Its Textual Preservation. The Bible is also a book to be trusted because its text has been miraculously preserved. None of the original manuscripts written by the biblical authors are still in existence. All of them were either lost or destroyed centuries ago. This has caused some critics of the Bible to question the purity of the texts we now have. But we can be confident that the Bibles we hold in our hands were translated from texts that for all practical purposes are the same as the originals.
The Old Testament. The Old Testament books were written primarily in Hebrew. They were recorded either on papyrus (a grassy reed whose inner bark was dried and glued together to form a paperlike substance) or parchment (the scraped and dried skins of animals). When a copy wore out, a new copy was made and the old one destroyed.
But that was not an easy task. They did not have copy machines like we do today, so it had to be done by hand. Stringent rules were followed by the scribes to keep errors from creeping in. The methods used by the Masoretes had been followed for centuries, from AD 500-900. These dedicated Hebrew scholars had an elaborate counting system for assuring accuracy. First, they would count all the letters on a page. Then, when they finished copying the page, they would count the letters on the copy to see if the numbers agreed. This would keep them from copying a word twice, omitting a word, skipping a line, or copying the same line twice. If the counts did not agree, they would destroy the copy they had just worked over so laboriously and start again.
Because of this system, the Hebrew texts since AD 900 are virtually free from error. But what about the years before 900? Most of the Old Testament was written centuries earlier, and the last book, Malachi, was finished nearly 400 years before Christ was born. Couldn't a lot of errors have crept in during that time?
That question could not have been answered with certainty before the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. One hot, dusty day in 1947, an Arab boy threw a stone into one of the hundreds of caves that pocket the cliffs surrounding the Dead Sea. To his surprise, he heard something shatter. When he crawled in to investigate, he found a broken pottery jar and some old manuscripts, including one of the book of Isaiah. This was the first of the collection of what came to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Word of the discovery spread, and soon archeologists were excavating caves throughout the area. They found fragments of every Old Testament book and some complete manuscripts.
But how did these compare with the Masoretic text? The careful work of textual comparison began, and soon it was found that there was no difference between the text of the Dead Sea Scrolls and those of the Masoretes. Even though these scrolls were copied almost 1,000 years earlier, they were almost identical to the Masoretic text! On the basis of this astounding evidence, we can be assured that the Old Testament text has been accurately preserved and that we can read it as the reliable Word of God.
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