“The new evidence confirms what we had already good reason to believe - that the Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with the utmost fidelity” ( Second Thoughts on the Dead Sea Scrolls, 1956, pg.Bruce and with this quotation, conclude our consideration of the Hebrew text: Some who rejected the Bible believed the scrolls would disprove the Bible as the inspired word of God. The matter of great importance is some of the material dated back to around 100 BC. They contained portions of almost all the 39 Hebrew books. What was found was called the Dead Sea Scrolls, in all about 350 rolls, most of them fragmentary. A great discovery was made March of 1948. We do not know the circumstances of the translation of the remainder of the 34 books. It is believed that 70 scholars took part in the translation of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible). In about 250 BC it was decided that there was a need to translate the Hebrew text into Greek. 400 BC), the Aramaic Targums, Syriac Peshitta (ca. There are other works that are involved in the Hebrew text. Their contribution to the accuracy and preservation of the Hebrew text was so large that the Hebrew text today is sometimes called the “Massoretic text.” Leaders among these Jewish scholars became generally known as the Massoretes. To guard the letter of the law with an almost fanaticism, there developed at an early age various groups of Jewish scholars who were dedicated to the purity and preservation of the Hebrew text. Until the age of printing, the Hebrews scriptures were laboriously handed down to us by copying. One cannot study the text of the Hebrew books without considering the Massoretes. There are many other manuscripts, but the foregoing are the primary witnesses to the Hebrew text. The oldest known manuscript that contains the entire 39 books is the Leningrad Codex which was finished in 1008 AD. Still another old Hebrew manuscript that has been important in restoring the original Hebrew text is the British Museum Codex of the Pentateuch (tenth or eleventh century). The Cairo Codex dates back to 895 AD and the Leningrad Codex of the Prophets to 916 AD. The earliest Hebrew manuscripts are known as the Cairo Codex and the Leningrad Codex of the Prophets. Alas, this practice resulted in later scholars not having access to the older texts. In fact, when a copy became old or worn, they would, out of respect for the manuscript, ceremonially bury it. One reason for the absence of comparative difficulty is the fact that the Jewish scribes carefully and fastidiously guarded their copies of the Hebrew text. The translation of the original Hebrew text (first 39 books of the Bible) in many ways has not posed the challenge that translating the Greek text has (New Testament). The text of the Hebrew scriptures (“Old Testament”). Hence, the books of the Bible had to be translated into English and the other languages of the world. There are three major languages involved originally in the translation of the text of the Bible, Hebrew, Aramaic (very similar to Hebrew), and Greek. In “The Texts of the Bible” we shall briefly consider the restoration of the Hebrew and Greek text of the sixty-six books comprising the book we call the Bible. In “How the Bible came to be,” we considered the original writers and writing of the sacred canon, the scriptures.
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