Unveiling the Truth: From the Dead Sea Scrolls to Biblical Criticism

Four thousand years ago, our patriarch Abraham fought against idol worshippers. Around 2300 years ago, the Maccabees battled Greek culture. A millennium ago, our sages debated with Christianity, and in modern times, a new illusion arose, termed "biblical criticism." The field emerged due to Christianity's decline. For about 2000 years, Christians persecuted Jews with absurd accusations of killing their messiah, desecrating the Eucharist, mixing Christian blood in matzah, and defying the logic of their Trinity, among other things. In modernity, these accusations were understood to be ludicrous, leaving Christianity with no basis to annul the Torah they called the "Old Testament." What to do next?

German Protestant scholars concocted "critical" theories about the Torah. A scholar named Wellhausen claimed that Jews had falsified the original people of Israel. There were different sects during the Second Temple times. The "Jewish" group triumphed, destroying other authentic groups like the Sadducees and the ancient Israelites. Judaism, he argued, was a modern invention, and so was the Torah.

If we traveled back to the Second Temple days, Wellhausen argued, and entered the libraries of many Jews throughout the country, we would find different versions of the Torah. The true versions were in the spirit of Christianity, with fewer commandments for sacrifices, as the prophets would say, emphasizing that heartfelt devotion was the main thing, and practical commandments were of lesser importance. With some manipulation of the prophets' words and what was then considered "evidence," his theory spread among Germany's scholars.

But in the 20th century, what seemed a fantastical vision came to pass: we managed to travel back in time and enter the libraries of the dissident sects from the Second Temple period. This refers to the monumental discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To grasp the scope of these materials, note that the Dead Sea Scrolls texts were published in 40 volumes by Oxford University Press over 54 years (1955-2009). For the past 19 years, Professor Emanuel Tov of the Hebrew University, leading 98 researchers, edited and published 28 volumes. Before him was editor Professor Eugene Ulrich, who, with his team, published 8 volumes, on top of the first 14 volumes.

Many theories arose by biblical researchers when the oldest biblical manuscript we had was the Leningrad Codex from around 1000 CE (preceded slightly by the Aleppo Codex). But the facts contradicted the theories.

According to the conjectures accepted by all biblical scholars, during the Second Temple period, the Torah was still being edited, with different versions existing. Different Jewish sects supposedly had other "original" versions of the Torah and the Prophets.

Let's call to testify the two main editors of these texts. In his article "The Absence of Sectarian Variants in the Biblical Scrolls from Qumran – How?", Eugene Ulrich writes: "When asked to write about the 'sectarian elements' in the biblical scrolls discovered at Qumran, I replied with some reluctance that my article would not exceed a page because, in all my years working on the scrolls, I never encountered a sectarian variant. However, assuming that titles might be instructive, I suggested writing about the absence of sectarian textual changes from the scrolls, as such an absence offers us a valuable lesson."

The first lesson is, naturally, the expectation from those who commissioned the article, assuming there were "sectarian elements" in the Dead Sea Scrolls. After all, the separatist sects' scribes did not spare criticism of the priests and Jerusalem's inhabitants and the halachic system of their time. Of course, they were not familiar with the term "Chazal" and were not bound to any of their canon. Thus, it was most natural to expect sectarian changes in biblical literature, in light of their outlook. Yet, the facts are that there are no such changes. Not even in books like Daniel, which are relatively late, do we find sectarian changes based on ideology or perspective. It was not part of the writing culture, despite the prolific writings of the Qumran scribes.

What are sectarian textual changes? These are known, for instance, in the Samaritan Torah, where several passages were altered to imply or explicitly state the sanctity of Mount Gerizim. As Ulrich notes: "It is important to note several facts: each of these examples is a secondary version, each is distinctly tendentious, appropriate to the Samaritans (or northern believers)... the specific Samaritan motif recurs in these versions."

Do we find such behavior among the Israelites or Jews that parallels the Samaritans?

"The specific arguments appear in 'sectarian' secondary compositions, whereas the scriptural texts themselves remain unchanged... To focus the discussion and achieve helpful results, the article must be limited to about 230 biblical manuscripts from Qumran... Throughout my work on biblical copies from the fourth cave for publication... I found nothing I could define as a sectarian textual change..."

Regarding the book of Samuel, written at Qumran (unlike others possibly brought from other cities), Ulrich writes: "When we specifically search for sectarian changes, we find nothing. All changes in the scrolls, in the Masoretic text, in the ancient Greek translations, later Greek manuscripts, and the ancient Latin translation are insignificant and commonplace changes, like adding implied yet unsaid elements... There is no sectarian change in the scrolls, the Masoretic text, or the Septuagint that one could define as an intentional alteration by any Second Temple Jewish group."

To summarize, Ulrich writes: "Regarding the evidence on the text: no textual changes were discovered indicating that any group – Pharisees, Sadducees, Samaritans, Essenes, Christians, or others – changed the scriptural text to support their beliefs. The exceptions are two religious ideas of the Samaritans, that God chose Mount Gerizim and commanded the building of the central altar there... All groups had defined views, but it seems they all agreed not to alter the 'original' text of scripture, resolving difficulties by correcting texts to the 'original source' rather than according to the sect's ideology.

"And so the ancient scribes did. They almost always tried to copy the text exactly as it was before them or the version they envisioned."

In short, the theories might appear appealing to some, but reality revealed them as fundamentally flawed. There were no changes or content exchanges in the Torah, Prophets, or Writings. All the various sects, from the Sadducees and Essenes to the eccentric groups by the Dead Sea, all adhered to the same single version.