The Dead Sea Scrolls and Biblical “Inerrancy”
Posted by mattusmaximus on August 5, 2012
Recently, while on vacation, my wife and I went to see the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For those who don’t know, the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest known writings of the Old Testament of the Bible in existence. They are roughly 2000+ years old, and written in a variety of languages; plus, the story of their discovery and excavation is quite fascinating.
A few things in particular struck me about the entire exhibit, which included some of the actual scroll fragments (and their translations); specifically, these things I observed about the scrolls seemed to come into direct conflict with the notion of Biblical inerrancy espoused by so many religious fundamentalists these days…
First of all, the fragments were just that… fragments. The scrolls were terribly decayed and incomplete, which is to be expected after over 2000 years of exposure. Now this wouldn’t seem to be that much of a big deal, were it not for my other observations…
Second, there was a lot of material within the Dead Sea Scrolls which doesn’t appear within the Old Testament Bible. In other words, the Old Testament Bible seems to be a whittled down version of these more original writings. Which begs a question: why did some of this original material make it into the Bible and other material was excluded? The obvious answer is that at some point, someone (that is, people) had to decide what to include and what to exclude. In other words, even at the very formation of what we call “The Bible”, it was going through a very real editing process by very real human hands. And this leads me to my third, and probably most damning, point…
The Dead Sea Scrolls themselves give differing, and even contradictory, accounts of various Old Testament Biblical stories. That is, they are not even consistent within their own writings, and these are the earliest (and therefore most original) Biblical writings we have! Why would this be, if the Bible is supposed to be error-free? The answer is simple, yet difficult for some to accept: the scholars who have painstakingly analyzed the scrolls for decades have found that these writings were written in a variety of different communities by a variety of different authors (most likely local priests or community leaders). As a result, each author had their own “spin” they wanted to place on various stories, which led some accounts to conflict with other accounts.
The conclusion is obvious: far from being inerrant in nature, the Bible is, and apparently always has been – even back unto the days of the Dead Sea Scrolls before “The Bible” even existed – a work of wholly fallible humans.
The Skeptical Teacher 
Bernard Ian Tanner Jr said
Like Beowulf, The Novels of Charles Dickens, or the Sonnets of Shakespeare the ‘Bible’ is a product of human hands and human ideas wholly and completely. Some ideas are good and some are just horrible.
Tristan said
People do like to say the Dead Sea scrolls aren’t good evidence for Old Testament being accurate because the DS scrolls also contain other writings that weren’t in the other manuscripts, but what those critics don’t realize is that is not what is so interesting. It’s not that the DS scrolls would have to be a perfect copy of the other manuscripts, it just proves that the writings that did exist in the middle ages weren’t “telephone gamed” into a completely different text.
To use an example, if you were to say that modern Shakespeare isn’t the same as the original, because people miscopied it and we only have copies written in the last thirty years, and then later you find a library full of books from the 16th century, and in that library you find works of Shakespeare that match up perfectly with your copy, it doesn’t matter what else is in the library, what matters is that the Shakespeare still is accurate.