Skeptics and armchair theologians (of the liberal and cult type) will say the Bible—the Tanach, Old and New Testaments, etc.—has many different ways of being interpreted, is full of errors and contradictions, and therefore cannot be reliable. It would be nice to blast away at all the opposition to the Bible in one fell swoop, but there are so many issues and angles they bring up against the trustworthiness of God’s Word.
Ever since the 18th century, there has been the old Higher Criticism, or the JDEP theory, which the liberal scholars STILL hold on to without one shred of documentary evidence. Those who would be interested in defending the Bible against that should start with Hengstengberg, who was contemporary with many of the German scholars who brought that up. His writings are possibly hard to get a hold of, though. Anyone with an original edition of any of his stuff has a theological gold mine at hand.
All I can say about the JDEP theory is that, if it were true, and the Pentateuch had been put together after the Babylonian exile then the Jewish leaders all got together and claimed it came from Moses, they have foisted the greatest con job upon their own people and the world. Highly unlikely.
Then there’s those who, like the Mormon leadership, claim that the Bible can’t be trusted in how it has been translated, that it is doubtful whether it has been translated correctly. Anyone with a moderate amount of study into that topic would realize that holds little water. Successful translations of the Old Testament had been made since before the 2nd century B.C. (Please, I don’t regard the secular humanist BCE nomenclature.), so we have many other known languages to which to compare our translations. The New Testament is even more reliable in that regard.
But my concern as of late has been the little spots in the Old Testament, in the original Hebrew, where there are “differences” or some may be “errors.” I’ve been doing my morning devotions going through the Hebrew OT, or the Tanach, if you will. That is an acronym for Torah (the Law), Nevi’im (the Prophets) and C’tovim (the Writings); the three main divisions of the Old Testament.
We who claim and believe in the plenary inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, take that idea to mean that in the original writing of each book of the Bible, there were no errors in the message God intended to convey to His people, including historically, etc. No one can prove, of course, that every writer of an OT book was a perfect speller or had the best command of Hebrew grammar, but that is where many believers make their first assumption.
Remember this, too, that after the first edition was made, then it was copied over the centuries, usually onto sheepskin, papyrus or some similar perishable material. Through the centuries, it is expected that some problems would creep in over the course of being copied by the hands of fallible people. However, compared to all the ancient literature known and discovered, the ratio of properly copied words over mistakes, etc. throughout the Hebrew OT is very, very low, in the range of less than 1/10th of one percent. Think of that; that’s like one problem only after every 1,000 words!
If you were to look at a Hebrew Tanach as one finds in your local synagogue, you will sometimes see a few words written in the outer margin of a page. This is what is called a “Quere” (kar-ee), or reading. It is the way a certain word or phrase should be read out loud. It differs from the letters actually written in the Old Testament text.
That difference between what is actually written and what is spelled out in the margin, people are want to call a mistake or error. Now, I believe not every one of these quere citations are actual errors in the copying of the text. Some are. That does not mean that God’s Word is “full” of errors. And very few make figuring out the original of the text highly doubtful. Much of it can be understood by its immediate context, just like we understand what a typo in a newspaper story should really be, because we easily get the context of that word.
Of course, these are not the only scribal errors to be cited. There are small differences between various translations, such as the Greek Septuagint or the Syriac Old Testament. The extant Hebrew texts may have small variations between schools of scribes.
Here’s what I believe some of these quere “scribal errors" could very possibly be attributed to:
- Dialectic differences: It is evident from reading of the geographical and demographic differences in the settling of the Israelite tribes in the Promised Land, that there would also be differences in the way one tribe or group would speak and spell. The incident in Judges 12:5-6 lends evidence to this. One group could not pronounce the “sh” sound properly, and so they were shown to be of the Ephraimite ethnicity.
- Bad grammar, bad spelling: As I mentioned above, we are not guaranteed that all of the Old Testament authors were perfect spellers or had perfect grammatical understanding. Some dialectical differences could also have lent to “improper” Hebrew grammar. Just look at what most blog comments and emails are replete of today.
- Politeness, embarrassment, etc.: There are a couple of examples where some vulgar words were given more polite, more gentle equivalents. The reason for this is because after the Jews were dispersed in exile, and the synagogues were their normal worship culture, the Tanach would be read out loud during service, just like we have in every Christian liturgical service.
One case in point is in 2nd Kings 18:27, where I’m pretty sure the common words for “pee” and “poop” were used by the Assyrian official speaking in the hearing of the Jews during their siege of Jerusalem. Now if you were to read those words out loud in the synagogue, I’m sure a lot of pre-bar-mitzvahed boys would do a lot of giggling, and many mothers would recoil with shock. So, it made sense to the scribes to replace those words with something more suited to public expression. - Confusion between letterforms: This is a very common one. In particular, the letters “vav” and “yod” are most common, because they only differ in how long the stroke is to make them. Any scribe who made the “vav” a little shorter than normal or the “yod” a little longer would have made it difficult for future scribes to discern, especially after a long day and their eyes would get weary. Another interesting nugget to chew on is the fact that at the rise of the Assyrian empire and some time afterward, there was a transition from the Jews using the original Hebrew letterforms and switching over to the Aramaic letterforms. Some scribal errors could have been introduced at those times as well.
- Dyslexia: That’s right, dyslexia isn’t just a common modern problem. The advantage today is that we have many methods for helping people overcome it. But I could surmise easily that a mild case of dyslexia could have been a problem for a number of scribes over the centuries. So many examples of obvious dyslexic errors are peppered throughout the Hebrew text, where a pair of letters were switched around. Like I said, though, the context usually betrays what the original word should be.
And I can imagine some dyslexic scribal student arguing with his Jewish mother about this: “I just can’t get it, Mom. I keep screwing up the order of my letters in the trials. I don’t think I’m fit to be a scribe.” “What do mean, not fit to be a scribe?" she exclaims, “Nonsense. Your father is a scribe; your grandfather was a scribe; and your great-grandfather was a scribe. Just work harder. You’ll make a great scribe.” “Well, OK, Mom,” he says reluctantly, “If you insist!” No wonder we have these kinds of things in there!
