Evidence · Case 03 · Reliability of Scripture
Judges
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
About 3 to 4 copies of Judges were found. One copy is missing a passage that appears in the later Masoretic text, which is of interest to scholars studying how the book took shape.
Sources
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- 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
- If a Qumran copy of Judges lacks a passage the Masoretic Text has, doesn’t that mean the passage was added later? That’s exactly the kind of corruption the claim denies.
It may mean that, and the variant is of real interest to scholars studying how the book took shape. The claim is not that no word ever changed but that the transmission was faithful and its variations are recoverable. A missing paragraph in one early copy, detectable by comparison, is a variant scholars can weigh, which is the opposite of an undetectable corruption. Faithful transmission includes preserving the evidence of where the text once differed.