re a little too satanic jon livesey writes so why do i read in the papers that the qumram texts had different versions of some ot texts did i misunderstand reading newspapers to learn about this kind of stuff is not the best idea in the world newspaper reporters are notoriously ignorant on the subject of religion and are prone to exaggeration in the interests of having a real story that is a bigger headline let s back up to at this point we have the masoretic text the various targums translations commentaries in aramaic etc and the septuagint the ancient greek translation the masoretic text is the standard jewish text and essentially does not vary in some places it has obvious corruptions all of which are copied faithfully from copy to copy these passages in the past were interpreted by reference to the targums and to the septuagint now the septuagint differs from the masoretic text in two particulars first it includes additional texts and second in some passages there are variant readings from the masoretic text in addition to fixing predating the various corrupted passages it must be emphasized that to the best of my knowledge these variations are only signifcant to bible scholars and have little theological import the dead sea scroll materials add to this an ancient copy of almost all of isaiah and fragments of various sizes of almost all other ot books there is also an abundance of other material but as far as i know there is no sign there of any hebrew antecdent to the apocrypha the extra texts in the septuagint as far as analysis has proceeded there are also variations between the dss texts and the masoretic versions these tend to reflect the septuagint where the latter isn t obviously in error again though the differences thus far are not significant theologically there is this big expectation that there are great theological surprises lurking in the material but so far this hasn t happened the dss are important because there is almost no textual tradition in the ot unlike for the nt c wingate the peace of god it is no peace but strife closed in the sod mangoe cs umd edu yet brothers pray for but one thing tove mangoe the marv lous peace of god
