Transcription
There are reasons for why these numbers vary. Because you're, everyone needs to hear this. Counting is subjective.
Felding a sword of scholarly consensus in textual matters is disingenuous. W, okay, we can't just count up every single difference. It doesn't really work that way. But I'm finding that these numbers don't really mean much. Wes, they list it as a textual variant. Okay, this, this is amazing to me. And so far, when you, when you look through that long, long list of textual variants, you don't get the impression that the editors of that volume are interested in weighing and evaluating differences. They're simply enumerating them. I'm just shocked at some of the stuff that's in that list of textual variants. I think there's many, many places where we need to sort of start to throw out examples that are in this list.
It was said on the internet quite a bit that the consensus is that the Masoretic text has [Music]. Added recently on my Joe Rogan appearance, I made a couple of comments that have garnered some attraction. And so people have taken notice of the fact that I made this statement. This isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls. But one of the things that shocked them about Isaiah was that it was word for word identical to the Masoretic text. And so in light of that statement and some of the attention that it has garnered, Bernard, I have brought on a friend of mine, Dr. John Me. Who is an Old Testament textual critic. And so John Me, if you are a viewer of my channel or the Apologetics Canada channel, will recognize him as speaking at our recent Apologetics Canada BC conference that happened back in March of 2024. Where he spoke on the Old Testament canon. And that talk can be found on my channel here. And I will link that below. Other than that, John, why don't you describe who you are and what you do?
Uh, thanks for having me on, West. By training, I'm an Old Testament textual critic, as you pointed out. I don't necessarily specialize in the Dead Sea Scrolls, though I make use of them quite a bit in my own research. The area of my dissertation, actually putting together a critical edition of Origen's Hexapla, or the remains of Origen's Hexapla for Job 22-42. So ancient Greek versions of the Hebrew Bible, that is my area of specialty. But specifically leveraging those addition or versions for textual criticism. I believe we need the best text we can get in order to exegete, in order to make commentaries, preach from. And so I've given much of my professional endeavors to reconstructing the text of the Hebrew Bible in the area of Job, a little bit in Isaiah. So I teach at Phoenix Seminary. Currently, I'm off to Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary next summer, or this summer, I should say, 2025. Wes, it's just a joy to be on here with you. I'm looking forward to delving into something known as the Great Isaiah Scroll. I don't think it's ever received such publicity as it has now. So I'm looking forward to interacting with you about this. It's gained a lot of attention on the internet. I don't know if you've heard of the internet, John, but, um, the internet is both very great and unforgiving in terms of its capitalizing on things you say that may or may not have been the best way to say them.
So you mentioned there, the Great Isaiah Scroll, 1Q Isaiah a. Why don't you just give us a breakdown? What is the Great Isaiah Scroll? And then what is the Masoretic text?
Yeah, so right, these words are kind of being thrown around on the internet these days. So let's just make sure we're clear. Let's start with the Masoretic text. Um, always kind of presented in a singular, right? The Masoretic text, of course, what scholars mean by this is the textual tradition that the Jewish Masoretes in the medieval period. Okay, Masoretes are like the masters of tradition. Okay, they received, uh, exemplar scrolls, okay, uh, and they made copies of them, very, very meticulous copies of the Hebrew Books, okay, from Genesis, uh, all the way to, uh, Chronicles or Ezra-Nehemiah, depending on what canonical order you're talking about. Okay, so they, they, they definitely, uh, copied all of these books. Now, they did two major things. They received a consonantal text. We're going to talk about consonantal texts here, okay? They received a consonantal text. They supplied written vowels. Obviously, the text was being read with vowels, but the vowels up until the point of the Masoretes, we're talking like, you know, 8th century AD here, right? 9th century AD, uh, when these vowels are now starting to be committed to writing, okay, in the transmission of the text. Okay, the Masoretes, again, they didn't invent the reading, they didn't invent the vocalization, but they did, uh, invent the system of vowels that came to be used as the written symbols. Okay, so they did invent that. And from there, uh, they also made one other major kind of innovation. They stopped copying the books in scroll format, uh, and somewhere along the way, they started to copy scrolls into the ancient book format, right, the codex. Familiar with your work, Wes. You do a lot of great work on explaining manuscripts and copies and that sort of thing. You actually have some great infographics on the codex, okay? Early Christians were very, very quick to adopt codex technology. The Jewish community, not so quick. And they waited. I think our, our earliest examples are really from like the 10th century AD, maybe slightly earlier, where Jews adopted the codex in order to copy out the scriptures in Hebrew. So the Masoretes don't invent the Hebrew text. No one's saying that. But I just want to be clear about this. What they did is they received a text only with with consonants. They committed the vowel, the vocalization, the reading of the text to writing, okay? They invented vowel symbols for A, E, I, O, and U. These kinds of sounds needed to be represented in writing. They did that very thoroughly, very consistently. And they also, again, they, uh, they stopped copying in scrolls and ultimately started copying the text, uh, in codices or codices. So that's what the Masoretic text is.
There are some, gosh, we don't know the best figure. I've heard, if you include evidence from the Cairo Genizah, which is the, the old synagogue in Cairo, yielded some 24,000 fragments of biblical scrolls. These are all cataloged now. I don't think they've received near the amount of time in research and study. So we can talk about this very much in its infancy stages, okay? So the Cairo Genizah, some 24,000 fragments of biblical scrolls. And then Drew Longacre put together a study on this, some 11,000 shelf references in the Israelite National Archive. So very crude number here, maybe 35,000 manuscript remains of, uh, Hebrew Books of the Bible. That's pretty massive. We have a lot more work to do, okay? So I'm always trying to recruit Old Testament textual critics on, uh, venues like this, okay? So hopefully, uh, we can get some more traction this way. But, uh, lots and lots of evidence. But this is all late, though. Late medieval period, okay? Manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible.
1Q Isaiah a, the Great Isaiah Scroll, one of the very first documents known as the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Bible discovered. There are some 220 or 212, let's say, fragmentary remains of biblical books in Hebrew that were discovered at places like Qumran, which is on the northwest corner of the Dead Sea. And then in caves known as S'khara, or Wady Murabba'at, or Nahal Hever, numerous places along the Dead Sea yielded what we now call the Dead Sea Scrolls. These date from say, 250 BC to all the way up to, we speculate, to the Bar Kokhba Rebellion, okay? This is the last opp, this was like, kind of the last, uh, gasp effort, right, of the Jews to expel the Romans from the land around 132-134 AD. Uh, so we, we sort of date all copying to, to end like just before then, maybe 120 or 115 AD. So, so we can date Dead Sea Scrolls to somewhere say, in the middle of the 3rd century BC to about 115 AD. I think this is probably the most conservative date range, uh, that we could probably give.
The Great Isaiah Scroll was an amazing discovery in 1947-48. One of the very first scrolls discovered. Scholars initially looked at it, right, and thought, wow, this, this is the oldest, earliest copy of Isaiah. They date it to about 150 BC, so talking about well, well before the birth of Jesus here. This is a full copy of Isaiah. That's something too. We need to be clear about, right? Not all Dead Sea Scrolls are copies of full books. The Great Isaiah Scroll, 1Q Isaiah a, it has a few lacunae or holes, right, gaps in our manuscript, in the manuscript. But for the most part, it is a full copy of the book of Isaiah. Now, this is important, right? Because this is something like a thousand years before that Masoretic text that I just talked about. When we looked at the Great Isaiah Scroll for the first time, right, we realized, oh, there are no vowels. There are no vowels written in here, okay? I still get like blank stares from people when I try to explain this. There are no dots and dashes representing A, E, I, O, and U. None of that is found in this scroll. It is mainly the consonantal tradition. But one thing I should add here now is that in even in the consonantal tradition, there were letters that functioned like vowels. Uh, even English has this, right? When we use, uh, Y, E, specifically like "unlikely," or "very," the Y here is not its consonantal, it doesn't have the consonant sound Y, right? It simply is being used as an I vowel. Well, Hebrew has a similar use of of a yod, right? That Y sound can also function in place of, say, I vowels. And it also has one that's W or 'vav'. Although in modern Israeli Hebrew, it's always pronounced as a V. 'Vav', but anyhow, 'vav', uh, also functioned as a vowel letter, usually for U and O vowels. And then they had a letter, He, uh, that makes the H sound. And on the ends of words, H could mark, uh, long vowels, mainly long A vowels, but it could also mark long O, uh, vowels as well. Well, depending on the context. The problem with that system is that it wasn't thorough and it wasn't consistent. When you hit the scribes at Qumran, they developed a special scribal spelling practice. Okay, I think Emanuel Tov calls this QSP, Qumran spelling practice. And lots and lots of different interventions and innovations of orthography or spelling are introduced into biblical manuscripts at this point. A very simple example, Wes, I, I, I use this in some of my writing and teaching. How do you spell the name David in Hebrew? Well, you've got D, W, D, okay, DWD or DWD, okay, in the consonantal text. And underneath all of those 'vavs' in the Masoretic text, there's a little dot that signifies an I vowel or a 'hireq' that gives us the "Da-wid," okay, the "Dawid" okay, spelling. But long before that little dot for the I vowel was introduced, many, many Jewish scribes were spelling David, D-W-Y-D. And what's fascinating, Wes, is that the Dead Sea Scroll spelling of David is almost everywhere D-W-Y-D. Even though those manuscripts are really old, they actually introduce the new spelling of David, or the updated spelling of David. His name. We know what's original because we can go back to something known as the Tel Dan inscription, which is dated to the 9th century BC. It's actually the first unattested time we see the name of David in the archaeological record. And it's in the expression "Beth David," House of David. And David there is spelled as DWD without the Y. You see? So even in these Dead Sea Scrolls, which represent the oldest leather or parchment, right, for writing surfaces, they already show the updating of the language. Whereas the Masoretic text, often times, though it's the newer leather, the newer writing surface, the newer manuscript, the Masoretic text is preserving the oldest textual tradition. That is the oldest wording, often times. Now, this is not, I'm not speaking in universals here. This is just generally how these things work. So 1Q Isaiah a gave us a snapshot of the earliest text of Isaiah on the oldest piece of leather or parchment. But we already noticed that there were some spelling updates, okay? There were a lot of them, actually.
Yeah, I think that's helpful to understand how we go from ancient parchment to modern-day print in terms of what you described as the transmission history. You know, those 970-plus scrolls, but the vast majority of those are in 10,000 approximately fragments. So there's a piecing together, almost like a jigsaw puzzle, of putting those together. And, and I actually mentioned that to Rogan in terms of the fact that this is largely an effort to put together in order to just figure out how to read these documents to begin with. And once again, spanning everywhere from the 3rd century BC to the 1st century AD. So we're dealing with a lot of documentation. But the documents from the Dead Sea Scrolls going back a significant amount of time from what we have then later in the Masoretic text in the Middle Ages, which is what the primary documentation for something like, say, the King James Bible was derived from, in terms of the King James Bible being done from printed editions of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. But those printed editions being drawn from sources at the time that were available, like the Masoretic text. So we discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls in this period in, you know, the 1940s, 1950s. And then that, that broadens our understanding of that in terms of the significance of this discovery. How did that really, obviously one of, if not the most important discoveries of the 20th century, but for scholarship and biblical scholarship more broadly, why was that such a monumental discovery?
Right, so, okay, great question. So again, we had these Masoretic manuscripts, the Masoretic text, um, showing the medieval text. Scholars always were asking, how old though? And how reliable is this Masoretic text? Right? Again, that, the, the parchment, right, the leather of the Masoretic text could be dated to like the 9th century, okay, up through say the 15th or the 14th century, okay? This is the Masoretic period. So, so you could, you could go, oh, wow, all right, so, so the leather's quite new there, but how old is the wording that's on it? And, uh, scholars before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, they had already been making long use of something known as the Septuagint, or the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. And its manuscript tradition goes back at least as early as the 4th century AD, okay? There's, there's earlier text, of course, but, but the 4th century is what most would point to with Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Alexandrinus in the fifth century, right? These are the three mega codices, so-called. And they preserve many of, uh, the Old Testament books, uh, in Greek, okay? And so we were using the Greek Septuagint already to validate how accurate is the Masoretic text. And of course, the results there were remarkable. There's an overwhelming agreement between what we call the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. Now, one thing we should just say here, Wes, no two manuscripts are exactly, exactly alike. Okay? Every manuscript, every copy has a mistake or two or three or four, okay? And we're going to get into this in a little bit with 1Q Isaiah a, right? Every manuscript has, has, has a mistake. So here's the problem with the Greek Septuagint, right? Translators could have already been translating copies that were defective. They already contained mistakes or variants, right, to the Hebrew text. That when I say the Septuagint almost always agrees with the Masoretic text, there are some big, big differences. But when I'm, I mean on the whole here, there is great, great alignment, so to speak, between the Septuagint and the Masoretic text. A lot of people try to drive a big wedge there, and I think those folks don't really quite understand what's happening here. Not every difference is a textual difference. Sometimes differences occur on the level of the translation, other factors that are involved. So when specialists look at these things, we're really looking at nitty-gritty. With the, you know, the exception of maybe a handful of exceptions, but the nitty-gritty is really what, uh, we're getting into. When specialists look at the Septuagint, they often times see a text that ultimately attests to the antiquity of the Masoretic text, but not in every detail, of course. There are differences, and, and some of them, some of them quite significant. But, but on the whole, we're looking at very, very closely aligned text.
So the Dead Sea Scrolls, back to your question, started to answer a couple different questions. They could give us our first direct look at the state of the Hebrew text, right, in the era just before the birth of Jesus. Okay, I think that's what their very, that's what their immediate significance was. We were looking at copies of the Hebrew Bible from the time before Jesus. Now, it was doing two things. It was also showing us, well, what, what text did those Greek translators translate? Right? At times, we see the Septuagint translators rendering a text that looks more like a Dead Sea Scroll than the Masoretic text, right? So the Dead Sea Scrolls opened up all kinds of avenues of further research and inquiry. And so I think we need to be kind of aware of that. But their immediate significance was they gave us firsthand knowledge of what the Hebrew text looked like in this early period. What did it tell us? Well, again, I think the earliest reports on the Great Isaiah Scroll from the first observers was, this is basically a, a proto-Masoretic, right, a forerunner text, a proto-Masoretic text of Isaiah. I think that's essentially the earliest conclusion on this. On the whole, the correspondence between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text version of Isaiah was quite close. And we'll get into numbers here in a minute and all that. But the initial reaction was, this is quite close. Now, here, here's an area, Wes, and I hope I'm not going to step on any toes, but apologists kind of latched on to that early, early on. They latched on to that datum. And they did two things with it. Uh, one, they didn't revise it when more Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the 1950s out of Cave 4. So I could pick on Norman Geisler here for a second. His, his description of the Dead Sea Scrolls doesn't really update with his Bible Handbook, okay, on this matter. I wish, I wish he had done that, but, but he didn't. And I've kind of tracked it, actually. His book is the source of lots of misinformation on the Dead Sea Scrolls. So he didn't update the, the evidence as more and more discoveries happened. And he didn't really track with later in subsequent research on the earliest pieces like the Great Isaiah Scroll or 1Q Isaiah a. So apologists, right, are going to do most help, and you know this, they're going to do most help for the kingdom as they continue to track with scholarship on these big, big questions and then speak to what the evidence teaches and doesn't teach us and that sort of thing. Little sidebar over. Overall, the Great, the Great Isaiah Scroll attests the same text as the Masoretic text overall. There are some things that we need to chat about. I've, I don't know about us, I'm not really a stats guy. I've heard a lot of stats on the Great Isaiah Scroll. And quite frankly, viewers need to know, it is very, very difficult to nail this stuff down, okay? This is, this is not my kind of textual criticism, okay? But it's becoming it fast because clearly, this is, this is the need. It's really difficult, Wes. I just want to say this, to actually nail down what folks mean by a word in the Hebrew text, okay? Right? And some of people like, wait, what now? The reason for this, the reason for this is in Hebrew, I can actually say "I love you" in one word. I can say "Ahavti," I love you. I can just, I can just do that. Or "Toda," thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, yes, I know, I know. So, so when you're thinking this through, you're going, wait, wait, wait, that's three words in English, okay? But one word in Hebrew. Now, even the Hebrew though, is a little bit tricky because you've got the verb form "ahavti," I love, and then you've got the 2ms pronominal suffix "kha," okay, being added, uh, to this, uh, word. And the Masoretes, it's clear to me, would count that as one word. But Accordance software does not. For those who know Accordance, it's this very famous, very good, Bible software. But it reckons words differently. It would actually divide that up into at least two words, maybe even three. So, uh, a friend of mine, uh, at Cambridge, Tim Lee, has a software developed. He can show that there are only 16,930 words in the Masoretic text of Isaiah. But contrast that with some of the numbers I'm hearing on the internet about Isaiah having something like 22,000 plus or 25,000 plus, I think I heard. So what's happening is, no one, rightly so, life is maybe too busy even for this kind of thing. No one is sitting down and just tabulating out, right, all of the words in the, the Hebrew Bible of Isaiah. Everyone's kind of falling back on some software, which is okay. But we just got to know what we're doing here because that's a massive variance. That's a variance of almost 8 to 10,000 words, right, off the top. All right. So I do think that's important when we're talking about statistical analysis. Again, the Masoretes would have had a much lower count of words than Accordance software. And I think that's really, really important to say upfront. Because of this, I find all these numbers pretty much irrelevant.
I heard that from various channels that, uh, maybe the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text of Isaiah have something like 92% correspondence, verbal word-for-word correspondence, okay? 92%. Which, by the way, I don't know what you think about this, that's still pretty close, right? Like, even if that was the final number, I'm going, this is over a thousand years of copying, right? Remember, a lot of people have in mind that it's like the telephone game. This is, this is how ancient manuscripts were copied. You know, of course, the telephone game, you don't wind up with 92% alignment, right, between the original message and the final one, right? And not, you're not supposed to. It's supposed to be fun, right? And the game is supposed to lead to utter chaos. But that's just not the way ancient scribes were. I think we need to be clear about that. So even 92%, if that was the number, I'm still thinking to myself, wow, that's amazing alignment actually between 1Q Isaiah a and the Masoretic text. But I think after delving into where that number comes from, let me, um, me put something in front of the screen for a second. This little volume right here, *Discoveries in the Judean Desert*. Uh, put together by Eugene Ulrich and Peter Flint, two real names in Dead Sea Scroll scholarship. They've done in here is actually quite amazing. But like, here's just a couple sample pages. I mean, this is, these are just lists upon lists of what they call textual variants. Not always between the Masoretic text and the Great Isaiah Scroll. Sometimes they, you know, they include other witnesses as well. But, uh, what most are interested in today is how many differences are there between the Masoretic text of Isaiah and the Great Isaiah Scroll of Isaiah? Well, I had a research assistant help me out with this. And, uh, he found that there were 2,764 total variant entries in this volume. 2,764. So if you're not careful, you're just sort of counting every one of those lines that I showed you, you would wind up with some 2,800 variants. You got to be a little bit cleaner than that, though. Only 1,187 variants did he find between the Masoretic text and the Great Isaiah Scroll, right? So that's like almost down a thousand, 2,800 to about 1,800. There are reasons for why these numbers vary because you're, everyone needs to hear this. Counting is subjective. The counting is pretty subjective, okay? We can't just count up every single difference. It doesn't really work that way. I still have curiosities about the numbers, but I'm finding that these numbers don't really mean much. So all I want to say is this, there's a hundred, there's, let's just say that there's a baseline of 92% between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text of Isaiah. I want to show ways in which a qualitative analysis shows that that number is going to start to go up, big time. And by the way, those percentages are arrived at, whatever the total number you've got divided into however many variants you think there are, that's how the percentages are arrived at. I think there's many, many places where we need to sort of start to throw out examples that are in this list, or at least at least categorize them differently. We can talk about different kinds of variations, but they're not all textual variants, which imply meaning variants, right? That's the, that's really what people want to know. Is the meaning any different between these books? Right? Or copies of the same book? That's what people, I think, really want to know.
Yeah, I think what that highlights is the qualitative versus quantitative analysis of variants. The fact that you have this, you know, volume 32, *Discoveries in the Judean Desert*, that has this long list of what at face value, if you didn't know any better, you would just think, okay, well, here are the textual variants, here are the differences between something like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the, the Masoretic text. Well, that's not really giving you the breadth of the information. And this is something that I think people need to recognize. And that when I started to see response videos to myself on my statement, which I have, you know, publicly stated was not the best wording, um, I think one of the red flags that went up in my mind, someone who, you know, I'm not a textual critic, I study paratextual features, but is kind of adjacent to textual criticism in the fact that I have done textual criticism, albeit I'm not a textual critic, is that I know how tricky numbers are. And when you're talking about something like, um, orthographic or morphological differences, you're talking about something in meaning differences. Those are hard to quantify, especially when you're dealing with words like you said, John, when you, when you're dealing with words that are spelled differently, D-A-V-I-D, you know, with the, spelled one way or the other way, which in the end would just be read David. And, uh, we have multiple examples of this in Greek as well. And when I, when I mentioned just briefly, because I think it's important to go into some of these differences in terms of the minority of these variants being described as, you know, maybe spelling differences, but we're not sure. As some, I've said online, um, I, I think to say that when I said that scholars were shocked at the discovery of something like the Great Isaiah Scroll is because what I'm used to seeing, um, when I deal with, uh, manuscripts are is something like, like this, right? That's right. Right. Yeah. So, which is very, very fragmentary. And so when you're dealing with something that's so fragmentary, you're trying to piece together. And yet, when we discovered the Great Isaiah Scroll, it was so well preserved that it was, it was shocking in that sense. So, yeah, why don't you go into some of these sort of differences that we find?
Yeah, so, yeah, just to be clear, and I, because I want to try, I'm trying to be as fair as possible. The, uh, the name of David, that's an example of a spelling variant. This same volume, uh, you know, that I looked at, that we looked at earlier, this same volume, D-J-D, volume 32, again, edited by Eugene Ulrich and Peter Flint, they, they are careful, uh, to distinguish that QSP, right, the Qumran spelling practice, also found in 1Q Isaiah a. So, here's like a long list again of spelling variants, right? These kinds of things, uh, only the nerds of nerds are completely interested in this kind of stuff, okay? But, uh, they, they, they do a great job, uh, calling all of these out. So, to be fair, most, most in this discussion, I think, are working with what Ulrich and Flint have called textual variants. Those are what I actually want to talk about now, because again, that, that's the big list that folks are trying to use to arrive at, well, there's 92% verbal correspondence between 1Q Isaiah a and the Masoretic text. Well, I just, I'm just shocked at some of the stuff that's in that list of textual variants. Isaiah 58:2. These are going to be hard to actually illustrate because the translations are going to be identical. You have a Hebrew text, Isaiah 58:2, in the Masoretic text, it would read something like this, um, "Mish Eloha Lo av," which we would translate, "And he or they did not forsake the justice of their God or his God." Okay, just, I've no English translations for whatever reason, pluralize this. It's about Israel, I think, as a nation. But anyhow, and, and he did not forsake the justice of his God. Now, "his God" is pronounced "lo-kha-w" or "lo-ya-w." It's another pronominal suffix. And I'll spare you the rest of the details. When I contrast that with the Great Isaiah Scroll, in this same place, the reading is this, um, "ispat Elo-ho lo av." The difference is "Elo-kha" his God, and "lo-ho," guess what? Also meaning "his God." You see? All that's happened here is what we call a contraction of a diphthong, okay? An "a" now contracting to "o." The Masoretic text actually preserves the oldest spelling, "aw." The Great Isaiah Scroll, a thousand years earlier on leather, already shows updating in this, uh, grammatical and linguistic development. "Lo-ho," right, his God. And, uh, I'm not making this up. You can look at GKC on the Dead, on the language of Dead Sea Scroll Hebrew and that sort of thing. But that is simply a linguistic, phonological change in the language. But Wes, they list it as a textual variant. Okay? This, this is amazing to me. Okay? I don't know how many there are like that, but my guess is quite a lot, because the 3ms pronominal suffix shows up a lot. And, uh, so someone's going to have to go and track all those down. And, and anything phonological or linguistic like that, just simply needs to be thrown out of the pool of data. Okay? I think if you do that, right, again, what if it's 92%? Whatever our threshold is, it's already gone way up once those kinds of variants are removed from a textual variant list, because that's not textual. This is, we're going to call linguistic. This is an update to the grammar, update to the language, has zilch to do with the textual history of Isaiah.
Another example, again, these are hard to illustrate. There are at least 21 times instances of a variation between two prepositions in Hebrew. Some of you didn't realize you were tuning into a Hebrew grammar lesson here today, but that's basically what's happening in this section, uh, here. We have two prepositions: "al," meaning something like "on" or "upon," and then "el," meaning something like "to" or "for." In Isaiah 38, you could check this out, but again, there's some 21 places here. Eugene Ulrich and Peter Flint listed all of these as textual variants. But I, and others, would not consider or evaluate or weigh these as meaning variants, right? There's no change in meaning, and therefore has really very little, if any, significance to the textual transmission. We might call this phenomenon a linguistic change or variation, but I'm not even sure that works either. If you look at 2 Samuel 2:9 as an example, I won't read the Hebrew, but I'll, I'll read the verse: "He made him king over Gilead, over the Ashurites, over Jezreel, over Ephraim, over Benjamin, and over all Israel." What's fascinating is he made him king over Gilead using "el," over the, all over Benjamin, all over all Israel, all. So you actually have three and three. What this shows me, and many Hebrew grammarians and linguists, is simply that these prepositions at this time are interchangeable or having overlapping meaning. So that if a scribe of 1Q Isaiah a diverges from the Masoretic text here, using "el" instead of "al" or vice versa, this is not a meaning change. This is not a textual change. This simply should be counted as something like a diachronic or or a linguistic development within, internal to the Hebrew language. So, um, 21 times or so, I've counted. So again, your percentage, right, start to throw these kinds of things out, that that percentage is going to start to go way, way up.
Got one more. One more kind of grammatical example. Isaiah 8:21. Just going to spare you all the details on this one, but basically, basically this verse would be translated, I think, into English, and it will be that when he is hungry, he will be enraged. This is Isaiah 8:21. "The well-hath cuts off. Well-hath cuts off. He will be enraged." It's what's called a "waw" consecutive perfect. And in ancient Hebrew, it's used everywhere and ubiquitously. And the Masoretic text still preserves this ancient structure or construction throughout. 1Q Isaiah a doesn't use the "waw" consecutive perfect. It uses simply "yith-qattal" or "yith-qattal-saf" "he will be enraged." But the meaning is exactly the same. And yet Ulrich and Flint continue to list that sort of thing as a textual variant. Again, the more variants you have, right, over the number of words, total words, right, depending, no one really seems to know what that is, okay? The, the, the lower your percent is going to be, right, of alignment between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text. So qualitative analysis is going to dictate that we don't just count up every single difference. We actually have to weigh and evaluate every single textual variant and ask, what is this telling us about the textual history of this book? And so far, when you, when you look through that long, long list of textual variants, you don't get the impression that the editors of that volume are interested in weighing and evaluating differences. They're simply enumerating them. So that someone later down the line starts to put, you know, fractions together and then getting percentages of like 90% or 92% or something like that. Those are grammatical or linguistic variations.
I want to talk now about some of the bigger problems that that include and encompass multiple words between, uh, these two texts. Having looked at some, again, linguistic, grammatical minutiae here, but again, things still being counted by these, by these editors. I think, I think this is all kind of wrongheaded. So, but I want to look at now some, what we might call significant differences, at least on the surface, they're going to appear as very significant. And then once we kind of take a quick look at them and break them down, we're going to see that not only are these just normal scribal mistakes, okay, committed right in the transmission of a book or transmission of a text, but we're going to see that in, in each case, that the antiquity of the Masoretic text is presupposed, and that the error, the big error, so to speak, is on the part of the scribe of the Great Isaiah Scroll. So we're going to look at Isaiah 40, verses 7 and 8. "Siss ki ruach Adonai nasa al-ein." Something like, "The grass withers, the flower falls, because the breath of Yahweh blows upon it. Surely the people are grass." That's how verse seven reads. And then in verse eight, we get the same four words: "yavesh na siss, the grass withers, the flower falls, but the word of our God remains forever." Wouldn't you know it, Wes, because again, there are four identical words here. "Yavesh na" starts verse seven, it also starts verse eight. And I challenge any of our listeners here to try to copy some things by hand and see if you don't commit a similar mistake in whatever your copy. But here, the scribe of the Great Isaiah Scroll actually skips all of verse seven, or what will amount to 12 words in the Hebrew text. This sounds like a really, really big difference, right? And it is. But the, the mechanism for the error is really, really easy to spot. It's simply because the scribe skipped over the first instance of "the grass withers, the flower falls." He copies the instance in verse eight of those four words, keeps on copying. All of verse seven is effectively omitted. The other interesting thing is, we, we don't have time to go into all of this, but the Great Isaiah Scroll itself shows knowledge of the mistake, because either the original scribe or or a later corrector, someone actually includes the missing words kind of between the lines and down, down the margin, okay, of the, of the scroll. We'll see that pretty plainly. But that's an example of what we call paraleipsis. It was a mistake caused as the scribe was working from his, from his exemplar, right, his copy, okay? He was copying. He looked over, or he actually commits the I skip and then comes back and copies that text, but he's already missed the intervening text, okay? He's omitted that accidentally. This is an example of paraleipsis, an an error that a scribe commits when they look away from their copy to their exemplar and then they come back. That's all it takes to commit a big mistake in copying something that amounts to 12 individual words, okay? That's a lot for a text like this, okay?
Now, because Isaiah 40:7-8 is sometimes debated, chapter 4 of Isaiah, verses 5 and 6. I won't read the Hebrew, but the whole, an English translation might read something like this: "Then the Lord will create over the whole sight of Mount Zion and over her assemblies a cloud by day." There's that word "by day." Hang on to that for a second. "And smoke and the shining of a flaming fire by night. For over all the glory there will be a canopy, there will be a booth for shade by day." "Yom." Same Hebrew word. "By day." "And for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain." That's the entire Masoretic text. What's fascinating, though, is that when you look at the Great Isaiah Scroll at Isaiah 4, verses 5 and 6, between the first "yom," by day, and the second "yom," by day, there are something like 14 words in between those in the Hebrew text. All of them accidentally omitted in the Great Isaiah Scroll. I think that's, that's an important note. The paraleipsis is what happens when a copious line of sight drifts from one word or set of letters in his master copy or his, his exemplar, to the same or similar words in a set of letters that are further along in that master copy, accidentally skipping the words or the letters in between. And, um, if people are familiar with my content, I've talked on on multiple instances about things like homoioteleuton or or homoiarcton, similar endings or similar beginnings where we see these in multiple manuscripts. And these are reasonable scribal mistakes. That's right. Where we can see exactly what's happening. Where a scribe sees an ending of a word, a line that ends in a similar word, and then his eyes go from the exemplar to the copy, and then he goes back to the exemplar and he sees that similar word, but it's maybe a few letters or a few lines down the page, and it's a similar ending word. And so then, effectively, skips those sentences. That's right. And that's, these are things that we need to be careful of in saying, okay, well, these are overt textual variants. Well, yes, they are, but they are reasonably explained in how the scribe made a mistake.
Yeah, you're right. And but I would go a little further on that and just say, we see these in 1Q Isaiah a. The only text that presupposes the error made in 1Q Isaiah a is the proto-Masoretic text that the scribe is copying. Do you see what I mean, right? So, in other words, it's not, it's not a different text in this instance, uh, than that. It's actually the Masoretic text that, um, has to be assumed to make sense of the paraleipsis in 1Q Isaiah a. Yeah. Right. So word for word, not exactly. But in instances like Isaiah 40:7 and 8, you can see exactly what is happening and you can fill in the gaps where the scribe has accidentally made a mistake that you can reasonably explain. What is going on? There's not nefarious intent. It was clearly in the original. The scribe has just made a mistake in, in terms of the copying, but it was originally there. It's just there's a reasonable explanation in terms of why it's not existing now.
The Isaiah Scroll also has one other, um, feature to it. I want to mention this. We, we won't go into it in great detail, but I want to mention it because it will explain why people are seeing such variation, okay, in the text of the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text of Isaiah. There are some four or five differences in the second half of the scroll, Isaiah 34 to Isaiah 66. There are places at the bottoms of the columns, in very regular intervals, where the scribe either omitted text or he tried to remember what was in the exemplar and he tried to fill it in by memory, okay? And, uh, we know this because we, or we can at least reconstruct, uh, based, you know, and this is the work of Drew Longacre, whose name hasn't been mentioned much on the internet, but he's one who knows the scroll quite well. Drew shows quite nicely that the exemplar that 1Q Isaiah a used must have been damaged because all of the all of these kinds of variants in only chapters 34 to 66 appear at the bottom of columns and at the regular intervals in the scroll, showing that the copy that 1Q Isaiah a was being made from was kind of being put on a rack time and time again, so much so that the bottom edge of the scroll was being damaged slowly but surely over time. And when it finally came time to copy it into a new copy, which we call 1Q Isaiah a, the scribe already saw that there were gaps because of the damaged leather or parchment at the bottom. Isn't that fascinating? This is a great, great study by Drew Longacre. He just shows based on the way the scroll would be rolled up, the exact places in the scroll that would be damaged if the scroll were hitting the rack at the exact same place every time it were put back on the shelf. That's pretty cool.
I think that's actually amazing. And, uh, and so what he's done is he's taken evidence that Eugene Ulrich and others have used for a developmental composition of the book of Isaiah and he's given a far more simple explanation based on a defective material copy that the, that 1Q Isaiah a was using, right? And, and, and for the most part, was able to copy pretty accurately, pretty precisely. But in these, in these places, though, in Isaiah 34-66, he had an exemplar that was damaged and he wasn't able to copy out, uh, every single line in these quite predictable places in the scroll. So Wes, we can't count those as textual variants, okay? If we've isolated them as the result of a materially damaged scroll, we cannot use that evidence to to say, now there was a different, a very different version of Isaiah floating around out there at Qumran, right? And 1Q Isaiah a is evidence of that. No, the scribe of 1Q Isaiah a had a damaged copy that he was copying from, and that's what accounts for differences again, at very predictable places and intervals within the scroll itself.
And maybe at this point, too, I, we need to say something about this word "consensus" or "scholarly consensus" that's kind of being thrown around. As as anyone can hear now, right, there's going to be a real amount of subjectivity and interpretation of how these errors or or or variants occurred. Eugene Ulrich, right, looks at Isaiah 40:7 and 8 as an example of compositional development between 1Q Isaiah a. He thinks the Masoretic text basically added verse 7. Whereas, whereas I think, no, what we're calling verse 7 was there originally, and 1Q Isaiah a omitted it accidentally. But not just, don't take my word for it. Go read Emanuel Tov's, uh, book on Old Testament textual criticism. Look up Isaiah 40:7 and 8 in the index, and you will read his discussion of this as well, calling it a clear mistake of paraleipsis, okay? So scholars simply will disagree, uh, on how this works. But, but I will say, wielding a sword of scholarly consensus in textual matters is disingenuous. Wes, you can't do that in these things because scholars simply.
Have you know they're independent? They have their own minds, and, uh, and they actually, uh, think about these things quite independently. This is not going to work consensus or whatever, because anytime I can show where RRI and Tove sort of diverge on something like this, they're no consensus is there, okay? At that point, so, and that's just the way these things are. There's a certain amount of subjectivity in how we parse out what's counted as a word, even then, what counts as a true meaning variant. And then, uh, then maybe, maybe some productive statistics could come from that. But you can see why statistics aren't going to tell a very accurate story, because it all comes down to who's putting in the data, who's doing the counting, who's doing the, the weighing, the evaluating, on and on. Yeah.
And, and this is why we need to be careful when we look at something like Volume 32 of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert and see something like 2,800 variants and take that at face value. Neily do that. That's not necessarily being honest with the data that we're, we're looking at. So I'm assuming what you're going to go into is Isaiah 2B into 10. So yes, if, if I'm correct in that, why don't you go into that's a variant that I've heard being thrown around a lot, especially in context to a textual differences within the Isaiah scroll versus the Masoretic text. So what do we see going on there? Isaiah 29B through 10B, basically translated correctly in our English versions, it's the prophet questing of God, "Do not forgive them," meaning the people of Israel and the, and the leaders of Israel. So "do not, uh, forgive them" is the content of 9B. And then verse 10 sort of kind of builds on that. This is again another instance, we can't explain this difference to the defective exemplar that I talked about earlier. It doesn't work. This, this difference arose differently, okay, than, than others we've talked about. Again, it was said on the internet quite a bit that the consensus is that the Masoretic text has added chapter 2, verse 9B and verse 10, okay, where the Great Isaiah Scroll has a shorter text, right? An omission, or maybe not an omission, but a shorter text.
Well, I, I always test consensuses, Wes. And in this case, I, I went to kind of my old friend Dominic Bartelmy with his critique, Textual Delimitation: Test Critical Textual Criticism of the Old Testament, the Isaiah volume. In short, I'll spare you the French. It's my French is not very good, so I, I'll spare you all that. In short, uh, Bartelmy believes the Masoretic text is original here. In fact, when the text has a prophet like Isaiah telling Yahweh, "Do not forgive the people," okay, that's a really hard verse. What's happening in two other Dead Sea Scrolls? We think they're, they're very broken. There are other scrolls here from, from the fourth cave of Qumran. They've softened it a little bit, like, "Maybe, maybe you will not forgive them," okay? So it's not, it's not the prophet saying to the Lord, "Please don't forgive them." It's maybe just an assertion, okay, "You won't forgive them," right? Because they're obviously pretty wicked and wayward at this point. So, so most have seen the other scrolls kind of modifying the text. We see in the Masoretic text, the Septuagint doing something kind of similar, but again, just, just modifying a difficult theological text in Isaiah 29B.
Well, I, I was curious. Uh, Balam's work came out in 1986. I wanted to know what, uh, what maybe the more modern, cooler cats were doing, okay? So this is Hugh Williamson doing a wonderful job here in the International Critical Commentary. Uh, this is just, uh, this is just Isaiah 1:5. In this, I'm trying to give the readers a sense. His one on, on chapters 6 to 12, I think is like twice the thickness, okay? And he's not even done yet. I think he's only through chapters 1 to 12, okay? But we happen to see what Hugh says about this textual variant. It's quite long. Maybe the main point, just to start with, is that he thinks also the Masoretic text is original. He doesn't think the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the original text. He doesn't think that the underlying Hebrew text of the Septuagint, he doesn't think that preserves the Hebrew text or the original text. He doesn't think all of the inundations and all that of scholars get us any closer, because he sees all of the modern scholarship and even ancient scribes at this place all trying to soften a very difficult text that would not be in the text at all unless it were the original text, okay? So this is what we mean by the harder reading is to be preferred, okay? And the Masoretic text preserves the hardest reading on just about anyone's estimation, which is why so many ancient scribes, modern, uh, scholars are all trying to, um, redact this in some way, okay? But they can't, they can't, they can't quite get around it. And Hugh actually notes this. But Hugh actually notes numerous commentators and scholars along the way that simply take the Masoretic text as original. So that leaves Hugh, Hugh Williamson to explain how is it that the 1Q Isaiah A winds up with a shorter text? He simply thinks that the scribe of 1Q Isaiah A omitted the verse, which is a way, right, of softening the text, just like we saw attempts with other Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint as well. He thinks they omitted it. He thinks because they also made another change up the verse in, in, uh, the beginning of chapter 2. He notes that that the scribe of the scroll in Isaiah 2, uh, I think it's verse two, he notes the nation is now responsible for teaching the nations. The nation of Israel is responsible for the, for the teaching of the nations when they stream into Zion. Yeah, this is like in, um, in 22 and 23. So because the scroll made a change, the nation of Israel is the teacher of all the other nations. When you got, when the scribe got to chapter 2, verse 9B, you can't have that same people now being sort of not forgiven, right, at the prophet's behest. So, so Marvin Sweeney, Hugh Williamson, a couple of other commentators. Williamson notes basically shows there was an internal issue in the Great Isaiah Scroll itself. It made Israel this chief teacher of the people, not God, but Israel as the teacher of the people, people of the peoples streaming into Zion in Isaiah 2:2 and 3. And when you got to 29B, right, only a few verses away, you wound up with a problem when Isaiah is now saying, "Don't forgive the people." Okay? So the easiest way to solve this conundrum is, let's just remove that verse and carry on. All right. And I think to me, that's the best solution, uh, to this problem.
But here's the point though, Wes. Scholars are going to disagree on what's going on there. I mean, he, he goes through every last proposal, okay? There's a bunch of them, all right? But my thought is, you can't say there's consensus on this problem. Just because Eugene Ulrich published an article in Dead Sea Discoveries in 2001 and used Isaiah 29B to 10 to show developmental composition between, between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the Masoretic text, does not a consensus make, okay? Um, I, I value Eugene Ulrich's, uh, opinion, perspective, of course, uh, but there are scholars on both sides, uh, of this question. And I think it's going to be a pretty much like an, an ongoing debate, right, for some time. That I think the MT is original. It's the harder reading, which is usually the preferred reading. It's very, very difficult to explain how someone would add that line, okay? It's easier to see how a scribe could omit that line or modify it to create some intermediate type readings between the two. And so at that point, the Masoretic text is a faithful base text, and the Great Isaiah Scroll shows the later development. I'm always skeptical when people talk about the consensus because I have yet to, at, say, the biblical literature, have someone hand out a questionnaire and ask you what your opinion is, and everybody, you know, fill it out to a degree that would derive a consensus. I've seen some meta-analyses, uh, that I think are actually very well done. But on the whole, I don't know who's filling out those kind of questionnaires in order to derive the, the consensus on, you know, a range of topics that I see people discussing the consensus on now.
In terms of that, I've seen it being thrown around. Would you describe something like Isaiah 2B, 10 and say that this is a good example of showing quite a bit of textual fluidity and being an example of developmental accretion to a text to the Bible? And I note this because there have been a few particular individuals online who have commented on this particular verse and its omission in Isaiah, uh, 1Q Isaiah A, as an example of an omission because it would be phenomenologically unhelpful for the author or the scribe's rhetorical goals to have it there. I actually think again, Hugh, Hugh can actually show you how it fits. And again, if God teaching the nations in 2:2 and 3 when they stream to Zion, right, in this kind of eschatological pilgrimage, right, to Zion, then, then there's really no problem. And, and again, there's no doubt the Masoretic text is correct there too. So that's, you know, that maybe should go with saying. But, but in 29B to 10, there's some hard sayings, and I think it fits because again, this just fits the prophetic indictment of the people, okay? So there's nothing that's said that's like completely outlandish. Like, it, I think it's shocking when the first time I read that, I couldn't believe I was, I had to like double check who's the subject and who's the addressee. And it is the prophet telling the, telling Yahweh not to forgive them. Like, I, I get that. I mean, that's hard. But I don't think it fits as a, again, the, the biggest question scholars have today is, who would add that? Like, if it doesn't fit or if it's too hard, like, like the question is, I can't see anyone later down the line adding it. It must go back to Isaiah of Jerusalem. You see? Like, I just can't see, uh, some later scribe adding that because it's too hard. Rather, what we get a glimpse of in the textual transmission of these verses is later scribes softening it or translating, in the case of the Septuagint, right, translating it in a way that's quite softened, or all the way to the 1Q Isaiah A level, let's just, let's just omit this, okay? So, so I think that's what is happening. It's not, uh, the way Ulrich and others envision this text working is you start with 1Q Isaiah A as the original text where there's a shorter text, okay? And then you have to see the later Masoretes or, or scribes just before them adding in 9B to verse 10, right? So, so that would be the textual accretion view, right? The text is growing, it's developing, this kind of thing. But I don't think, again, it's one thing to say that, it's another thing to give a demonstration of how that would work. Scribes do not typically make texts harder to read, okay? Either grammatically, stylistically, or theologically, they do not do that. And that's what this would have to require. So I, I think best to assume the MT as the original at this point, as the harder reading, and then work it through in all the other, uh, scrolls. There's two or three Dead Sea Scrolls that come to bear on this question, and the Septuagint as well. And, uh, each one shows that it's grappling with the MT that's there, and you have to, they're trying to negotiate that, okay?
So, um, now again, scholars are going to disagree. I think we can be reasonably certain, uh, of the reconstruction I just laid out that again, Bartelmy, Williamson, several others have seen. And again, RRI only works really, he tried to put 29B to 10 in like, kind of a stream of several other examples like this and said, "See, Isaiah, the book of Isaiah is developing, right, in the 2nd century BC." But I just thought once Longacre cut out from under him all those other examples due to defective exemplar, right, again, not, not compositional reasons, but just defective copies, there's really no, no leg to stand on when you come to 29B to 10, because that could, that has to now be explained in a very different way. And, and I think there's, there's reasonable explanations in terms of that. You, you know, you have 10 scholars in a room, you have 12 different opinions. That's right. That's, there's always, you always have early and later, right, scholars like, you know, arguing against themselves, right, later on. Yeah, of course, of course. And this is not to like make scholarship mute or anything like that. It's important, obviously. But, but it is important just to recognize how this works. There is a ton of back and forth on this. And, um, I think the, the last thing I want to point out is this volume, this DJD 32, it's one of the last DJD volumes published. It's only been, I think it was published in 2008, something like this. Yeah, very, quite, quite recently. Yeah, 2010, actually. So, um, the volume's only 14 years old, 15 years old now. And, um, that means it's still very much in its infancy in terms of research and scholarship. So, so to talk about, you know, consensuses and, you know, trying to wield that, I, it's kind of irresponsible, actually. So, kind of wish that hadn't been done.
The other video we need to mention to Wes is, uh, Anthony Ferguson, right? Got on with, um, uh, Sean McDowell. And Anthony, uh, wrote a whole doctoral dissertation on these so-called non-aligned texts, that is, these Dead Sea Scrolls that didn't align with the Masoretic text. And you sort of went one by one. The Great Isaiah Scroll was actually a, a decent portion of that thesis. And that video is well, is worth watching as well, because he, when he talks in terms of statistics, I mean, he's, he's really done that work. And so he has some good comments there on the global situation, uh, even as I think we've kind of gotten down into the weeds a bit more, um, qualitatively, though. Yeah. And I'll link that one down in the description. But I do think it's pertinent to mention those few examples and then obviously mention Dr. Ferguson and his work. And even take ownership in the sense that something that I tried to do very imperfectly when I was on Rogan is, is acknowledge that when I said, you know, "This isn't true for all the Dead Sea Scrolls, but is true for, uh, the Great Isaiah Scroll." Part of what was going on in my mind is the fact that we do have scrolls like the Jeremiah scrolls that are definitely shorter and that do exemplify a text that does differ from something like the Masoretic text in more obvious ways than something like the Isaiah text. And so, you know, obviously imperfectly and taking, um, accountability for those things. But I think that there are ways that even in my own world of Christian apologetics, there have been generalizations that have been unhelpful and that need to be taken account for. In, um, groups like, you know, Norman Geisler, who has now passed away, but was not a biblical scholar. He was a, was a very good and competent philosopher, but definitely had some blind spots in terms of his biblical scholarship in, in that regard. And so there are ways that we can build on that as individuals involved in biblical scholarship, and as myself involved in Christian apologetics, trying to make sure that we are doing our due diligence in, in taking ownership for things like, um, saying "word for word" is not the best verbiage. "Virtually identical" is maybe more accurate to what is going on than taking, using terminology like "word for word."
But thank you, Dr. Me for joining me. Um, I have had the, you know, pleasure of having you part of our conference in the past, and then me attending your conference over at Oxford University at the Text and Canon Institute. So really appreciated that and seeing the level of scholarship that you're involved in and the rigor that that entails. And so I just, uh, really appreciate you participating in this and being involved in this conversation, one that the average person really has no frame of reference for. So I think it's important to get people on a more equal footing in terms of conversations about when numbers are thrown around, and scholarship is thrown around, and terms like consensus are thrown around, to maybe calibrate those scales a little bit. I just want to thank you again for for bringing me on and, and for the work that you do, Wes. I'm always encouraged to see you doing, and this is, this is before, before Rogan. I mean, you've been at this for quite a while. And so, no, I just, I just applaud your faithfulness and, and, and burden, uh, to bring these issues down, uh, for folks so that they can understand what's happening. And I think that's essential for the church, uh, and for the expansion of the Kingdom.
How can people find more of what you're up to, and maybe even find more about the scholarship that you are either currently involved in or going to be involved in in the future? Yeah, so probably my Twitter or X handle is the best way at this point. So it's just Dr. John Me. So that's, that's maybe the best way. Um, you can also follow the work of the Text and Canon Institute at textandcanon.org. I think that's, that's a place where again, my, my New Testament colleague Peter G and I, uh, for the last six years have been trying to translate scholarship for, for the church. Everything dealing with the history of the Bible, manuscripts, translations, canon, right, all these questions. And I don't know, I think we're approaching some 100 articles in English, uh, on that site. So, so check it out. Textandcanon.org, I think is going to be a great spot, uh, to get more kind of content like this. And if you do not have it already, Scribes and Scripture by John Me and Peter G is the place that you want to go, um, apart from the book that I will subsequently publish in the future. This is your go-to for the, the topic. I'm not just saying that out of obligation. I do think that that is the book that you should get to look at the amazing story of how we got the Bible, bringing clarity into the confusion that's out there online.