The Text of the Old Testament
Lecture 10

What is the History of the Transmission of the Texts of the Old Testament?

The Beginning Statement
•	We do not have any of the _____________manuscripts written by the ___________authors
•	These original manuscripts are called ________________
•	all we have are copies of the autographa
•	The word “________________” comes from the Latin and means literally “that which is copied by hand”  We have ________________of the originals only
Until the Dead Sea Discovery
•	we only had manuscripts that went back to the _________century AD
•	With the DSS an excitement mounted because some of these scrolls are at least ________years earlier than what we already possessed
•	These help cast considerable light on our task of looking at How we Got our Bible
The Text of the Old Testament Prior to AD _______
•	It should not surprise us that the original mss have disappeared.  Why?
•	1. They were subject to wear and tear and ___________like other ancient mss
•	2. They were even exposed to calamities that the Jews suffered like the ____________Captivity in ________BC and the temple was destroyed and again in AD _____by the Romans
Other Reasons for a Scarcity of MSS
•	3.The ancient Rabbis had such high _____________for the sacred Scriptures that when mss began to show signs of wear and tear, they reverently ________________of them.
•	4. The Rabbis knew that they took great care in copying the mss that there was no need to value an _______mss over a _________one.
Before Older MSS were Disposed
•	they were kept in the _______________(or hidden spot of the synagogue)
•	This was a _____________room or extra room in the synagogue
•	One Genizah was located in _____________and at the end of the 19th century, gave up its treasures of rich mss and fragments.
•	Some dated back to the __________century AD
•	Once the room was full, the scrolls were taken and burned in a very elaborate ceremony
Early Stages of Transmission
•	we have to plead ignorance for the really early stages of transmission
•	We simply have no Hebrew mss that go back further than ____________
•	These were only discovered in 1947 at ____________________
Some Inferences
•	can be made from later phases of the textual tradition
•	1. The acknowledged ______________of the Old Testament books would give rise to an OT canon and as a result, the drive for a correct _____________to copy.
•	2. In contrast to the Jewish manner of non-sacred books which ___________errors were considered of no consequence, the matter of the sacred text was to be transcribed _________
More Inferences
•	3.The contact of Jewish _____________with the literary world of the Greeks probably made them more exact in their literary transcriptions of the scriptures
•	4. The division between the ____________and the ______________-probably made the search for a reliable text even more important
•	5. The ______________________would add to the demand for accurate copies of the text to be studied
The Drive for a Standard Text
•	obvious before the time of Jesus there was some diversity of texts
•	some from ________________are closer to the __________________text, while
•	others are closer to the style of the ____________
•	and a third group follows the style of the ___________________textual tradition
•	So, the drive to establish a Hebrew textus receptus was on its way
From AD 100 
•	the _______________were very concerned to standardize the text of the OT
•	from AD 100 there were very strict __________________of copying a mss
•	“No pains were spared in preventing errors from ________________the sacred text, or in discovering and _________________them if they should creep in”
Rules One from the ____________________Period
•	Only ___________________from clean animals was allowed
Rule Two:
•	each written _______________of the scroll was to have fewer than __________-eight and not more than _____________lines
Rule Three:
•	the page was first to be _____________and then the letters ______________from these lines
Rule Four:
•	the ink was to be ____________in color, prepared according to a specific ______________
Rule Five:
•	no word or letter was to be written from_____________; the scribe was to __________________the words before he wrote them down;
Rule Six:
•	he was to ____________his pen _________________writing the sacred name, Yahweh;
Rule Seven:
•	the new copy was to be _____________within ______________days after completion; if more than ________________errors were found on any single sheet, the roll was condemned;
Rule Eight:
•	every ______________and __________________was counted;
Rule Nine:
•	there were also rules o the _____________of the letters and the ______________between them.
These Rules
•	may seem rather ridiculous to us, but
•	they did promote an ______________copy and encouraged great confidence in the ________________of the OT text.
The ____________________and the Masoretic Text
•	Until the invention of the printing press, all mss were written by __________
•	this made it inevitable for _________________errors to occur within the copied text
•	Several of the Hebrew ___________________are very similar and leads to some confusion
•	illustration is _____________________and ________________________names.  
•	The Hebrew r and n occasioned this difference
The Hebrew Response
•	various groups of Jewish scholars arose dedicated to ___________the text of the Hebrew OT
•	The head of the list were the _________________at ________________
•	There school was not the earliest, since they did not come into being until about AD _____
•	But they are the most important for our study
The Masoretes
•	are so names because of their acknowledged _________________on the authoritative traditions (Massorah) concerning the text.
•	Their labors spread over a _____to 5 ________________period and their contributions are many
•	Perhaps the best known are the vowel pointings which they devised for the HBW text
•	Remember that all _______letters in the Hebrew alphabet are consonants
•	Thus the OT was first written without ____________
The Reason for the Vowel Points
•	the spoken Hebrew language was in danger of being forgotten
•	in a similar fashion, it was feared that the written ____________would disappear
•	Thus, the _____________inserted vowel points _________and _________the lines of text
•	they did not bother the text in any manner, simply added vowel points to help maintain the correct pronunciation
Other Features of the Masoretes
•	they sought methods to help eliminate scribal errors of _________or ________
•	they did this by numbering the_________, words, and __________of each book.
•	They counted the number of times __________letter was used in _________book
•	(The middle verse of the Pentateuch is ____________________8:7), while the
•	middle verse of the OT is __________________6:7.
Their work
•	they examined and appraised carefully the textual materials available to them
•	and set before scholars a text which had been received at least several centuries before their time.
•	So successful was their contributions that the text used today is often referred to as “the ______________________Text”