inter-testamental period and certainly by the time of Jesus, what the Dead Sea Scrolls show us is that there was no one Hebrew Bible. The Jewish communities living in Judea in Syria, Palestine, Israel were content to live with textual plurality. And the people at Qumran preserved all of them. They didn't destroy one text tradition in favor of another. They preserved all of them. And all of them had been used. They were all in circulation. It's kind of like our circumstance with English translations today. You walk into a Christian bookstore and there's like 100 English translations, you know? Well, that's kind of like they're all the Bible, but they're all different translations. They're the same, they're the Bible, but yet they're different because of the wording that you can find in them. That's the same kind of situation that you're looking at at the time of Jesus. So there's no one Hebrew Bible. The idea that there's one Hebrew Bible that goes all the way back to Moses or anyone else in the Old Testament. And that was the only one that existed and got copied forever at an infant item, Lord without end, you know, that sort of thing. That is a myth. At the time of Jesus, you had at least three and you actually had more. You had textual plurality. And no one text was elevated above any of the others. They were all just fine. They were all used by Jews in their synagogues, in their communities, in their, you know, for their personal reading or whatever. That's what Qumran tells us. You say, well, what, you know, how then did we get to the situation nowadays when I read on the internet and you'll especially read this with Bible code nonsense. I read on the internet about the Hebrew Bible, the Maseridic text. This is the Hebrew Bible, this edition. Okay, again, the reason that becomes what it is is because people are just telling you stuff. Okay, there was no one Hebrew Bible that like survived the, you know, the last gasp of the kingdom before Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple and then someone ran away with it and started copying it. You don't have evidence for that. You have evidence for three, at least, and they all hit the same chronological wall, the Dead Sea Scrolls. They all hit 200 BC. That's just the way it is. So, again, we have to align our thinking with the data that actually exists, not a story or a narrative that we want to invent. What we know is the Maseridic text actually was created at around 100 AD. Now, what happened was because of this textual plurality and because of the Septuagint, again, that irritated a lot of people in the Jewish community because the Christians favored it, not only because of the Gentiles, but the Septuagint reflected certain readings in whatever Hebrew Bible was used to produce it that actually helped Christian theology. So, it was the choice of the early church for several reasons. So, the Jewish community around 100 AD made a decision and said, you know what, we are going to standardize our Bible. We are going to standardize the text of the Hebrew Bible and we're going to do the work. We're going to take, you know, we're going to look at all these different versions of it. We're going to decide what it should say and then we are going to transmit or, excuse me, transmit and copy. And transmit that thing for the rest of time. That's going to become the Bible for our community, the Jewish community. And that decision, that product, the thing that was produced out of that effort is what we know as the Masoretic text because the scribal families that were from that point on assigned to copy it, they were called the Masoretes. They are the ones that were tasked to copy this thing, you know, for the rest of posterity. Now, some people in the Jewish community weren't happy with that. You'll actually read in the Talmud, for instance, the Talmud and the Mishnah, you know, some of these, the Jewish theological writing. When Jewish writers and rabbis quote the Hebrew Bible, they actually don't quote word for word. What we know as the Masoretic text, there are variations. A scholar who's long dead, a German scholar, actually collected these and he reproduced them in several volumes. I mean, we know that there not only was the Masoretic text created in 100 AD, but there wasn't even one version of that that was acceptable to the Jewish community. There were other rabbis that said, well, I like this reading over here. I like what that verse used to say that they would still quote it that way. They would still use it. It would still wind up in their writings. And you had, again, competing scribes that when they copied out a Torah or a manuscript, they would put those in. So there was a little bit of, you know, well, we'll show you. We're going to, you know, thanks for the effort, but we liked our Bible before. And it might only be 12 different places in the whole Old Testament, 12 different words. But those were the words that they wanted and so they did it. There wasn't even one Masoretic text even after its creation. Now, why am I mentioning all this? Because, again, there's this myth out there that if something, you know, if you're reading along in your English Bible and there's a footnote, Deuteronomy 32-8 is the best example. You know, when the most high deviant nations, he divides them up in the court in the Sons of God. Well, the Masoretic text says Sons of Israel and that's the Bible that God created. That's the Bible that God gave the Jewish community. That's the correct reading there because it's the Masoretic text. That's the sacred one. Sorry, but it wasn't. Not only was that created in the first century, 100 A.D., but the older material, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, says something different. What you're hanging, what you're depending on is a decision of a rabbi somewhere and even his compatriots in some cases didn't like all his decisions. This is an ex-cathedra from the voice of God saying Sons of Israel and Deuteronomy 32-8. But yet in evangelical circles, we prop up this notion of the Masoretic text as being something that's like literally handed down by God. That is not the case. It's the product of a set of historical circumstances and we know that because of data, because of manuscripts, because of things that exist that you can go look at. There's no way around it. And while I'm commenting about the practices and how evangelicals kind of talk about the Hebrew Bible, not only do we have this sort of mystical or mythical view of the Masoretic text. I think it's not a bad text. It's a good text, but there are other good texts. And some of the manuscript data is a lot older than the Masoretic text. We ought to pay attention to that. That's all I'm saying. But along with that, we have this, again, this mythology about scribes. Like they were infallible or something. Before they could write the name of Yahweh, they had to go take a bath or something like that. Look, this is the talk of apologetics. This is not the talk of factual reality in many instances. A lot of these scribal practices that you hear apologetics teachers talk about come from later practices in certain rabbinic communities. They do not reflect the scribal practices of the people who produce the Dead Sea Scrolls. How do you know that, Mike? You just don't like rabbis or something. How do you know that? Well, I know that because we can look at the texts. And I think the best place that I could illustrate some of these things for you is if you go up to my website, BibleCodeMyth.com there's a link there once you get on the page to a PDF that will show you it goes through Isaiah 53 because I used this. I created this way back in 2003, I think it was, where I was on the Art Bell show and I was supposed to debate Grant Jeffery about the Bible Code. Grant Jeffery had no frame of reference for basically anything I said. He was just dealing in mystical, evangelical mythologies about the Hebrew text and he was trying to defend the every letter sequence thing of the Bible Code and I said, look, it can't work this way because if you look at the Dead Sea Scrolls they use different spells. They were still using the consonants for vowels and so if you just count the letters there are hundreds of letters in the oldest manuscript data for Isaiah 53 that are not in the Hebrew text you're using because you're using a modern edition of the Maseridic text and if you're doing Bible Code stuff even one letter difference messes up the sequence well in 13 verses I produced a bunch of screenshots you can look at the PDF now and it said, look, there's over 100 spelling differences here 100 letter sequence differences your theory of Bible Code simply cannot work if you're going to argue that God handed down this text then you ought to be using the Dead Sea Scroll version but instead you're using this other thing that works in a software program so you can make these claims that's what you're doing and that's what all Bible Coders do they don't incorporate any of the text critical data the Bible Code is dead on arrival show me someone who believes in a Bible Code I will show you someone who doesn't understand how we got the Hebrew Bible and doesn't incorporate text critical stuff like the Dead Sea Scrolls they just don't do it so again why am I saying that because if you look at that PDF you will see what scribes actually did they will do stuff like erase things they don't go take a bath and then oh we got to scrap the whole text I misspelled Yahweh or I forgot it you know so now let's burn this thing I'll go take a bath and then we got to start over again that is a myth at least in terms of greater antiquity they would erase things they would insert lines in between lines when they knew something had been missed that was their correction we got to put it in there let's stick it in there if they didn't have room they would insert a line that went vertical okay they would put dots over letters that they thought were mistakes mistaken words or letters they would suspend the letters we missed one this one needs to go in between these other two so it will suspend it over the place where it belongs you can actually just visually look at what scribes did they're doing the best they can it's not like you can just go down to office max and get another animal skin to start your Hebrew Bible over there is no paper again in the modern sense I mean this is what you had to use and it took a long time to prepare the writing the thing you were going to write on and so they tried to make the best use of their material that they could so they would scratch out things and they would do erasures so they would add little words suspend them put dots just go look at it now if you're really interested in this Immanuel Tove that's TOV it has a recent book it's probably pricey anything Tove writes tends to get priced pretty cheaply on scribal habits you know in the Hebrew Bible specifically in the Dead Sea Scrolls now prior to Tove's work this is going to be a name familiar to many of you especially if you're old coast to coast AM listeners but prior to Tove's work the best work on scribal practices in the Dead Sea Scrolls was written by none other than Malachi Martin yes that Malachi Martin the guy who was the exorcist Martin's dissertation was on scribal practices in the Dead Sea Scrolls and specifically the Isaiah Scroll the great Isaiah Scroll it exists in two volumes it is impossible to find so you're not going to go out and buy this trust me I have seen a copy of it at the UW Madison when I was a grad student they actually checked it out once just so I could see it and kind of flip through it but it's grossly expensive if you ever find a copy of it it's just extraordinarily hard to find but that was the best up until you know Tove's recent book but we know what scribes did so let me just get off that point let's talk about bringing it up to the modern day here and wrap up here so what's happening after the Maseridic text is created around 100 AD it begins to be copied by professionals professional scribal families this was their trade as a family and their children would be trained in it would be passed down from generation to generation some of the most famous manuscripts that I already mentioned like the Aleppo Codex it's not only important because it was produced in the 900s AD but there's evidence that it was pointed it was hand pointed went by pointed I mean the vowels were added okay because by the 800s AD the vowel system had been invented Aleppo was pointed by hand by the famous scribe Aaron Ben Asher and so in the Jewish community it has a special status because this is a well-known scribe in the scribal tradition Lenin Gredensis was also probably pointed vocalized by a Ben Asher member of the family but not Aaron so it's not looked upon with as much esteem in the Jewish community as Aleppo but it's still complete and Aleppo is not so what you have during the Middle Ages is you have again handwork just really difficult handwork to bring things to preserve the Maseridic text and so what happened at that point it was all done by hand when you get up to the time of the printing press in the early 1500s you have modern printed editions that become available they are typeset they are produced scholars can use them in universities that exist at the time synagogue congregations would have a copy you could distribute more copies of it because it had been typeset and printed so in 1516 1517 you have what's called the first rabbinic Bible developed or published it's called a diplomatic edition now there are two kinds of editions of the Hebrew Bible diplomatic edition means that you're trying to reproduce a particular text tradition like the Maseridic text eclectic editions are editions that were produced to try to incorporate variant readings in other words readings from other manuscripts that are not in the Maseridic tradition to incorporate them into the text of the Hebrew Bible you don't really get any eclectic editions until the 1800s so most of what happens after the printing press happens is producing copies of different editions of the Maseridic text you have the first rabbinic Bible in 1520 of something called the complutancy and polyglot which was actually six volumes a polyglot is a biblical text in several languages or columns so volumes one and four was the old testament volumes five and six was the Greek New Testament with a critical apparatus this is just an example of what people are producing 1524 25 four or five years later you have the second edition of the rabbinic Bible it's much like the first it's a diplomatic edition again trying to reproduce a better preservation of the Maseridic text as they were able to do it however this one actually bends to the Septuagint in a few places because Christians had grown used to certain readings in their English in their own translations their own other languages translations for instance in Psalm 2216 the second rabbinic Bible will have they pierced my hands and my feet well that actually follows the Septuagint text and not the Maseridic text Maseridic text says like lions my hands and feet so the creators of the second rabbinic Bible went with what would be the Septuagint in that case just because people were familiar with that reading they departed from trying to reproduce the Maseridic text at that point people who produce editions will do things like this and produce translations they'll make concessions like this for their community now in terms of modern times in the 20th century again to abbreviate this because we could talk a lot about editions and whatnot in 1906 you have something called Biblia Hebraica produced the editor was a guy named Kittle his last name begins with a K so this became known as BHK Biblia Hebraica Kittle BHK 1906 this was produced through the help of the German Bible Society there were nine editions of this in all it was an eclectic text it was not just a rehash of what had been the most popular version of the Maseridic text so it's not that it's different there were two editions 1906-1913 again they weren't real popular because the eclectic approach was different it was new so it took a while for this approach to catch on 1936 there was a third edition and this one was a deliberate attempt to adjust BHK to Leningradensis to try to reproduce a version of Leningradensis mostly achieved in near perfect fashion four decades later in 1977 the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia BHS as we referred to it in graduate school and in seminary this is what you buy when you take Hebrew in schools you buy BHS and that was also produced by the German Bible Society it revised BHK the third edition so this is actually a fourth go around here and this is a near perfect copy of Leningradensis and it's been reproduced in software a lot you know this particular version now today to wrap up here where are we at today in modern times there's actually three projects going on to go beyond BHS and BHS was done in 1977 again near perfect edition of Leningradensis but scholars have wanted to do different things for instance one group says well hey why don't we try to produce an edition of Aleppo most of the Torah is missing but why don't we have an Aleppo Bible and then use Leningradensis and other things to do the Torah why don't we do that and so that's one of the projects it's called the Hebrew University Bible Project HUBP again it is really when it's going to be done and it might take decades it was begun in 1956 and only I think four volumes have appeared so far that gives you any indication about how it's going but when it's done it will be the first edition of a Hebrew Bible that reproduces the Aleppo Codex that's the goal there's another project called BHQ the Q stands for Kinta so a fifth edition of Biblia Hebraica so this is the next thing this is a text again based on Leningradensis and it's corrected against color photos of Leningradensis sometimes it's hard to read what letter it is and so the editors go through and they're trying to make an even more perfect edition of Leningradensis this is expected to be completely done in 2020 and there's a lot of it that's already out there every year at the academic conferences they seem to have another volume there to sell another fascicle as they call them of BHQ and so some BHQ is getting adopted into Hebrew exegesis classes and whatnot because it's the most current text available for students and whatnot so that's a second project the third project is something called the Oxford Hebrew Bible project and this aims to be a critical edition so not a reproduction of Aleppo not a reproduction of Leningradensis but let's make a true critical edition where we compare all the manuscript data together and produce a Hebrew Bible this is a kin if you remember the episode we did on the Greek New Testament the reasoned eclectic approach to compare all the manuscript data and then put together a text that's what they're trying to do here at Oxford with the Hebrew Bible again this is going to take a long long time but it aims to be a true critical edition of the Hebrew Bible and it'll be published by Oxford University Press so even today this kind of thing is still going on and you say boy they fuss a lot how many differences are there between BHS and Leningradensis if I had Rick here at work he could probably tell me the exact number but I think it's like a couple dozen and everything else is identical except for the vowel pointing and the accent thing and stuff like that I think it's added by scribal traditions the Maseridic tradition and whatnot why do they fuss over it the Rabbinic community, the Jewish community cares lots of other people care Hebrew scholars professors who want their students to work with the best edition possible to be able to compare variants in manuscripts so it's an ongoing process it's an ongoing thing, frankly it works a lot better in the digital world because you can make the changes and corrections a lot quicker and make it more useful but it's still scholarship is still really run on print when it comes to something like this so these projects tend to take a long, long time but that is again really how we got the Hebrew Bible it took a while to write the thing establish the final form of the text 1200 years probably at most took another couple hundred years to argue about are we all in the same same place, are we all on board with the books that we're going to include in this thing we call the Hebrew Bible and then after that we had the Jewish community say we need to get away from the Septuagint stuff we need to deal with the textual plurality and create what has become known as the Maseridic text and then it just starts getting copied by hand printing press gets invented certain editions of the Maseridic text get published and there you go that's how we got it but what I want to accomplish again is to give you an overview of all of that there's lots of great resources if you like manuscripts stuff lots of books I could recommend if I get enough questions on that maybe we'll post a few of those at the episode but I also wanted to deal again with certain mythologies and there is no such thing as one Hebrew Bible that goes all the way back to the last Israelite fleeing Nebuchadnezzar and then it gets copied from there on out that is not the way it works it's not what the manuscripts have for us and it just isn't it's not the enterprise it's not what the data has myths about that myths about the Maseridic text there's not even one of those that everybody fell in love with and thought came from the hand of God even in the Jewish community again these are myths so the value of pointing them out is that when you're reading a commentary when you're reading an article when you're listening to a podcast this one or some other one and they talk about different manuscripts say this or that you should not immediately assume okay that is flawed thinking what we should be doing is evaluating all the evidence and again just like I said with our interview with Rick Brannon the best explanation as far as what the correct the original reading of the text was is the reading that explains all the other ones how all the other ones could have arisen and that just takes time that takes thought and time and there are people who devote their lives to it so that we can have a reliable English translations Mike I feel like I've just taken a semester of classes Crandon you probably did no I mean this is why this show is just so important I mean that's good history of how we got the Old Testament that you know you're just not going to learn in Sunday school the short answer is it was a lot of work it was a pile of work over a long time over a long time you know and this is why I say our view of inspiration should be one that focuses on providence we don't need an ex files view of how we got the Bible where people are getting zapped and their minds go blank and their limbs start flailing if you know you either have a big view of God or you don't you either believe in providence or you don't you either believe in the unseen hand or you don't and if you don't have a God that's powerful enough to essentially devise people over the span of centuries so that they would produce a text that he was happy with you know that God could endorse you know and Jesus used the Hebrew Bible I mean it was good enough for him why isn't it good enough for us I mean if you don't believe that God is going to work through people and through believers to produce and recognize this thing we call the Bible then I just pity you you know because your position is vulnerable if you have one of these ex files views of inspiration you might think that's more secure but there's things lurking in the text that just defy it and undermine it and when this is how you're taught to think about your Bible and some nasty person on the internet who isn't the friend of you isn't the friend of the faith isn't the friend of scripture wants to poke you in the eye with this stuff it destroys people's faith and it just doesn't have to be it's just it's completely unnecessary alright Mike well I'm going to switch gears here and I want to tell everybody that if you're an android user go subscribe to our podcast on the google play podcast section in the religion section and you'll see our show so that's pretty cool that we're in the top 50 of the whole religion section so that's pretty neat and Mike next week we're going to go back to our Q&A episode and I just want to remind everybody I've got tons of questions and we will eventually get to them all so if I don't respond back to you via email just know that I did get it I'm a little behind on my emails but just know that I did get it and again if you do want to send questions to our Q&A Q&A show you can send that to me at trace trickling at gmail.com Mike that was a good one another good one I think we've covered the entire Bible now right all of it right yeah in terms of that yep all right well good deal we appreciate it and just want to thank everybody for listening to the naked bible podcast god bless thanks for listening to the naked bible podcast to support this podcast visit www.nakedbibleblog.com to learn more about Dr. Heizer's other websites and blogs go to www.grmsh.com