Page 64 - Doctrine and History of the Preservation of the Bible revised

Methods of Copying the O.T

Meticulous care of Jewish Scribes

The lack of manuscript evidence could be a cause for alarm if it were not for the extreme care of the
Jewish scribes who made copies of the Old Testament. The Jewish scribes conscientiously sought
perfection in the transcription of the text. According to the Talmud, rigid regulations were laid down for
making copies of Old Testament texts:

1. The copyist was required to sit in full Jewish dress after a complete bathing.
2. Only a certain kind of ink could be used.
3. Rules governed the spacing of words.
4. No word or letter could be written from memory.
5. Lines and letters were methodically counted.
6. If a manuscript was found to have even one error it was destroyed. (This helps explain why only a few
manuscripts survived.)
7. During the copying process, any two words touching each other warranted destruction of that page,
and the page before it (because it had touched that page).

“This strict set of regulations which governed the early Jewish scribes is a chief factor which guarantees
the accurate transmission of the Old Testament text” (Lightfoot, pp. 97-98).

Confirmation of the Dead Sea Scrolls “With the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars have Hebrew
manuscripts one thousand years earlier than the great Masoretic Text manuscripts, enabling them to
check on the fidelity of the Hebrew text. The result of comparative studies reveals that there is a word-
for-word identity in more than 95 percent of the cases, and the 5 percent variation consists mostly of
slips of the pen and spelling” (Geisler and Nix, p. 382). As F. F. Bruce says, “The new evidence confirms
what we had already good reason to believe—that the Jewish scribes of the early Christian centuries
copied and recopied the text of the Hebrew Bible with the utmost fidelity” (F. F. Bruce, Second Thoughts
on the Dead Sea Scrolls, pp. 61-62).

No Originals? The Bible is a Copy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfFibipkIdU

Methods of Translating the Bible

There are many versions or translations of the Bible today. Why so many? Is one better than the other?
Is there only one true and faithful translation? Let’s look into the difficulties that translators encounter.

Not only that but translating from one language to another is not as simple as it may sound. You don’t
just look at the word in one language and match it up with the other language. Why?

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