Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

May 13, 2015

Rewriting the Bible at Qumran

Did the scribes of the Dead Sea scrolls insert their own ideas into the texts?

Among the Dead Sea scrolls are numerous texts of biblical books, which often differ in small—and sometimes large—ways from the standard version of the Hebrew Bible. Some of these differences are products of scribal errors; many scholars believe some Dead Sea versions to be the more accurate. In other instances, however, it seems that the scribes of Qumran (the community to which the scrolls belonged) deliberately interpolated their ideas into the texts, as Shani Tzoref writes:

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