The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Integrity of the Masoretic Text (Q&A Response) Part 1

Here's Part 1 of my response to a high school student's question about whether the Dead Sea Scrolls call into question the reliability of the Masoretic text.

Jul 09, 2025

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The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Integrity of the Masoretic Text (Q&A Response) Part 1

Earlier this year, a high school student of mine sent me the following question, in exactly these words:

How can we quote any torah book if things like the dead sea scrolls have proven that there are multiple and significant textual differences in the Masoretic text than them? Like how in yoshiyahu the dead sea scrolls version has more than 2000 actual differences not just spelling differences. Doesn't this suggest that the torah evolved over time before becoming standardized?

Ordinarily, I try to answer questions in no more than a paragraph or two. But in this case, given the nature of the question, I knew I needed to write a longer response. Once I did, I realized it might be valuable to share.

I replied to this student in two parts: a prefatory email (Part 1) and a longer main response (Part 2). Below is Part 1, which I’m making available for free. Part 2 will remain entirely behind a paywall. Why? Because these answers aren’t for everyone. In fact, they might be actively harmful, even to some who are asking the question, and certainly to those who haven’t looked into the topic at all. Since this touches on several ikkarim (foundational principles of Judaism), a degree of caution is warranted.

So why share any of this? For three reasons—two for educators, and one for everyone:

The Dead Sea Scrolls is a topic I hadn’t researched before. When this student first raised the question, I felt out of my depth. I had to do a lot of reading, thinking, and asking before I felt ready to answer. At the very least, educators who face similar questions may benefit from reading what I wrote and using it as a starting point for crafting their own approach.
I think there’s value in seeing how an educator like me tackles a complex, high-stakes question. I’m sure other educators would approach the question differently. If we talk and think about these differences, I’m sure we’ll all become better craftsmen.
The final section of my response contains facts—not theories, not ideas, just plain facts—that even the most educated Orthodox Jews I know don’t seem to be aware of, and which I think are important to know. I considered spinning that section off into its own article, but for now, I’m keeping it behind a paywall because of how shocking it will likely be to the average reader.

One final note. As an educator, I naturally take into account the intellectual, psychological, and circumstantial profile of the student before responding. Most of the time, that doesn’t end up mattering. This time, it did. For obvious reasons, I’m not going to spell out those considerations here. I only mention them because some readers may wonder why I responded as I did, or think they would’ve answered differently. To them I say: you’re missing an important set of facts (i.e. knowledge of the student)—without which, it’s impossible to know how you really would have responded.

What follows is Part 1 of my response to the student. I’ve corrected minor errors but left the substance unedited (which was difficult for me, since my writing standards for articles are higher than my standards for emails).

Part 1: The Pre-Response Response

Allow me to preface my response in four ways:

(1) This Topic is Multifaceted

As you’ve seen over the last year-and-a-half, some questions can be answered concisely. Others require a more extensive treatment. Your question about the Dead Sea Scrolls (henceforth, DSS) falls into the second category. Hence, my decision to respond at length with an email.

One reason for this is that your question touches on many other fundamental questions and topics, each of which deserves its own treatment. I’m talking about questions such as: What is the Masoretic Biblical text? How did it come to be? What makes it authoritative? What is the status of non-Masoretic texts? How should one weigh archaeological findings like this, in general? What does Orthodox Judaism teach about Torah min ha’Shamayim? And many more, I’m sure.

When investigating a multifaceted question like this, it is necessary to move slowly and deliberately, taking note not to muddle questions together. Obviously, I’m not expecting you to do this yourself. That’s my job. But I wanted to give you a heads-up so that it doesn’t come as a surprise if I inform you that what you think is on-topic is really a question on a different topic, or even multiple topics, each of which needs to be addressed on its own.

(2) This is STILL a “New” and “Hot” Topic

Another reason why this is a particularly tricky topic is that the DSS are a recent find. The scrolls were discovered between 1947 and 1956, but their contents weren’t fully deciphered and published until the 1990s, which is very recent in academic time. (Some of the scrolls haven’t even been deciphered yet because of their deteriorated condition, though AI technology will hopefully help with that.)

Practically speaking, this means that the significance of the DSS is still being researched and debated, and much of the latest scholarship isn’t readily available because it’s in academic journals rather than published books. This is also why scholars in the field are divided on what to us might seem like fundamental questions (or what actually are fundamental questions). Lastly, this is also why even the scholars who specialize in this make mistakes or are working with outdated data, as you saw in the YouTube video you sent me. This leads to my third preface ...

(3) Expertise is Difficult to Come By

Because this is a new and specialized academic field, it’s not something you’ll find many rabbis know about. I include myself in this: I haven’t done any primary research on it. I’m largely dependent on what the experts say.

You’ll find rabbis who know the halachic and theological sides of this topic but are not familiar with DSS studies. Likewise, you’ll find academics and experts in the DSS who make basic mistakes about what Jews hold (or have held) about these topics according to Orthodox Judaism. Thankfully, there are people who are scholars in both fields—some of whom I'll mention later.

One advantage I have, however, is that I’m decently well-connected in the world of Jewish academic scholarship. When I started writing this response to you, I put out the call on my social media networks for resources. Within 30 minutes I was contacted by several experts, including one author who has degrees in the archaeology of the Ancient Near East and Classical Jewish History, another who has a PhD in Late and Early post Second Temple Literature, and another who is an expert researcher of ancient Hebrew manuscripts. I also happen to have access to a leading expert in Second Temple-era Judaism. In other words, there are lots of people I can ask who are experts in the field.

The reason I’m telling you this is because just as it is medically irresponsible to “do your own research” by Googling symptoms and giving yourself a diagnosis, so too it is important for laymen like you and me to direct our questions to the scholars in the field and not just believe everything we read online—especially because there’s bias on both sides, religious and secular.

This is one of the reasons I appreciated the video you sent me: I was impressed by that YouTuber not because he’s smart, but because he knew he’s not an expert in the field, so he reached out and consulted them directly. Btw, that’s one of the advantages of professors: most of them have their email publicly displayed (on their university’s website) and are happy to answer questions, or at least provide resources.

(4) I Have Three Books

Lastly, after you asked me this question, I decided to buy a book on this topic recommended by several people, called Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls: The History of Judaism, the Background of Christianity, the Lost Library of Qumran. It was written by Prof. Lawrence Schiffman, who has been studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 50 years, is considered one of the leading experts in the world on the topic, and is also a Torah scholar. We’ll see how readable it is, but I’m hoping it’ll provide me with more background information to at least know what to ask, since I’d still consider myself the proverbial fourth son in the Haggadah on this topic.

I also have a book by R’ Amnon Bazak (from Yeshivat Har Etzion) called To This Very Day: Fundamental Questions in Bible Study, which takes up questions like these, and another book I recently read on the origins of Tanach.

Okay, I think those are the prefaces to my response. Before I conclude this prefatory email, I want to establish some basic terminology—specifically, three terms:

Masoretes

I’m just going to quote an excerpt from Wikipedia:

The Masoretes (Hebrew: בַּעֲלֵי הַמָּסוֹרָה, romanized: Baʿălēy Hammāsōrā, lit. ‘Masters of the Tradition’) were groups of Jewish scribe-scholars who worked from around the end of the 5th through 10th centuries CE, based primarily in the Jewish centers of the Levant (e.g., Tiberias and Jerusalem) and Mesopotamia (e.g., Sura and Nehardea). Each group compiled a system of pronunciation and grammatical guides in the form of diacritical notes (niqqud) on the external form of the biblical text in an attempt to standardize the pronunciation, paragraph and verse divisions, and cantillation of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) for the worldwide Jewish community.
The ben Asher family of Masoretes was largely responsible for the preservation and production of the Masoretic Text, although there existed an alternative Masoretic text of the ben Naphtali Masoretes, which has around 875 differences from the ben Asher text. The halakhic authority Maimonides endorsed the ben Asher as superior, although the Egyptian Jewish scholar, the Saadya Gaon (sic), had preferred the ben Naphtali system ...
The Masoretes devised the vowel notation system for Hebrew that is still widely used, as well as the trope symbols used for cantillation.

Masoretic Text

This refers to the standardized text of Tanach that we rely on in halacha. It’s misleading to speak of this as if there’s only one version, as you’ll see in Part 2 of my response, but we use this term to differentiate it from other versions of the text of Chumash and/or Nach which are not considered halachically authoritative by Orthodox Jews.

Examples of non-Masoretic texts include: the version that was the basis of the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Torah, the original form of which we don’t have), the Samaritan Torah (which is held to be sacred by the group of people who split off from the Jews during the era of the first Mikdash), the version that was the basis of the Peshitta (the Aramaic translation of the Torah used by Syriac Christians), the Dead Sea Scrolls, and perhaps a few more.

Textual Witness

In these discussions, a “witness” is something that provides a direct or indirect source of evidence about the state of a text in late antiquity. This can take on several forms. A few examples will illustrate this point, and why we call them “witnesses”:

Ancient Manuscripts: The oldest edition of the Masoretic text we have (in part) is the Aleppo Codex, which dates back to the 10th century CE. There’s also the Leningrad Codex and a few others that have the reputation for being reliable. These are the “purest” textual witnesses because they’re direct.
Ancient Translations of the Torah (e.g., Septuagint, Peshitta, our own Aramaic Translations): If a translation was made before the Masoretic text was finalized, then that translation “saw” a proto-Masoretic version of the text. For example, there are cases in which the Targum (Aramaic translation) of Nach translates the Hebrew word עִם (with) as עַמָּא (nation), which indicates that the version of the text it was translating was vocalized as עַם (nation) rather than עִם (with). This is a textual witness, but it’s one step removed, because it’s indirect.
References in Other Texts: Another form of indirect witness is if a pasuk is quoted or referenced in some other source.

Okay, I think those are the basic terms. On to Part 2!

I know you won’t be able to really weigh in on this until you see the full response, but I suppose it can’t hurt to ask at this point whether you’d add, subtract, or change any aspects of my preface.

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