Ancient Manuscripts How Are They Dated?/How Manuscripts Are Dated

Imagine that you are cleaning the attic of an old house and find a handwritten, undated letter yellowed by time. 'How old is it?'  you wonder?  Then you spot another old letter. The general style, handwriting, punctuation, and other features resemble that of the first letter.  but much to your delight, the second letter has a date on it. Although you are  unable to determine the year that the first letter was written, you may now have a useful clue for estimating the general time period of the undated one.  

Most ancient scribes did not mark their copies of Bible manuscripts with the date of completion.  To determine an approximate date, scholars compare the texts with other works, including ancient non-Biblical documents for which dates are known, drawing inferences from handwriting, punctuation, abbreviations, and so on.  However, several hundred dated manuscripts have been identified.  Handwritten in Greek, they range from about 510 C.E. to 1593 C.E.

Dating the Dead Sea Scroll of Isaiah

The first Dead Sea Scroll of the Bible book of Isaiah, discovered in 1947, was written on leather in a pre-Masoretic Hebrew script. It has been dated to the end of the second century B.C.E. How did scholars arrive at that date?   They compared the writing with other Hebrew texts and inscriptions and assigned it a paleographic date between 125 B.C.E. and 100 B.C.E. Carbon-14 dating of the scroll provided additional evidence. 

Amazingly, a comparison of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the Masoretic text, prepared many centuries later  by scribes called Masoretes, show no doctrinal change.  Many of the differences simply involve spelling and grammar. Also noteworthy, the Tetragrammaton-the four Hebrew consonants making up the divine name Jehovah-appears consistently in the Isaiah scroll. 

Next time: Ancient Manuscripts How Are  They Dated?/ Clues From Handwriting

From the Awake! magazine