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In What languages was the Bible Originally Written?

Methods of Copying the Old Testament

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

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