Sample Solution

uring the early stages of the Bible it could only be copied by hand which made the distribution of it incredibly slow, also there were many mistakes made that were never corrected. In order to find out what are mistakes there is a process called text criticism, where all of the scripts are compared to each other using the older texts as the guide to get the most accurate text possible. The Masoretic Text was recognized as the main authoritative text because it was the only complete text until 1947 where part of it was destroyed during riots. It was written without the usage of vowels which led to different translations that do not fit in the text.

Septuagint was the first translation of the Hebrew Bible and it was in Greek. The king of Egypt ordered for a translation of the Bible into Greek Around 285 BCE. There were concerns that the translation is not accurate because of the huge difference in languages. Even with this concern it has the highest Greek authority possible because it was inspected by the King himself. Only the highest of authorities at the time worked on this translation so there would be as little mistranslations as possible. The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in 1946, years following more scripts and fragments were found. Some of the scrolls contain whole works and date back as far as the mid third century BCE. Ever since the findings of the Dead Sea Scrolls the Hebrew text has been more thoroughly understood.

Julius Wellhausen created the Documentary Hypothesis, which was the beginning of deep research of the Torah and Bible. He confirmed many things with thorough research allowing for all of his work to be considered the firm ground for further research. Another person who had a large impact on everyone’s research was William F. Albright. He came after Julius who mostly used texts to prove things while William used archaeology to back his findings. He did not like how Julius left out ancient oral traditions which led him to believe that he had beaten Julius with his own research.