Right, so we'll continue talking about the Bible and how we got the Bible today and focusing today on the Old Testament manuscripts. And I want to start by mentioning what is called the Wicked Bible. Maybe you have heard of this. It's called the Wicked Bible. And this was a copy of the King James that was printed in 1631. And it's called the Wicked Bible because it, in this copy, had left out a very important word. In Exodus 20, 14, one of the Ten Commandments, it left out the word not. And so it says in the Wicked Bible, thou shalt commit adultery. So that's a pretty bad mistake to make when you're copying the Bible. Don't let your copy say thou shalt commit adultery. And this is an English translation, this is King James, and so it shows that even when copying a translation, you can make a mistake. And even when you're using a printer, as they were doing in the 1600s, they're using a printer and yet they still made a mistake by leaving out a word. How much more likely and possible is it than to find mistakes when people are copying the Bible by hand and not a printer? And so I want to reiterate for us that the presence of copies that might have what we would call mistakes in them, or they're just differences in them, that doesn't mean we get rid of the whole thing. That's like saying, well, because we found a copy of the Wicked Bible, let's get rid of all the King James versions. Let's get rid of all English translations, because we found this one copy with a mistake. That doesn't make any sense. Because in this case, it's very easy to figure out how a mistake was made. All you do is compare it to all the other King James versions that you could find. And you could see that clearly this one has an error. This one had a mistake. And this one is really easy to figure out, right? This is pretty clear. But it's not as clear with a lot of the other examples that we find, especially with Hebrew and Greek, with the original languages. But the method is the same. We're still doing the same thing. All we're doing when we find a difference, a variation, is we're taking this one copy and we're comparing it. And that is how, using the same method, we can figure out what the original actually is. So the goal with looking at all these manuscripts, looking at all these copies, that's what it is. We have this abundance of evidence, we have all of these ways, all of these things we can look at, and this is how we can figure out, by putting them side by side, what the authors actually wrote. And so we're gonna think more about this with the Old Testament today, Lord willing, next week we'll do the New Testament copies. So as we come to the Old Testament manuscripts, one lesson I think that you should take, that I take from all of this, is gratitude. So if nothing else, I hope that you leave from this today with gratitude. Gratitude to live in 2025. Because in 2025, not only have we found manuscripts from 1000 AD that have survived over a millennium, but we also live today in the days after the Dead Sea Scrolls, which we'll talk about, but you've probably heard of them. They were discovered in 1947. And what a blessing to live in the time after these were discovered and then researched in the 50s through the 70s and still being researched today. And so we have all of this evidence to work with. And we also live in the day, I mentioned the Ketef Hinnom amulet that was discovered in 1979. You might remember that little piece of silver scroll that was found. It's a blessing that we have another piece of evidence to show how the Bible was being copied. And then here's another one that has been discovered recently. It's called the En Gedi scroll, based on where it was found in Israel. And it dates back to the 4th or the 5th century AD. And so it was discovered in 1970. But it wasn't until 2015 that they were able to figure out what was in it. So they discovered this thing. They said, you know, it looked like a cigar. It was like a three inch long and one centimeter wide scroll that had been rolled up. And so somebody discovered this in 1970, but they couldn't figure out what it said inside. They knew that if they had tried to unroll it, because it was so brittle, it was just gonna fall apart. So instead of unrolling it, in 2015, at the University of Kentucky, they did a micro CT scan. And somehow, I don't fully understand the technology, but somehow this micro CT scan could see through the scroll and figure out that it had that writing. And so you can see this is the front of the scroll where it's blank. And then it has writing after that. And those are the first two chapters of Leviticus. And so this is a miniature scroll of Leviticus. And obviously we don't have the whole thing. It got torn up and a lot of it is destroyed. And so we can have another piece of evidence here, where from 1000 AD, we have copies of Leviticus. Then you have the Engedi Scroll of 500 AD, and then you have Dead Sea Scrolls of Leviticus. And we can compare all these, and what we see is the Masoretic Text, which is the standard Hebrew text, it's being preserved, it's being copied accurately. So this is an example of why we can be grateful in 2025. Even maybe sort of small things like this, if you were not, if you had been alive in 2010, you wouldn't have known about this. We wouldn't have had this evidence. So we approach this being grateful that God has given us evidence of his word being preserved. So let's look closer at the evidence we have of the Old Testament. we have about 35,000 manuscripts or fragments of the Old Testament from the years 800 to 1100 AD. So 35,000 fragments or manuscripts. But remember that when we talk about 35,000, we're talking about things like this. We're talking about things that are ripped apart, destroyed, and we only have pieces of them. And so this thing, document, I guess, this counts as one fragment, and it was found in Cairo. And so here's a copy of Psalms, and you can see that it's not a very large copy of Psalms, but this would be under that number of, they found 1300 copies of the Psalms, in a storage room in Cairo in the 1700s. So this is what we mean when we say we have 35,000 manuscripts. Some of them have a lot of text. Some of them have very little. And the manuscripts that we have are from the Hebrew scribes, and many of them that have survived are from around the year 1000 AD, and it's called the Masoretic Text, so I'll use that word a lot. The Masoretic Text is this Hebrew text from around 1000, because the scribes were called Masoretes, and they were living by the Sea of Galilee, and this was their profession. This was what they devoted themselves to, is just copying the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. So they were the Masoretes, and so their text is the Masoretic text. So we have all of these little fragments, but we also have copies of the entire Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. There's the Sassoon Codex, which is from 1053 AD, and really the only reason I bring it up is because you may have seen it in the news a couple years ago. It went on auction, and it sold at an auction for $38.1 million. So if you had that much money, you could have bought that yourself. It was sold to anybody. But some museum, I think, in Tel Aviv, they paid for it. So there's the Sassoon Codex. It's a whole copy of the Hebrew Bible from the year 1053. The two main ones that we have are called the Aleppo Codex, because it was found and kept in Aleppo, Syria, and then the Leningrad Codex, which is in St. Petersburg, Russia, or also known as Leningrad back in the day. So Aleppo comes from 930 AD, so that's the oldest what used to be complete copy of the Bible, and then there's Leningrad, which is 1009, which is complete. The Aleppo is considered to be the most accurate codex because it only has three differences in the entire Old Testament. And just as an example, when we talk about differences, we're talking about things like this. So apparently, in this word, the Jeromelites in 1 Samuel, apparently what had happened was there were three dots, these two dots, two dots, and two dots. And so somebody had written two dots under here, and someone came along and realized that was a mistake. And so they exfoliated, remember? They exfoliate the document. They take off the ink, and then they switched it. Two dots that were here became two dots here, and they wrote this line underneath. And so that's the kind of thing when we talk about three differences. This example's from Leningrad, not Aleppo. I couldn't find what the three examples were, but this is the kind of thing that we're talking about. And those are just vowel points. They make vowel sounds. So very small. They don't change the meaning of the word. They're sort of just kind of like spelling things or the way something might sound. So the Aleppo is considered to be the most accurate. The only problem with that one is that in the war with Israel in 1947 and 48, some Syrians attacked synagogues in Aleppo, and they had these riots in Aleppo, Syria, and so they destroyed a lot of the synagogue, and they, you can see this one got burned, so part of it is burned, But then the Torah went missing, the five books of the Bible. So about 40% of the pages on the front of it are missing. And we don't know if somebody stole it. It's kind of like a adventure story. Did somebody steal it? Or did somebody take it to protect it somehow? Or was it burned or destroyed? We don't know. This one is the most accurate, but because we no longer have the whole thing, you can't go to a library and a scholar could look at it himself, most people use the Leningrad Codex as like the base. And so the Leningrad comes from 1009, it is the earliest complete Bible still in existence. So Aleppo exists, but it's not complete anymore. And Leningrad has 120 differences, so things like that one that I mentioned. 120 differences as opposed to three, but it's still very accurate. So when we talk about the manuscripts of the Old Testament, this is usually the main thing that we talk about, that we have these copies that are over 1,000 years old. So we can go from the 800s to 1100 when we have 35,000 manuscripts, but then you go to before that, between 200 and 800, and we only have 21 manuscripts. So they call it the silent period. Only 21 copies, and one of those is that En Gedi scroll that we discovered recently. Probably the reason we only have 21 is because of war and maybe Muslims and Christians going to war with each other and at some point these copies got burned. But even though we only have 21, we can still find some important evidence for the Old Testament. There's one manuscript. that we can call the missing link between the 1000 AD and the Dead Sea Scrolls BC. It's called the missing link, and this one is the Ashkar Gilson manuscript of the Torah, the Pentateuch. and some of it is still intact, so this one is from the 6 to 700s AD. And it might be hard to see the picture there, but this part is of Exodus 15, which is a song, it's a poem, and you can see that it's laid out in this pattern, and it's called the brick pattern, where they have shorter lines with a longer line in the middle, and it goes down, so maybe that's easier to see. And the reason this is relevant is that even the brick pattern from 600 AD matches the Leningrad Codex of 1000 AD. So we see that they were preserving the text, they were copying the text in a very conservative way so that even the way it's written out, even the pattern of how it's copied is matched by the manuscripts. So now we can compare, in this case we have an evidence of Exodus chapter 15. So you look at the copies of 1,000 AD, they're the same as Ashkar, Gilson in 600 or 700 AD, and then we look back to the Dead Sea Scrolls and we see also the same text being preserved. So with Exodus 15, you have 1,100 years, 100 BC to 1,000 AD Same text. So that was the silent period. And now we go to the early period, the BC era generally. And we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. So in 1947, these archaeologists, actually it was a nomad boy, it was a shepherd boy. He threw a rock in a cave and he heard a sound. And so he went exploring what was in the cave. And he's like a teenager. He's 13 years old. And he found all these scrolls. And then he went and told people about it. So it was a very interesting story. And the archaeologists came in, and they started excavating these caves. And they found more and more scrolls. And even a few miles away, here and there, they're finding all of these copies. So kind of as a group, we call them the Dead Sea Scrolls. So Dead Sea Scrolls are from 250 BC to 130 AD. Now, maybe you've heard of them, so maybe you can answer for me. What do you know about the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls? What have you heard about why they're important? John? I say, yes. I'll get there in a second. So the most famous guest scroll is called the Great Isaiah Scroll. If you watch a History Channel show or something like this, or you go to the Museum of the Bible, which is an interesting museum. So if you're in D.C., you should go there. It's a good museum. So if you go to places like that, what they will emphasize is the reliability of the text that we have these copies being continued. And so, you know, we had the copies from 1000 A.D., and then when we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls, we discover, wow, they are very, very similar. In some places, almost exactly the same. In 200 BC for 1,080. So you still see this preservation of the text. Now that's usually what you hear, and so I just want to give a little caveat to that, and we'll maybe see some examples today. It's a little more complicated, so it's not like exactly every single book is exactly the same. So it's a little more complicated than what you often hear on a history channel or something. Instead of calling it uniform evidence, people now, we call it pluriform, which means there's diversity. So in the bigger picture at the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have 210 manuscripts of the Old Testament. And we have copies of every book except Esther. We'll talk about the canon and which books are in the Bible and why, we'll talk about that later. But it is interesting, for some reason, Esther was not found there. Now it could have been that they copied it, but for some reason we haven't found those copies, they don't exist. But they have every book except Esther. So that's interesting. They don't have Esther, but they also have other books that we would call the Apocrypha like Enoch and Jubilees. So, by the way, the people in this town is called Qumran. The people in Qumran, they were not Orthodox Jews. They were like a cult, basically. So they had their own weird ideas about the Messiah. So they weren't standard theology. And so you have these other books like Enoch or Jubilees. We also have not only Hebrew copies, but we have Greek translations, both of Enoch and of books of the Bible. And we also have Aramaic translations. I think there are 30 written in Aramaic. And so the point is there's lots of evidence and there's lots to think through. So we'll start with the similarities between Masoretic text, 1080 texts in the Codex, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. So they found the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is the whole book of Isaiah, and it's 1,100 years older than the other oldest book, Aleppo, that we had. So the Great Isaiah Scroll is very much closer, obviously, to when Isaiah wrote. Isaiah wrote in the 700s, and so this is 100 BC. And it's important because it's the whole book. So remember, not all of the manuscripts are complete that we have, but here we have the complete book of Isaiah. Now you can see, you know, some lines, some words got ripped off or burned or destroyed, but we have the entire book of Isaiah on a scroll, and Isaiah is a really big book, right? So that's a pretty great feat that they were able to do this. There's actually another copy in the caves of Isaiah, but it looks like that. So they don't have the whole thing. But interestingly, this one is actually even more exact. So the Great Isaiah Scroll is very similar to Aleppo, but this one is even closer to Aleppo. But the problem is we don't have the whole thing. But of the parts that we have, that's what we can figure out. So the Great Isaiah Scroll is very similar to the copies we have, but there are minor differences in things like spelling, and I'll show you an example in a second. And so the Dead Sea Scrolls show the very conservative copying is going back even probably, we can say, at least to like 200 BC. So we have actual evidence. You can go to these libraries if you are a scholar and they let you in. You can go, you can look at the actual document, and you can see same words, same book over 1,200 years, 1,080 to 200 BC. Now, there are some differences, and some of the differences actually, interestingly, they help us get back even closer to the original of what Isaiah wrote. So, here's an example from the Great Isaiah Scroll. So, the evidence outside the Bible shows us that from 1500 to 500 BC, the word Damascus, the capital of Syria, was spelled The second way, Damascus. So Isaiah wrote in the 700s BC, he wrote in this time period when the spelling would have been Damascus. So you would expect that when you get to the copies of Isaiah. You would expect maybe that he would write without the letter R. Later on, like in Chronicles, Chronicles was written after the exile, Chronicles spells Damascus with an R after the 500s BC. I hope you're tracking, I hope that makes sense to you. Now, I'll let you guess. When we get to the Great Isaiah Scroll, R or no R? It's a 50-50, just make a guess. R or no R? So Isaiah in 700 BC would have no R. So will the Dead Sea Scroll have an R or not? Somebody, somebody, come on. R, okay. All right, let's see. Well, squiggly lines to you. The Great Isaiah Scroll, 150 BC has an R. So the Dead Sea Scroll has the later spelling. So that's interesting. This is Isaiah 7 verse 8. Now, we compare. What about the Aleppo Codex from 930 AD? R or no R? It's got no R. So this is kind of strange. Maybe this is confusing, but Aleppo has the older spelling. So actually what we see here is that in this case, the Aleppo Codex is preserving an even older spelling that they knew went back to before the Dead Sea Scrolls. So they were able to figure out that Damascus isn't spelled with an R when Isaiah wrote it. And they must have known that. And so they realized that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, those people updated the spelling to their time period, and they put an R in the word Damascus. So they said, Isaiah didn't write that. He didn't spell it that way. He didn't spell it with an R, so they took it out. So I hope that makes sense. The 700 BC spelling was without an R, and we actually have how the Aleppo shows us of an even older spelling than what the Dead Sea Scrolls had. So what I'm trying to show, I know it's complicated and maybe it's hard to understand, but what I'm trying to show is that The similarities show us something, and even the differences. If we can figure out why the differences are there and what they mean, even the differences can get us back to the original. So I think I have time for another example. I was not sure if I would be able to do this, but here's an example where the Dead Sea Scroll actually shows us the original that the Masoretic text doesn't, if that makes sense. So actually, in this case, the Dead Sea Scroll shows the older one, even though here, the Aleppo shows the older one. So Psalm 145.13, you can go, if you wanna look in your Bible, you can, but there's the verse on there. I'm guessing if you look it up in your Bible, it'll be in brackets, the end of verse 13. It says, the Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works. The ESV, NIV, and Christian Standard include those words at the end of verse 13. The King James, New King James, and New American Standard don't include those words. And the issue here is not about the translation, but the people who were making the translation, they had to decide whether they thought this was originally supposed to go in the psalm or not. And the difference of opinion is the difference between the Codex and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Which one can we determine is correct, those verses supposed to be there, and someone took them out somehow, on accident maybe, or were they not supposed to be there, and someone just made it up and inserted it, and they weren't supposed to. Well, what we find is that in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the line is actually there, and It makes more sense, in my opinion, to say that the line should be there because Psalm 145 is an acrostic. So remember the acrostic, where each line begins with the letter of the alphabet. And each verse is going, or each line is going in order of the Hebrew alphabet. And so what we find in the Aleppo Codex, so this is the letter M, the sound M, and this is S in the order of Hebrew alphabet. It's M and then N and then S. So what we find is that here, the N got skipped. And in the Dead Sea Scroll, it didn't get skipped. So this phrase, the Lord is faithful in all his words and kind in all his works, starts right here. It starts with the letter N. Okay, so we can see that most likely what happened was that the psalm originally is this acrostic written with each line in the next letter of the alphabet. and the Dead Sea Scrolls continued that copying of the psalm, but then at some point after the Dead Sea Scrolls, that line got skipped. So it's more likely that the line got skipped than that somebody was like, oh, that line doesn't go there, I'm just gonna, or that line isn't there, but I'm just gonna make it up and stick it in there. So it probably got skipped, and If you want to look at your Bible, verse 17 is very similar. In Hebrew, it's only the first word that is different. I think the word is righteous. I think it starts with the word righteous in Hebrew. And so you can imagine a scribe being sleepy. And he sees verse 17, and he sees a lot of the same words, Lord is righteous in all his words and kind in all his works, and he's like, oh, I copied that already. And so he had copied it, or he thinks that he copied it, and so he accidentally skipped the line before. I hope that makes sense. It's a bit complicated to explain. But, The takeaway from it. This is an example, I think an interesting example about the King James. So the King James doesn't include the line. And the King James didn't have the Dead Sea Scrolls. The translators didn't have it. So these witnesses were not available to them. So I don't want to put down people who like the King James. The King James is fine as a translation, but the people who are dogmatic about the King James being the only correct Bible, I think is a problem, because in 1611, they just didn't have the manuscript evidence that we now have in 2025. So this is an example where we can see that what the King James was using was not quite exactly right. But thankfully we have evidence to point us back to what I think would be the original line in the song. So that's one example where the Dead Sea Scrolls, again, can help us. Last part I want us to look at are what they call versions of the Old Testament, which is basically translations. So sometimes looking at a translation can get you back to the original. So if you can't find any copies in Greek of the Iliad, maybe you pick up a copy in English. And if you know Greek, you could say, okay, well, here's an English word, what's the Greek that they were translating? And so this is what they do with the Bible, to look at translations and then reverse engineer what is the word in Hebrew that they were translating in their own language. And so the versions that we have are the Samaritan Pentateuch, And Genesis 4.8 is an example, for some reason, of why the NIV used the Samaritan Pentateuch to translate the statement of what Cain said to his brother, which is not in Masoretic text. But there's the Samaritan Pentateuch, there's the Syriac in Syria, and then there's Latin. And these all basically show that the translations that are being done are being done with the Masoretic text as it's being preserved over time. The last one that I wanna mention is the Septuagint, that's what it's called. It's the Greek translation of the Old Testament, starting in second century B.C. Now, we could talk for 12 weeks about the Greek translation, but it's important because the New Testament quotes the Old Testament. The New Testament is written in Greek. So let's say Matthew wants to quote the Old Testament. Sometimes he takes the Hebrew, the Masoretic text, and he gives his own, he translates it himself. He's writing it in Greek, right? He doesn't just copy it in Hebrew, because it's a Greek book. But sometimes he's like, well, why am I translating it myself if there already is a Greek translation? This is the Septuagint. So sometimes Matthew quotes the Greek translation. So even as we look at the New Testament and how it quotes the Old Testament, a lot of times it's quoting this Greek translation. So Matthew had access to the Hebrew, most likely, or at least he had been taught it and memorized some of it, but he also had the Greek translation. Okay, so in general, The Masoretic text, the Hebrew, is the standard for the Old Testament. It is a rare occasion when the ancient Greek translation can actually get us back to the original. So the Greek translation's from maybe 200 BC. So it's closer in time, but that doesn't always mean that it's better, remember? So rarely it can help us, and maybe we'll look at an example. But our base is the Masoretic Hebrew text, which is accurate copy. And here's one reason I want to say that. You probably know in our day, there's all this anti-Semitism stuff going around. And there are some people in Christian, conservative, reformed world who are being exposed to this anti-Semitic stuff. And they are adopting it. And I want to warn you that there is, I just heard this a few days ago, there's this argument out there that we should use the Septuagint, the Greek translation, over the Masoretic Text because, they say, the Masoretic Text is Jewish and it's corrupt, it was copied by people who deny Christ. And so the people who hate Christ, we shouldn't use their copy of the Bible. So I'm just saying that you might hear that from somebody, somebody watched a certain reformed guy, well he claims to be reformed, but he's not. These people are infiltrating reformed churches and Christians, and they're coming up with these silly, just ridiculous arguments. And some person will just watch that video and say, oh yeah, that makes sense, because they don't know. They don't know anything about the Masoretic Text. So I'm gonna just tell you, historically, the Masoretic Text is accurate. We don't go just throwing it all away and adopting the Greek translation. And especially, you don't do that because Those people were Jewish. By the way, the people who translated the Greek, they were not Christians themselves. They were possibly also Jewish themselves. So it's a silly, can I say the word stupid? It's a stupid argument. It's wrong and it's evil. So there is a rare occasion when the Greek translation can actually help us look at the text. So Psalm 2216, I think, is an accurate example. In the King James, it says, dogs have compassed me, the assembly of the wicked have enclosed me, they pierced my hands and feet. The Jewish Bible using the Masoretic text says, dogs are all around me, a pack of villains closes in me like a lion at my hands and feet. And so the question here is, what is the word that was originally written in the psalm? Is it this word that means like a lion, which is in the Masoretic text, or is it this word, which, if you look at the Greek translation, you reverse engineer it, what word are they translating in Greek? It's the Hebrew word they have pierced. And you can see, almost exactly the same, this one is just this, except the line is a little longer. And so you can see how a mistake by a scribe could have been made. And in this case, it seems better to understand it as they have pierced, which is in the Greek translation, though it's not in the Masoretic text. And here again, it's interesting, the King James uses the word, they have pierced. And it's a clear prophecy of Christ, as we know. But the King James only people, they will say, the Masoretic text is perfect, you never correct it, but the King James itself corrects it. The King James is choosing the Greek translation over the Masoretic text. So this is a very rare example, but I think it is an accurate example of where we can look at ancient translations and get at what the original was. So again, I hope this brings gratitude that we can look at all this evidence and that we have even these scholars who can sort through all this stuff. God in his providence did not give his Bible on a Word file. He did not store it on cloud servers. It got copied by hand, and this is what He gave us, and we have to sort through, but God enables us to find out the text and to know His Word. Let's pray. Lord, we do thank you again for your providential preservation of your word. We pray that all of this would help us to trust, know, and love your word more. We pray that you would give us wisdom as we seek to see what your word says and that we might be guided by you. And we ask Lord for your blessing upon us as we seek your word, that from it, we might have life. Please help us even as we spend this day in worshiping you and hearing your word. Help us to have life through it. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.