Shalom everyone,
Some of you might be aware that I have had an ongoing project since 2005, which I have called, ‘The Original Israelite Bible Project’. Thanks to the existence of four different versions of the Torah, it’s possible to bring together and reconstruct the original text of the Torah. There are also three different versions of the other books of the Bible, so it’s also possible to reconstruct the original text of the rest of the Hebrew Bible.
Please read to the end of this article for news of an exciting recent discovery called, ‘The Shapira Scroll’ – the existence of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls that was actually found in the 19th century, 80 years before any of the others were found.
Introduction
Wouldn’t you rather know the truth about something, than live your whole life being coddled and comforted by a false assumption?
Without knowing any biblical history themselves, some fundamentalists believe that the entire Hebrew Bible was delivered complete, handed down from God, from beginning to end, all in one go. Others who are willing to think a bit more about it, and realise that the Bible covers a very long period of time, are willing to concede that each book of the Bible was written at different times, but nevertheless, will still insist that each book was delivered – or even dictated – by God to a human being, at the time it was written.
When you learn Hebrew and start being able to read Hebrew, these views begin to unravel. You begin to see that there are different styles, different forms of language, and different dialects – throughout the Bible. Some biblical books, from an analysis of the language contained within them, even seem to have different styles and forms of language within just the one book. It begins to dawn on you that, no, these documents were not written down, or even authored, by the same person.
There was a point at which each document, each book of the Bible, reached its final form. The study of the sources of a document is called, ‘Source Criticism’, and the study of how a document was edited and put together, is called, ‘Redaction Criticism’. These study-disciplines make untenable the belief that the Bible is a perfect, infallible, unchangeable or complete text.
For fundamentalists, this is simply unacceptable – almost blasphemous even. However, in my view, the Bible has effectively become their god – they revere, idolise and worship Scripture to such a degree, that the Bible is their god. However, this is the sin of bibliolatry: idolatry of sacred scripture. Revering sacred scripture to such an extreme degree is idolatry. The god they worship is inaccessible and unknowable – because their rigidly harsh fundamentalist god, moulded by human minds and lacking in any divine compassion, isn’t real – and so the only option they have is to deify the Bible itself. They can’t exert any control over God, so they seek rigid control over the Bible instead.
In contrast, if you follow the Living God, Yahveh – if you are able to get to know Yahveh, relate to Yahveh, love Yahveh and admire Yahveh’s values and ideals – then the fact that the Bible is not perfect will not faze you at all. I know I repeat this time and again in my writings, but always remember that the people before Moses had no Torah, and yet they knew their religion – the Way of Yahveh. They had no Bible, yet they knew God’s values and principles, because they had a direct relationship with Yahveh, who is a real, living Entity. At a time when all we had was a very primitive form of the Torah, Israelites were advised, “Know Yahveh” (see Jer 31:34, 1Chron 22:19, Hos 2:20, Hos 6:3). Yahveh is a real, living God, and therefore a knowable God. Only a god that is false – a creation of human intellect – is distant and unknowable.
Mistakes and Omissions in the Bible
The most undeniable mistakes in the Bible – ones that only the most foolhardy would try to deny – are the mistakes that appear in the acrostic psalms. An acrostic psalm is a psalm where every line, couplet or verse begins with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Since the order of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet has remained unchanged from ancient times, then if a letter of the alphabet is missing, the omission is obvious; it is a provable error which no one can possibly deny – and to even try would be a foolish endeavour to nowhere.
Such is the case in Ps 9, where the lines for the letter dalet are missing (between 9:6 & 9:7); in Ps 10, the lines for the letter mem are missing (between 10:2 & 10:3) and samek (somewhere within 10:5); and in Ps 34, the lines for vav are missing (between 34:5 & 34:6). In Ps 145, the line for the letter nun is obviously missing (between 145:13 & 145:14). However, the version of the psalm in the Dead Sea Scrolls provides us with the missing words.
With regards to Torah itself: Anyone who can read and understand Hebrew, and has ever been called up to read from the Torah on Shabbat, knows that there are certain mistakes in the Torah that they have to be aware of when reading.
There are certain copying mistakes made in the Torah, which you have to be aware of, because these words are not read out (qerei) as they are written (ketiv). Rather than correct these copying errors, the errors themselves have become sacred, immutable and uncorrectable, because of pure superstition and irrational fear. The commonest copying mistake is in mistaking the Hebrew letter yod (י) for a vav (ו), and vice versa. If written quickly, in ancient Hebrew they look identical.
Error example #1: At MT Gen 36:14, the name Ye‛ush is spelt Ye‛ish (the Herodian-style vav, if written quickly, can look like a yod). Similarly, at MT Gen 32:30, the place-name Penu’el is mistakenly written as Peni’el (yet it is spelt correctly in the following verse); MT Dt 33:9 has bano (בנו his son) instead of banav (בניו his sons – a missing yod). Rather than correct these obvious spelling errors, the Masoretic scribes built up a tradition of simply remembering these mistakes; they are written (ketīv) one way (that is, the wrong way), but pronounced and read out (qėrei) a different way (i.e. the correct way). If you don’t speak or read Hebrew, you will not be aware of any of this.
Other times, you will be reading the Hebrew narrative, and it is obvious that there is something missing. If you only read and understand English, translators don’t help you, because they usually cover up these problems in their translations. Hence my next example.
Error Example #2: The wording of the verse suggests that there is a substantial omission in the text. For example, MT Gen verse 4:8 has a phrase missing from it. The Hebrew in the Masoretic text reads:
Cain said to his brother… So when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.
Every other ancient version of the text, except for the standard Masoretic text of the Tanakh, reads,
“Cain said to his brother, ‘Come, let us go out into the field.’ So when they were in the field, Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him.”
The words indicated in bold are completely missing in the Masoretic text, yet appear in every other version of the passage – in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Aramaic Targums, the Greek Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch. This suggests that a copying mistake was made in the supposedly ‘perfect’ Masoretic text – the text that scribes supposedly copied ‘perfectly’ from generation after generation, from time immemorial, without ever making any mistakes.
Error Example #3: At MT Gen 37:2, the line begins, ‘These are the generations of Ya‛aqov’. This is the ancient Hebrew way of saying, ‘This is an account of the story of Ya‛aqov’. However, it quite clearly is not the beginning of the story of Ya‛aqov, but of his son Yosef. It’s almost comical the way that some commentators and interpreters try to defend and justify the wording of the text. The Masoretic Hebrew reads:
élleh | toldōt | ya‛aqov | yōseif | ben | shva‛ | ‛esreih | shānāh | hāyāh
these | generations | Jacob | Joseph | son | seven | ten | year | was
In biblical Hebrew, to say how old you are, you would say, ‘I am son of xx year’, or, ‘I am daughter of xx year’ . If the obviously missing words are restored, we can instantly see how the scribal copying-error might have occurred:
élleh toldōt yōseif ben ya‛aqov yōseif ben shva‛ ‛esreih shānāh hāyāh
These are the generations of Joseph son of Jacob. Joseph was 17 years old
You can see that the words, yōseif ben are repeated in what hypothetically would have been the original source material. If the scribe was tired, or otherwise distracted, he could have seen these two words, and mistakenly thought he had already copied them, so he went straight on to the word for ‘seven’.
This also suggests to me that there had to be a point in history when there was only one single copy of the Torah that already contained these mistakes, in order for the same mistake to have then been passed on to every subsequent copy.
The most likely stage would have been when the final version of the Torah was being put together after the Babylonian Exile, being taken from various original source materials (such as the Elohist, Priestly and Yahwist sources). The mistake therefore had to be in the very first copy of the final, redacted text in the 6th century BCE, and all subsequent copies then perpetuated this error.
Error Example #4: Another good example is at MT Gen 37:36, where the first yod has been omitted from ‘Midianites’, so that in Hebrew it actually reads ‘Midanites’ instead – again, this error could have been in the very first redacted copy, to be passed on to all subsequent copies. This is an obvious and undeniable spelling mistake, but in the Masoretic tradition, they considered the text so sacred – even with the obvious spelling mistakes and flaws in it – they believed they were forbidden upon pain of being cursed and struck down by God to correct the errors. I cannot in all conscience and intellect defend the logic of such a primitive and crude, superstitious belief.
How the Torah was put together and written
When the people of Judea were taken into exile to Babylon in about 587 BCE, it became urgent that the disparate oral and written traditions of Israel be put down in writing, in order to ensure that the religion of Israel was not lost while in Exile. Among those Judean exiles were also descendants of people who had been refugees from the Northern Kingdom, which had fallen 200 years previously. They had brought with them their own, distinct, oral and written traditions. In his book, ‘The Bible with Sources Revealed’, Richard E. Friedman shows that the Elohist (E) Israelite and Yahwist (J) Judahite sources had previously been amalgamated by a redactor in Jerusalem during the pre-Exile period, some time in the late 7th century. There was therefore already a lengthy written document which contributed to the final Redactor’s Torah in the 6th century.
I would hypothesise that the final stage – the project of bringing together the various oral and written traditions of Torah, began in Babylon, and was finished when the Jewish people returned to the Holy Land during the Persian period. The Torah as we have it now, only came into existence in its final form in the 6th century BCE – 800 years after Moses.
Previously, there would of course have been older written sources of Torah, but some of it was still oral. The written sources could have been very ancient indeed – such as the ‘Book of the Covenant’ in Exodus (Ex chapters 21-23), and the stages of the journeys recorded in Numbers. And who knows how far the oral sources of Torah could have dated back to!
I suspect that, during this final stage, there was only one person, one lonely scribe, putting these sources together (sometimes called, ‘The Redactor’ by some scholars). Because there was only one final redactor, there came a point at which there was only one copy of this final, merged edition of the Torah. However, I have to ask, who knows what details from the oral source-material were left out? Who knows what written source-material was left out through editorial decisions, or simply through copying mistakes from the sources?
It then seems that 2 further copies were made of this final merged edition, but unfortunately, they weren’t perfect copies.
There is a story recorded in the Talmud (Tractate Ketubot 106a), which says that after the Babylonian Exile, there was a time when there were three Torah scrolls located in the Temple archives, from which all other copies were being made. However, it was notable that they each had textual variances with each other. The differences were then resolved by simply taking the majority readings among the three. The same tractate in the Talmud says that this single, revised Temple copy then became the standard text from which all other copies were subsequently made.
This logically means that, if only one of the three copies had words from the original final copy of Torah, and the other two did not, then these original – and authentic – words would basically have been ignored and dropped, because they were in the minority.
It could therefore be possible that the reason why differences exist between the Masoretic text, the Samaritan Text, and the Egyptian text (from which the Greek Septuagint translation was made), was because their originals were copies made from one of the other 2 copies that existed before the differences were ironed out.
Anyone who tries to claim that the copying of Torah has always been perfect and without error, doesn’t know about this story in Tractate ketubot.
The Stages of the Torah’s Evolution
To summarise, these are the stages of how, in my view, the Masoretic Text of Torah came about:
1. The Redactor gathered together all the ancient written and oral sources from both the Northern and Southern kingdoms, which were accessible to him (so, what might have been in the sources he couldn’t get hold of in Exile, and which no longer existed?)
2. During this process of melding, the Redactor could have left out stuff, either through editorial decisions, lack of access, or copying errors.
3. When he was finished, there was only one merged, amalgamated copy.
4. Two more copies were made from this one copy; however, there were copying errors in both these secondary copies.
5. The Samaritans copied from one of the copies, and the Egyptian Jewish community used another. It is furthermore possible that the Qumran community used the third. This would explain the differences between all of them.
6. There came a point at which people began noticing that differences existed between the three copies, so a majority reading was taken of the 3 copies, and that eventually became the Masoretic text. This was the standard text from which all other subsequent copies were made. This unfortunately meant that, if only one of the copies had the original, authentic words of Torah, these words were not passed onto the Masoretic text. Thank God we have FOUR versions of Torah to compare!
So that’s how the different versions of Torah came about.
The Shapira Scroll of Deuteronomy
Now to an enthralling and exciting discovery. In 2021, an archaeological ‘cold case’ was reopened. It was the case of the Shapira scroll, which was an unusual version of the Book of Deuteronomy.
In 1865, some Bedouins found a leather scroll, tied up in rotting cloth and stained with black bitumen, in some caves east of the Dead Sea. It was sold to a Jewish antiquities dealer in Jerusalem, Moshe Wilhelm Shapira. The scroll was written in Paleo-Hebrew, and when he read it, Shapira noticed it was parts of the Book of Deuteronomy (NB the original Deuteronomy would have been written in Paleo-Hebrew). You can read the whole story in Ross K. Nicholls’s fascinating book, ‘The Moses Scroll’.
At first glance the content of the scroll – which, as a document in and of itself was complete – it seemed to be a summary of Deuteronomy; not all of Masoretic Deuteronomy was present. However, on closer inspection, the verses that it did contain, were for the most part whole verses. To me, this suggests that the document was a source of the Deuteronomy that we now have. It’s possible that the final redactor in the 6th century BCE used this as a source document.
Various scholars in the 19th century examined the document, and because of its differences to the version of Deuteronomy they were familiar with, declared it a forgery. As a result of the shame and humiliation that Moses Shapira suffered from this accusation, he eventually committed suicide in 1884, and the scrolls themselves went missing several years later in 1889. No one knows what happened to them.
However, we fortunately do have numerous transcriptions and copies of the Hebrew text, and of the notes that were made by the scholars who examined the scrolls and later declared it to be a forgery.
Comparing the verses that exist both in the Shapira scroll and in the Masoretic text of Deuteronomy, there are a number of minor differences, but not enough to warrant including them in my harmonised translation – they wouldn’t add anything substantial.
However, one big difference between the Shapira scroll, and the Masoretic text of Deuteronomy, is that the Shapira scroll contains the blessings that would have been said on Mt. Gerizim. These are completely absent from the Masoretic text, but are written out in full in the Shapira scroll. They would logically appear between MT verses Dt 29:13 & 14 – and they are not merely positive iterations of the curses.
In Josh 8:34, it says that when Joshua was reading out to the Israelites all the words of the ‘Teaching of Moses’ (i.e. the Book of Deuteronomy), he read out the blessings and the curses. This means that the blessings must have been in Deuteronomy at some stage of its existence, yet they are blatantly missing from the Masoretic text we have today.
I suspect that the reason why such an important passage got left out, was because the opening verse for both the blessings to be said on Mt Gerizim, and for the curses to be said on Mt Ebal, are almost identical (“Then the Levites shall declare in a loud voice to all the Israelites”). The Redactor could have seen the opening verse of the blessings, copied it, then when he went back to the source scroll, his eyes fell on the opening verse of the curses instead, and resumed his copying from there. That’s probably why the blessings for Mt Gerizim are entirely missing from all extant versions of the Book of Deuteronomy. In my humble opinion, I think that the only reason why this source-scroll survived – why it was protected and not discarded – was because it still contained the blessings.
You can read the blessings taken from the Shapira scroll here in my reconstructed translation (scroll down to HEBT verses 29:14-27).
In the Shapira scroll, the order of both the blessings and the curses (MT Dt 27:15-26), follows a discernible pattern: the theme of each blessing and curse follows the order of the Ten Commandments. However, the thing about the Ten Commandments that appear in the Shapira scroll, is that they are in a different order to the Ten Commandments we are familiar with. The blessings and the curses in the Shapira scroll both follow this alternative order.
This difference in the order of the Ten Commandments, suggests to me that the Shapira scroll was genuine – because otherwise, why would a forger make such an obvious mistake?
My Personal Views on the question of, ‘Who write the Bible?’
Now I need to address a contentious issue. My starting point to the question of, ‘Who wrote the Bible?’ is to fulfil the commandment to ‘know Yahveh’ (see above). With that mindset, one comes to the conclusion that, anything which is compassionate, noble, loving, just and good in the Bible, that was written under the inspiration of God. However, anything which is cruel, unjust, unkind and devoid of love in the words of the Bible, then that was written by imperfect human beings. In the Israelite way of thinking, we are meant to use our experiential knowledge of Yahveh to be able to tell the difference. In the Talmidi tradition, we are meant to take James’s advice, and interpret scripture ‘honestly and responsibly’ (Book of Jacob the Pious 29:4)
I strongly believe that the words in the books of the Prophets are as near to the direct words of God as we can get. Sometimes, a prophet’s teachings became a school which studied that prophet’s teachings, made up of followers who were inspired by the individual emphases of that prophet. The prophetic words that subsequently came to a prophet’s followers, were then added to the book, but under the prophet’s name. This is what happened with the Book of Isaiah, which contains the prophetic words not only of Isaiah, but also of his followers.
As for the five books of the Torah, the written words we read are ultimately the words of the final Redactor in the 6th century BCE. However, I do believe he used sources which were already centuries old by his time, some of which were likely written by Moses himself, at the behest of God.
As for the other books of the Bible (such as the historical books), each was written by a separate human being, who was trying to record their understanding and experience of God’s values in the life of their people, Israel. I personally do not believe that God dictated such books, but I do believe that it is possible that God could have moved such writers to embark upon the project of writing such books. While God could have inspired these writers to write the historical books, ultimately though, the words they put on parchment were their own.
Summary
When you study the form and style of the Hebrew text of the Bible, with an open mind, you come to realise that the text of the Bible is not perfect. There are obvious things missing. This fact would disturb a fundamentalist who thinks that the Bible is perfect and infallible like God – they think, ‘How can we possibly know God if we don’t have a perfect Bible?’
Talmidis should not be fazed by the inconsistencies, errors, omissions and inaccuracies of the Bible, because the source of our rock-solid values, ethics and spirituality, is Yahveh, our living God, just as it was in the time of the Patriarchs. Sacred Scripture may be imperfect and incomplete, but we can be assured that Yahveh is Perfect, Complete and Unchanging.