How We Got the Bible Part 2: The Earliest Hebrew Manuscripts

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"How We Got the Bible: Transmission and Translation" with Pastor Sean Finnegan. Session 2: The Earliest Hebrew Manuscripts

Masoretic Text manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible include the Codex Cairensis (896), the Petersburg Codex (916), the London Codex Oriental 4445 (925), the Aleppo Codex (925), the University of Michigan Torah (950), the Damascus Pentateuch (1000), the Leningrad Codex (1010), the University of Bologna Torah Scroll (1155), and the Mikraot Gedolot which is 16th century text that the King James Bible (KJV) is translated from.

But the Masoretic Text manuscripts are not the oldest Hebrew manuscripts! In today’s session, we will look at even older Hebrew manuscripts including the Cairo Genizah Texts, the Ein-Gedi Scroll, the Nash Papyrus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Ketef Hinnom Silver Scroll. By looking at these texts, we will go back before the Middle Ages into earlier and earlier times, until we get to times even before Christ.

A “genizah” is involved in dealing with texts that are worn out. What do you do when a Bible wears out? If you’re an orthodox Jew, you bring the worn our Bible to a special room in the synagogue called a “genizah” where the worn our Bible will be stored. A nook near or under the synagogue’s ark, a basement room, a cubbyhole – all of these could and did function as genizot. The fragments that required this sort of treatment became known as shemot, or names: theyw ere considered sacred because they bore the name of God. In some town and cities, the genizah materials were taken out of their receptacles on a designated day and buried in an elaborate ritual that was part funeral, part carnival. Depending on local tradition, the papers and books – and often discarded ritual objects that included or had contact with a written text, such as mezuzot, phylactery straps, and the like – would be placed in straw baskets, leather sheets, or lengths of white cloth, like shrouds. Coffins draped with decorative fabrics were sometimes used to hold a no longer valid Torah scroll, and the privilege of pallberaring was bestowed upon those who had donated money to the synagogue. Songs were sung, cakes eaten, and arak was drunk as a procession set out for the cemetery. This act of inhumation served, in fact, as a kind of twin ritual to the dedication of a new Torah scroll, and after the old scroll was buried, pilgrimages to the “grave” would be made, just as they were to the tombs of holy men.

The Cairo Genizah, mostly discovered late in the nineteenth century but still resurfacing in our own day, is a collection of over 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts. Many of these were stored in the loft of the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat in medieval Cairo between the 11th and 19th centuries. The dark, sealed room in the arid Egyptian climate contributed to the preservation of the documents, the earliest of which go back to the 8th or 9th centuries A.D. These manuscripts outline a 1,000 year continuum of Middle-Eastern history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world. The Cairo Genizah can be described as one of the greatest Jewish treasures ever found.

Even older than the Cairo Genizah manuscripts, are the Dead Sea Scrolls. The term “Dead Sea Scrolls” is redolent of enigma, of intrigue, perhaps even of sacred mysteries; hovering in the background are images of caves, scrolls, barren deserts, and intense scholars hunched over tiny scraps of leather. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran, which occupies one of the lowest parts of the earth’s surface, on the fringe of the hot and arid wastes of the Judean Wilderness. From that place, members of an ancient Jewish religious community hurried out one day and in secrecy climbed the nearby cliffs in order to hide away in 11 caves their precious scrolls. No one came back to retrieve the. There they remained, undisturbed, for 2,000 years.