Exodus, Fragment 2 from 4Q13 – 4Q Exodb, Photographer: Shai Halevi – Deadseascrolls.org.il USA 2D. Image of a public domain work.
“All of Jacob’s Descendants Numbered Seventy-Five” – The Opening of Exodus in the Dead Sea Scrolls
The Book of Exodus begins with an accounting of the members of Jacob's family who went with him to Egypt. Our Torah, the Masoretic Text, lists 70 people. Dead Sea Scroll manuscript 4QExb, however, records 75 people. How do we account for this and other differences between the texts?
Published: January 5, 2015
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Last Updated: September 7, 2026
In general, in antiquity the army would first conquer the smaller cities and towns around the capital, isolating the capital city, and eventually laying siege to it.
No Dead Sea Scrolls have the entire Torah copied on a single scroll since the technology for working parchment very thin so that the entire Torah could be copied in a single scroll was not yet developed at this time.
The system we now use developed in Tiberius, in the Galilee, but other systems were tried as well, as reflected in manuscript evidence from the Cairo Genizah and elsewhere. Thus, various traditions reflected in the Talmudim and other early rabbinic literature about how a word is read reflect oral, not written traditions—after all, no language can be read without vowels, but the vowel system need not be written down. Similarly, various discussions in the Talmud about trope likely reflect signs that were made in the air, rather than a written system. Had a system of writing symbols for the vowels and trope always existed, they would have been recorded in the scrolls; the fact that various, competing systems are found in the post-Talmudic period indicates that the written system developed after the Talmud.
Some scholars believe that the Joseph story as a whole originated as a separate block of material, inserted secondarily between the ancestral stories and the exodus. The book of Chronicles (דברי הימים) greatly deemphasizes the sojourn in Egypt, and it is likely that some in ancient Israel did not have the tradition of descending to Egypt, insisting instead that the Israelites continually possessed the land of Israel.
It is also important to remember that Christianity developed as a branch of Judaism in the first century CE, and that the New Testament offers important evidence for Judaism in the period after the Bible but before the earliest rabbinic literature such as the Mishnah (late second century CE or early third). The Bible of this community was typically the Septuagint, so it is not surprising that Acts here agrees with the Septuagint.
For more details on the creation of the Masoretic text, and places where the Talmudic text differs from the Masoretic one, see B. Barry Levy, Fixing God's Torah: The Accuracy of the Hebrew Bible Text in Jewish Law (Oxford, 2001). Note especially his discussion on pp. 164-166 of R. Akiva Eiger’s Gilyon HaShas to Shabbat 55b.
