Misty Watson
After working to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls, Carol Newsom realizes there are some discrepancies in the ancient Jewish texts and Old Testament translations.
But “I’m more impressed with how faithful (texts) have been over 2,000 years,” said Newsom, a Distinguished Professor of Hebrew Bible at Emory University in Atlanta, who spoke at the Dalton First United Methodist Church Sunday evening.
The Dead Sea Scrolls “don’t change anything for (Jewish or Christian) faith,” she said.
The first of the scrolls were found by two shepherds in caves along cliffs near the Dead Sea in 1947, which lead to the discovery of 10 more caves containing pieces of the ancient writings, Newsom said. By 1956, approximately 50,000 fragments of the scrolls belonging to some 800 manuscripts had been found.
About 25 percent of the scrolls found were biblical, including versions of Isaiah, Habakkuk and Jeremiah, Newsom said. Others included commentary on Old Testament books, books such as Enoch and Jubilees that are not in the Christian canon, and instructions on how to live in the nearby Jewish settlement of Qumran.
From 1978 to 1982, Newsom, now 58, translated and wrote a dissertation on a manuscript dating back to 100 B.C. called “Songs of Sabbath Sacrifice,” which are songs people living in Qumran would sing on the Sabbath. One song was sung on each of 13 Sabbaths, all pertaining to angelic priests and the heavenly temple of God.
The oldest scroll, the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, dates back to the third century B.C. around 600 to 700 years after it was written, Newsom said.
The book contains one of the biggest changes in the modern Christian Bible as a result of the Dead Sea Scroll findings, she said. Bibles that predate the 1950s contain a slightly different version of 1 Samuel 10, which does not include the last few versus.
“Some believe it was omitted by a scribe (who made copies of the texts) accidentally,” Newsom said.
There were two versions of Jeremiah found in the caves. One version was about one-eighth shorter than the version printed in the Old Testament.
“The form we have now is probably a newer version,” she said. “There are not large portions of the text that are different, but small phrases,” such as “thus saith the Lord” were added.
Some scrolls found were considered part of the ancient Jewish canon, but have been left out of the modern canon, according to Newsom.
The Book of Jubilees, believed to have been written by Moses in the second century B.C., closely follows the stories in Genesis, but includes more detail, such as “elaborate poems,” she said.
The Book of Enoch tells a story of how evil came to be, but says evil exists because angels sinned, not humans, said Newsom.
