Old Testament
Textual
criticism of the Old Testament is very much limited by the paucity of manuscripts.
The oldest Hebrew manuscript is the Codex Babylonicus Petropolitanus (codex
is a manuscript in book form, rather than in a roll), which goes back only
to 916 A.D. All of the Hebrew manuscripts represent one and the same text, the Massoretic.
The Massoretes were a guild of Hebrew scholars who sought not only to preserve
and transmit to posterity the consonantal text, but by the addition of vowel
points to also preserve the proper pronunciation. This work was done somewhere
between the 6th and 8th centuries A.D. It is thought that the form in which we
now have the Hebrew text was fixed around the beginning of the 2nd century
A.D., and that the scribes used the utmost care in copying the manuscripts. The
Jewish rabbis believed that every word and letter of the Scripture was of
divine authority, and hence they made sure that extremely accurate copying was
done. The scarcity of Hebrew manuscripts is due to the practice of destroying
worn manuscripts after new copies had been made.
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