more recently, the Dead Sea Scrolls. The text of the Old Testament which has been accepted as authoritative by both Christian and Jew is known as the Masoretic text. The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scribes who, sometime around A.D. 500, developed a more or less official text from the systematic sorting and comparison of the various manuscripts that had come down to them. In the margins of this text they were careful to write down all the variant readings which had been accumulated up to that time. These all amounted only to about 1,200 in number, or less than one per page of the Hebrew printed Bible.
As far as the transmission of the Masoretic text is concerned, prior to the printing of the first Hebrew Bible in A.D. 1526, there are about 1,000 manuscripts in existence. The oldest of these is dated at A.D. 916. However, of those that are available, there are scarcely any variations of significance, and support from other sources also warrants confidence that we have the original Masoretic text.
The basic text of the Old Testament originally consisted only of consonants, with vowels assumed to be understood by the reader from the context. However, in the present Hebrew Bible appear so-called "vowel points," indicating which vowels to use with the consonants. These were added by the Jewish scholars in about A.D. 700. Since they do not constitute a part of the original text itself, it is conceivable that these are wrong in some instances, and may need to be corrected if sound textual criticism justifies it.
As a check on the accuracy of the Masoretic text, there are several other channels of transmission of the Old Testament which can be examined. The most important of these is the Septuagint Version, so-called because it was supposedly produced by seventy scribes in about 280 B.C. These men translated the Hebrew Scriptures into the Greek language, for use by the Jews of the Dispersion. It is possible that this Septuagint translation was used by the Apostles and the other first-century Christians.
The Latin Vulgate was translated by Jerome from Hebrew and Greek into Latin in about A.D. 400. The Syriac Version was translated from the Hebrew about A.D. 200. The Samaritan Pentateuch (the Samaritans did not accept the rest of the Old Testament) had been handed down independently of the Jewish transmission line since the time of Nehemiah, about 400 B.C.
Although there are minor variations in all these versions, none are significant enough to change any doctrine or event recorded in the Old Testament. In almost all cases, the variations are trivial.
Furthermore, there are numerous ancient writings in which extensive quotations from the Old Testament were made, including the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Ecclesiastes, the Talmud, the writings of Josephus and Philo, the Zadokite Fragments, the Targums, and other early literature, as well as numerous quotations of the Old Testament in the New Testament. All unite in showing that the Old Testament text has always been essentially as we have it today, as far back as any direct evidence can take us.
This fact has been further confirmed by the discovery of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, beginning in 1946 and continuing on to the present. These manuscripts actually date from the time of Christ or earlier and are the oldest actual manuscripts of any parts of Scripture found to date.
Many scrolls have been found, and these include, in one scroll or another, practically the entire text of the Old Testament. The agreement of all these with the received Masoretic text is remarkable, such variations as exist being insignificant.
There is thus no reasonable doubt that our present Old Testament, based on the Masoretic text, is practically identical extending back to the time when the last books of the Old Testament were originally written. That being true, there is no reason to doubt that all of the books have come down to us substantially as written. The scribes who copied the manuscripts are known to have taken extreme pains to insure accuracy of copying. Many numerical devices were used counting letters and gematria (numerical equivalents of the letters) in the various books as cross-checking devices.
Finally, it is significant that no other ancient writings of age comparable to the Old Testament have been so accurately transmitted or based on such an abundance of textual evidence. If we can rely on the accurate transmission of any ancient document at all, that document is the Old Testament.
The Strange World of Higher Criticism
The textual critic, working in the field of "lower criticism," performs a vital service as he seeks by scientific analysis of the manuscript evidence to determine as closely as possible the original text of the biblical writings. But there is another field of study, euphemistically called "higher criticism," the motivations for which are suspect, to say the least, and the results of which have been devastatingly corrosive to biblical faith.
This type of study (or, better, speculation) presumes to be able to reconstruct an accretion process by which ancient writings, especially the Bible, came to be assembled out of a miscellaneous assortment of fragments and forgeries, and then foisted on the people as divinely inspired writings of the fathers and prophets.
The "higher critics" profess to be scientific in this endeavor, but actually they are completely subjective, seeking by all means to find a naturalistic, evolutionary explanation for the Bible and the history of Israel and the Christian Church. Invariably they attempt to explain away all miracles and fulfilled prophecies, and almost always to attribute the authorship of the books to writers of much more recent date than claimed in the books themselves.
The Bible, to the higher critics, is thus a purely natural book, full of errors and contradictions and outright lies. It certainly cannot long retain any religious authority or moral value if this is its character, and yet this higher criticism has been taught as certain fact for a century or more, not only in secular universities but even in most of the theological schools of the western world.
One would think that, with an abundance of manuscript evidence confirming the textual accuracy of the Old Testament back to the very time of its completion, combined with its universal acceptance as authentic and divinely inspired, by both Jews and Christians, in the centuries closest to its writing and compilation, it would be taken at face value by those who use it, at least until some clear evidence of fraud or forgery comes to light.
But this is not the case. The higher critics insist that practically none of the Old Testament books were written by the traditional authors — all were written much later, by writers who had no direct knowledge at all of what they were writing. Claims of authorship were deliberately misrepresented to give the writings a spurious authority and, especially, to make their records of current events look like fulfilled prophecies.
This peculiar field of study began, as do most attacks on the Bible, with an attack on the two creation chapters of Genesis. Jean Astruc, an infidel French physician, in 1753 wrote that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 were from two different and conflicting sources, since the name used for God was, in the first case, Elohim, and in the second, Jehovah Elohim. He was followed by the German rationalist Eichorn, who in 1779 noted differences of style also. DeWette in 1806 professed to distinguish four main writers of the "Hexateuch," writers now known as J, E, P, and D (referring, respectively, to the supposed "Jehovist," "Elohist," "Priestly," and "Deuteronomist" writers and editors). Various writers suggested still other documentary divisions, authors and "redactors." The Graf–Wellhausen "Hypothesis" (developed in 1866–78) worked out a very complex division of the first six books of the Bible, all supposedly written and edited in the period 900–600 B.C., whereas Moses died about 1450 B.C. Other prominent higher critics of the 19th century included Kuenen, Driver, Cheyne, Ewald, Coonhill, and others. All such men were, of course, evolutionists (though some antedated Darwin) and naturalists (though some professed Christianity and held professorships in theological schools).
The higher criticism does not, of course, stop with the books of Moses and Joshua, though these were the first to be attacked. Because of their fulfilled prophecies, Isaiah and Daniel have been particularly fought, but actually no book of the Old Testament has escaped
