The Great Isaiah Scroll and a thousand years of copying
Found in 1947, the scroll let scholars compare Isaiah across a millennium of hand copying. What did they find?
Before the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest complete Hebrew manuscripts of Isaiah came from the medieval period. The Great Isaiah Scroll, found in Qumran Cave 1 in 1947, is usually dated to the second century BC — roughly a thousand years earlier.1
What the comparison showed
The scroll is strikingly close to the later Masoretic text. Most differences are in spelling and grammar. There are meaningful variants too, and some have been adopted by modern translations, but none changes the book’s substance.2
For readers, it is a vivid illustration of — and an equally vivid reminder that textual criticism is careful work, not a slogan.
Notes
Sources
- primaryGreat Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaᵃ), Qumran Cave 1. Israel Museum, Shrine of the Book.
- secondaryEmanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed.. Fortress Press, 2012.
- secondaryMartin Abegg Jr., Peter Flint and Eugene Ulrich, The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible. HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
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