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| p.3The Dead Sea scrolls of the Qumran community The Qumran community started in 150 B.C lasting no longer than 70 A.D. These scrolls were collected and hid the scrolls in jars kept in caves by the Essenes, These were religious Jews who separated themselves from the religious leadership and the temple, forming their Qumran community living in the Judean desert. They believed in immortality and divine punishment for sin. Also what the Old Testament said, that the Messiah would be the Son of God, who was soon to come. That he would raise the dead, heal the sick, and announce glad tidings to the poor (as spoken in the Old Testament). the Dead Sea Scrolls, called the “Son of God” fragment 4Q246, (found in cave 4 of (Q) the Qumran community) describes the Messiah, “He shall be called the Son of the God; they will call him the Son of the Most High ... He will judge the earth in righteousness ... and every nation will bow down to him... with (God's) help he will make war.” During this time period they had to contend with being under Roman occupation and the other invasive way, the Pharisees influence on the temple worship. This included their many new traditions to live by, adding to Moses’ law by their own religious reinterpretations. The Pharisees added 100 or more laws for each of the 613 laws of Moses, which became more important than Moses law. In time, the people knew the laws of the Pharisees better than their Hebrew Old Testament, but it became a burden to keep. There are those who believe the Essenes were driven out into the wilderness as a result of a dispute with the priestly leaders in Jerusalem over matters of legal interpretation of the law. This could be one of the reasons the Essenes were a strict “monastic” community, apart from the current problems they saw that came into Judaism. They were known to copy biblical texts and creating their own documents, and collected others religious books that were circulating. They believed in some mystical ideas, such as participating with the angels in their worship, etc. They had their own set of flawed beliefs Josephus wrote, that when one joins the Essenes, he was to swear that he would keep their doctrines secret, (especially the names of angels.) Many of the scrolls discovered at Qumran confirm this veneration of angels, such as the Aramaic Testament of Levi 18:5,10; Jubilee 1:27, 29;11; 2:1;12, 1 Enoch 84:4;13; 100:10;14;104:1, 4;15. Bible books were scrolls at the time, used in the synagogue for liturgical use. Considered invaluable, they were kept with great care. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls were found preserved in linen wrappings. Books/portions were kept in Earthenware jars (Jer. 32:14). 900 distinct scrolls contain Jewish religious literature, books from the Apocrypha (Tobit, Ben Sirach, Epistle of Jeremiah), the Pseudepigrapha (1 Enoch, Book of Giants, Testaments of Levi and Naftali), previously unknown psalms. Not just biblical texts were found at Qumran, but also, non-biblical literary works, and some mystical, and even occultic works. Whether they practiced all of these or were collections is not yet determined. The Qumran Dead Sea Scrolls found in the caves, included 40,000 fragments of scrolls, 600 partial manuscripts, 80 Old Testament chapters and the famous Temple Scroll. Nearly all of these writings were written in Hebrew, and out of the nine Hebrew scrolls, or 179 modern A4 pages, only the equivalent of 22 pages were in Aramaic. These early manuscript fragments date nearly a thousand years before the oldest Masoretic manuscripts that are from the tenth century. The Dead Sea scrolls clearly show that the Hebrew language was the Primary language spoken and written prior and at the time of Jesus. Most are written in Hebrew; both Leviticus and Job were written in Aramaic with a few manuscripts written in Greek. All of the books of the Old Testament, except for Esther, Nehemiah, and some of the minor prophet’s, have also been discovered in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea scrolls clearly show that the Hebrew language was the Primary language spoken and written prior and at the time of Jesus. The fragments, (mostly being just tiny pieces of manuscripts put together) and scrolls (about 35% of the DSS biblical manuscripts) belong to the Masoretic tradition, 5% to the Septuagint family, and 5% to the Samaritan, the remainder is not yet determined. There were 17 differences from the current Masoretic text of today and then, that were mostly punctuation. 10 were differences in spelling, out of the other 7; 4 were of conjunctions, the last 3 were different words used for light. Charles Pfeiffer stated “The Old Testament books from Qumran are those which we find in our Bibles. Minor textual variants occur as they do in any document which depends on hand copies for multiplication, but the biblical text may be regarded as essentially reliable” (The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible, Charles F. Pfeiffer, p. 114). The scrolls brought to the world manuscripts of Old Testament books 1,000 years older than any previously in existence. Of the older scrolls, the Isaiah A Scroll (IQIsa) is the oldest known copy of any complete book of the Bible dating back to around 125-130 B.C. (or possibly older). The Isaiah B scroll (IQIsb) dates close to the same time period (about 125 B.C.). Both texts bear close resemblance to the Masoretic text (which was translated from 895-1000 A.D.) which is the standard text used today for all Hebrew Bible translations. As mentioned in a previous article, the Masoeretes were extremely accurate at copying the Old Testament! When the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1947, a complete copy of the book of Isaiah in Hebrew was found from 125 B.C. and was compared to a later scroll of Isaiah from 900 A.D., 1,000 years later, and was found to be almost word for word. No doctrinal material was affected by any of the discrepancies. Gleason Archer observes that the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave 1, “ proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 percent of the text. The 5 percent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling ” (Archer, 19). Which has this lean toward a non scribe writing it. Most of these Hebrew Scrolls are written in the standard "square" ("Hebrew") script, very similar to today’s Modern Hebrew, there are several that are written in paleo-Hebrew, an ancient script from the First Temple period. Some of the Scrolls written in the standard script used the ancient script, specifically for writing the divine name. All of the Greek texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are written in Koine Greek, (the common Greek dialect, not classic Greek). A total of 27 Greek manuscripts have been identified from the Qumran caves, several Greek fragments are preserved in Cave 4. All the remains of 19 papyri found in Qumran Cave 7, the majority of manuscripts cannot be identified, except for a copy of Exodus and an Apocryphal work, and the Epistle of Jeremiah. Newly discovered texts are written entirely in the Greek, except for God’s name, which is represented in the Hebrew as the Tetragrammaton (YHWH). Which tells us no official scribe translated these to have both languages combined together (when they were translated each in their own language originally). Probably were latter transcribed. |
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