Sunday, April 16, 2023

Biblical Manuscripts

Great Isaiah Scroll, 202-107 B.C., facsimile :

The Great Isaiah Scroll is one of the original Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in 1947 and is the most complete of the DeadSea Scrolls found in the Qumran Caves. 

The scroll was written on seventeen sheets of parchment, connected into a scroll.  Differences between this scroll and the later Masoretic text are mostly grammatical and spelling differences.

Both this scroll and the Codex Leningradensis are open to Isaiah 40:8: "The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our

God will stand forever." (ESV) Although the manuscripts were written over 1000 years apart, the Word of God had never changed.

Codex Leningradensis is the oldest Hebrew manuscript of the entire Old Testament. This codex was found in Egypt and is

now at The National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg (formerly known as Leningrad).

The early Hebrew manuscripts did not have vowel pointings, chapters, or verses.   A group of scribes called the Masoretes, who

worked in Tiberias and Jerusalem in Israel between the 5th and 10th centuries, added vocalizations (vowels), accents, and a textual apparatus to the Hebrew text.

The version was finalized by Hebrew scribe Aaron ben Asher in the early 10th ce.

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