Joshua

Sources

• Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library (Israel Antiquities Authority) (opens in a new tab)

  Explore the archive by manuscript, site, and language

• Peter W. Flint, “The Significance of the Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 53.1 (2010), manuscript table (opens in a new tab)

  Southwestern Journal of Theology 53, no. 1 (2010): 15-25

Objections & responses

4QJosh-a places the altar-building episode at a different point in the narrative than the Masoretic Text. Isn’t that a structural difference, not a copying slip?

Correct, and this is a case where Qumran may preserve an older arrangement, since Josephus also seems to know the altar episode in that position. With only two copies the base is thin, and Joshua is one of the books where the text form genuinely varied in this period. It does not undermine the claim that the book’s content was preserved: the same events appear in both, in a different order at one point, and the difference is on the table for anyone to weigh.

Appears under 1 claim in this case

• The Dead Sea Scrolls show the Old Testament text was copied with remarkable stability across about a thousand years, alongside a documented plurality of text forms.