Vocab Malone

Well, no, they're copies of the Bible.

Oh, they're copies.

So the way it works is we had something called the Masoretic text.

Masoretes, sometimes just pronounce Masoretes.

My pronunciation is not that great, by the way, so I do that a few times.

It's all good.

Our Hebrew scribal class, professional copyists,

They had produced good scrolls that we had, but they got us into the Middle Ages because what they would do is they would get rid of or not use old ones when they produced a new one.

That's how, by the way, confident they were that the new ones were accurate, by the way.

This was their job, though.

But it put us into a newer bracket, you know, 900s, 1,000.

That's our oldest copies of the Hebrew Bible until the 1940s with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Got it.

Then we have scrolls from the time of Jesus and even slightly before.

Wow.

Of the same Old Testament.

Almost all books are present, I think, except for Esther.

And now we can compare what we have over here with almost a thousand year gap sometimes to say, this is the test.

If these over here are radically different than this, the Bible is shown to have some serious problems in its transmission.

Right.