Introduction

Even though the Dead Sea Scrolls have opened up seemingly endless resources that help us better understand and reconstruct the early biblical text, we are still groping in the dark when we try to understand how the various biblical texts emerged. Thus, the more we know, the less we know.

We will never have firm answers regarding whether there was once an original text of Hebrew Scripture and which of the known texts represents that text best. Moreover, at least in some chapters, it seems quite possible that more than one formulation of the text circulated already in early times, making it difficult to even discuss which formulation is earlier or later.

The Masoretic Text (MT) of the Torah, the version used by all Jews today (including Karaites),^[1] is a carefully copied text, but that doesn’t mean it is perfect or always reflective of the original.^[2] When analyzing variants, scholars will often express an opinion on the comparative value for each reading, and I will do so here as well. Sometimes an MT reading is preferred, at other times a reading found in another source: a Dead Sea Scroll, the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP), the Torah of the Samaritan community, or the Greek Septuagint (LXX), the translation that, according to tradition, was produced by seventy (LXX) sages. In all instances, while we constantly search for objective elements, such preferences are ultimately based on subjective reasoning; in other words, different views are possible.

The reason why MT differs from other texts in any given instance is sometimes because of scribal intervention in one of the texts. Sometimes a difference may be a result of error.^[3] At other times, scribes may have made minor changes^[4] based on context or interpretation^[5] or based on theological exegesis;^[6] in some cases, passages have been rewritten more extensively.^[7]

That scribes purposefully adjusted their received text may seem surprising to modern readers, who imagine that the job of the scribe is to faithfully transmit the text being copied, exactly as it appears, like a modern copy machine. However, ancient scribes were much more active in creating the text, and they took the liberty of inserting various changes in the text (omissions, additions, changes in content). Such interventions were considered acceptable at the beginning of the transmission of the biblical text.^[8]

To give readers a sense of what kind of differences are found between MT and other versions of the Torah, I present ten illustrative examples of differences, namely variants, between MT and the other texts.