I recently had the privilege of attending a seminar in which I got to touch a nearly 600 year old scroll which consisted of the first five books of the Bible. It was a fascinating experience to see a document which had been the spiritual center a Jewish community in Poland for many, many years.
The scroll’s owner, Josh McDowell, explained the painstaking process by which scribes reproduced these texts down through the centuries. Long before photocopying was invented, God took special precautions to make sure His Word was accurately written and rewritten, even over several thousand years. It was no accident that He chose the Jews to safeguard His Word for He knew that they alone had the discipline, the respect, and the procedures to pass it down accurately from one generation to the next.
For starters, each scribe had to memorize 4,000 transcription rules before being allowed the privilege of copying the sacred text. That’s enough to make even our strictest penmanship teachers look like rank amateurs. Each Hebrew letter had its own prescribed formula for construction that had to be followed precisely each time with no cursive shortcuts. As they wrote with goose quills, none of the ink letters could touch and if they made a mistake, they had to rewrite the entire word. If the mistake was made on God’s name, they had to rewrite the entire scroll.
In addition, even though the scribes knew all five books entirely from memory, they had to say each word aloud before they copied it, copy it, and then say it aloud again to make sure they had copied it correctly. Reproducing manuscripts by this meticulous process usually took two to three years and was often done by candlelight.
Once a scroll was finally completed, other scribes carefully checked it to make sure there were no mistakes. They counted each letter to make sure that all 304,804 of them were included and that the center word occurred in Leviticus 11:42. In addition, each Hebrew letter was assigned a numerical value, similar to Roman numerals, and the mathematical sum of each line was also checked with the original to make sure they matched. Such an exacting process ensured that the holy Word of God would be transmitted and preserved down through the ages for each generation to read and obey.
Until 1946, many skeptics had claimed that the Bible contained so many copying errors that it was no longer reliable. Then the Bedouin shepherds discovered the 2,000 year old Dead Sea Scrolls and scholars were amazed to learn that what we have today is virtually identical to the ancient texts even though they had been recopied so many times. The manuscripts we have today vary ever so slightly with only minor differences in punctuation and grammar, none of which affect any doctrinal meaning. In a similar fashion, the New Testament books have also proven remarkably accurate to their earliest copies as well.
No other book in history has been so carefully preserved nor so thoroughly scrutinized. Even a photocopy of a copy of a copy begins to get unreadable, so God used other means to preserve His Holy Word. Why would He do this? So that we could know of His great love for us and that we could have His owner’s manual for our lives in complete accuracy. He specifically wanted to make sure we would recognize His Son when He came and receive Him as our Savior.
The next time you pick up a Bible and begin to read it, think of the time and effort that went into it and thank God for the faithfulness of all those scribes that have delivered this incredibly unique and special gift to us. Because of them, we can trust the Bible. And may this assurance motivate us to read it, study it and obey it, for these are the reasons God’s done what He’s done.
Blessed reading, George