Should Christians trust the Hebrew Masoretic Text or the Septuagint when they disagree?

But if you if you have clear discrepancies between the two and the original Hebrew, do you do you do you consider the Hebrew to be the inspired? Yeah, because the text itself was written in Hebrew.

So I’m, I’m only looking at the Septuagint because the Septuagint, if you remember the history of the Septuagint, when Alexander the Great wanted to make sure everything was in his language and he wanted to Hellenized the world and Greek world, the whole point of having these 70 scholars come together to translate this was so that it can be in his great library.

And that’s, you know, he knew it was this monumentally important book. And so he was going to have it translated, and it became such an important reference in the sense that the Bible was going to be read by people that read Greek in the Greco-Roman world, that, of course, it stayed that way as the church moved from the east to the west and theology took off the hotbed of theology, and studying Christianity and studying in general, moved out to the West.

Everyone was reading the Greek Septuagint, and that was very important until Latin, of course, till Jerome’s Latin Vulgate came around. And then that became even more broadly read. But the Septuagint is simply a translation from the Hebrew text. And that’s the point. It’s it’s one tier removed. It’s like our English text reading an English text, and that’s one step removed.

So if these things were written in Hebrew, which of course they were, and a couple passages in Aramaic, which is just a form or a dialect of Hebrew, then, then yeah, I’m always going to favor that the only time I question it. And here’s where I don’t want to get too nuanced in this discussion is sometimes you’ll find that the Hebrew text that we have, which again, these rabbis treated this so, so carefully that they would destroy their, their, you know, what?

They were replacing a worn out text, a worn out, you know, scroll so that they could after they counted every letter, after they did all that they could do as fastidious professional scribes. And so we don’t have anything until we had the Dead Sea Scrolls in Hebrew. But we didn’t have, you know, some linear kind of of, of manuscripts from the eighth century, in the seventh century, in the sixth century and the and the fifth century and the third century.

Right. We the the mass of Hebrew text that we have come from the Masoretic period, which are eighth, ninth, 10th century. And when we look at the great Leningrad codices, or all the big Hebrew texts that we have, those are, you know, ten years into the Christian era of ten centuries, rather into the Christian era. So you can find sometimes this is a long lead into this statement.

And I want to be careful, because I don’t want to undermine anybody’s confidence in the Hebrew text. But occasionally you will have certain things in the Hebrew text. I’m thinking, for instance, of Daniel chapter nine, where some of the breathing marks that are added for the singing of the the Cantillon Marks, they’re called the singing of the Hebrew text puts things in place in that particular passage that would obscure the fact that what’s referred to in that text is the Messiah that came in the first century, and you can find a little bit of biased every now and then.

And that’s just in the singing, breathing marks. But still, sometimes I struggle with the Masoretic Text in 1 or 2 passages here and there, because I think, yeah, the Jews of the ninth and 10th century did not want to let anybody use the Old Testament text to prove their Christian doctrine. And even though they’re being very faithful in translating it, I should say copying it because it’s in the original language that was written in.

Occasionally I’ll compare that with the Septuagint, which was translated before the time of Christ and the Dead Sea Scrolls that we do have in Hebrew that precede the time of Christ, written before the time of Christ, second, first, third century BC. And when the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls happened to match in a passage where I feel like, okay, why does this not so clearly read the way that that I think it ought to like in the passages that are referring to the coming Messiah that take us directly to Christ, then at times I do see the influence of the Jews kind of leaning away, where there’s a questionable reading or questionable wording of

a verse. And those are the few times I’m going to go, whoa, I’m, I’m going to say that perhaps this is a little bit of bias in the, in the scribal work and, and that just it very few passages does this relate to. And you can read about this if you want to read a book. I don’t remember the author’s name, but Dead Sea Scrolls in the modern translations, if you that little book, if you looked it up, we’ll talk about the few times that you have Josephus, who of course wrote in the first century, who’s telling all these biblical stories, the Septuagint that precedes the time of Christ, and the Dead Sea Scrolls that

precede the time of Christ. And if those three are in disagreement with with some finer point of translation in the Masoretic Text of the ninth 10th century that we still have. Right? We have those in museums. And then we’re going to say, maybe there is a leaning away from the Christological passages that clearly point to Christ of the first century, that we say is the Messiah.

Because of course, Jews are not wanting to admit that. So and that’s such a rarity that I don’t want to say it. I struggle to say it on the radio because I don’t want anyone to think, oh, you know, the Masoretic Text we can’t trust. I’d much rather trust the Septuagint. A lot of good work has been done in the Septuagint.

Septuagint is helpful in many ways. It certainly helps us understand the Greek vocabulary of the New Testament, because it’s written in Greek in the New Testament. So the Septuagint is very important, but I don’t want it to say I don’t want someone to say like you, Kenneth, I’m going to trust the Septuagint over the Masoretic Text. Most of the time I’m going to trust my Hebrew text based on the Masoretic Text, but I do occasionally want to look at what the Dead Sea Scrolls say and the Septuagint and say, okay, where there’s disagreement with two against one.

Or sometimes you throw in Josephus and passages like first and second Samuel, where there’s a lot of interesting things that are said there, because we don’t have a lot of Hebrew texts in textual criticism in the Old Testament that are looking at first and second Samuel with the kind of plethora of witnesses that we have in other parts of the Bible, then I’m going to say, okay, maybe, maybe we’ve got something here that’s been influenced by theology instead of just pure scholarship.

Maybe I said too much for the average listener, but I think you can track without Kenneth, and I don’t know if that was helpful or not, but generally I trust them as text above the Septuagint. Gotcha. That’s very helpful. I appreciate the insight. Yeah. And that little book, it’s not a not a big book. It’s not really I mean, it sounds scholarly, but it’s, it’s a accessible to the average leader reader.

It’s just I think it’s just called this the Dead Sea Scrolls and Modern Translations. When I read that, I thought, okay, this is provocative and interesting. And then I’ve heard a few great scholars at different seminars I’ve been to that have pointed out a few of the things that really comported with that book and helped me understand that occasionally, you know, there is some skepticism from time to time on textual choices of the text.

Okay, just just to be clear, you said Harold Scanlan is the. Yeah, that’s that’s him. That’s right. That’s that’s the name. I didn’t say his name because I’d forgotten it. But you looked it up and that’s it.