re a little too satanic jon livesey writes so when they took the time to copy the text correctly that includes obvious corruptions well yes this is the real mystery of the matter and why i am rather dubious of a lot of the source theories there are a number of places where the masoretic text mt of the ot is obscure and presumably corrupted these are reproduced exactly from copy to copy the dss tend to reflect the same errors this would appear to tell us that at least from some point people began to copy the texts very exactingly and mechanically the problem is we don t know what they did before that but it seems as though accurate transmission begins at the point at which the texts are perceived as texts they may be added to and in some situations such as the end of mark material is lost but for the most part there are no substantial changes to the existing text you re basically trying to make a mountain out of a molehill some people like to use the game of telephone as a metaphor for the transmission of the texts this clearly wrong the texts are transmitted accurately 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
