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Why Use the Dead Sea Scrolls instead of the Masoretic Text to translate Isaiah?
Why is the base text for Isaiah the Great Scroll of Isaiah? Why was 1QIsa substituted for the MT?
In our view 1QIsa is more reliable than the two surviving Masoretic Text manuscripts. More on this, below.
It is completely out of accord with the 1st principle of translation posted on-line.
At best, this accusation misunderstands the principle. Our answer is that or use of the Great Isaiah Scroll is fully in accord with our first principle: Here’s what our first principle states, as quoted exactly from our Principles of Translation page:
For the Tanakh, or Old Testament, the Masoretic text as published in the latest editions of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and Quinta is used as the base text, in consultation with other ancient Hebrew texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, and a select number of ancient versions (the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Targums). All significant departures from the base text, as well as all significant textual variants, are indicated in footnotes.
With respect to Isaiah’s famous book, the operative phrase “in consultation with other ancient Hebrew texts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls” is applicable. In the case of Isaiah, we consulted with 1QIsa so much that it became quickly evident that in translating the book of Isaiah, the MT must be supplanted by 1QIsa, aka the Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran Cave One because 1QIsa is more reliable than the MT.
We make no statement as to the comparative reliability of the MT to the other MSS of the DSS. For now, we only comment on the contents of Qumran Cave One.
It is not commonly known to lay Bible readers that the entire ancient corpus of Old Testament Hebrew manuscripts consists of only two texts: Codex Leningradensis and the Aleppo Text. Both date from within 100 years of each other, give or take a decade or so, and in round numbers we date them from about 950 and 1050 AD.
In contrast, the DSS Great Isaiah Scroll dates from mid-2nd century BC, at the latest, and maybe as early as the mid-200’s BC. It’s 1200 years or more older than the MT manuscripts that have survived over the centuries. In our view, 1QIsa is the more reliable manuscript.
Along the way to rendering one of the first high-quality English language translations of 1QIsa with scholarly footnotes that will be made generally available to the public, a suspicion that’s grown on us while making the ISV OT rendering has come to the forefront of our analysis of the MT text: this is our growing theory that certain parts of the MT tradition came about during the Middle Ages as a polemic response to the Christian interpretation of the Tanakh as that tradition is sustained in the NT MSS.
The explanations of the events of the NT (as depicted by those NT writers) have a tendency to cite the LXX, since the NT was largely composed originally in Greek, or when citing the Tanakh, NT writers occasionally proffer what appears to be a Targum; i.e., a dynamically produced, spontaneously crafted translation from the original Hebrew or Aramaic Tanakh into Greek, somewhat after the fashion of a modern United Nations-like dynamic translation. In doing all of this, NT writers who are citing the OT as proof of a prophecy fulfillment
sometimes make citations that are inconsistent with the MT readings. But these renderings do not appear to have been inconsistent with the LXX or with their Targum-like personal translations. Nor, it would appear, are these citations by NT writers inconsistent with 1QIsa in the DSS, even though occasionally the NT writer citations of the OT are inconsistent with the MT. So we’ve been wondering why the MT says things that the DSS don’t contain. We think the anti-NT interpretational grid for the MT arose during the 4th century as a response to Constantine’s somewhat anti-Semitic influence on the Jewish Hebrew scholarly community. So we’re relying on 1QIsa over the MT’s Aleppo Text and Codex Leningradensis. To sum up, when we can use a Hebrew MS that is 12 centuries older than the MT, we’ll use it rather than MT.
OK, thanks for posting this. Sounds like they are explaining why a manuscript 1200 years older is preferred.
But while I am trying to consider Ender's telephone analogy with regard to these texts, I still have no idea how his reference to the dead sea scrolls helps him make it.
What I can determine by my own meager scholarship is that the KJV which was made with very few manuscripts is slightly inferior to the NIV and modern versions which used a great many more manuscripts, many of which were older.
But if the "telephone game" analogy is valid, I would expect the NIV and KJV to be hopelessly divergent. But I find they have very little difference except in what English words were chosen for translation. The apparent differences in manuscript were minute and irrelevant to anybody but the nit-picking perfectionists who do God's tedius work of translating these things.
Thus I must conclude its unreasonable to take Ender seriously in this matter.