Nehemiah

Sources

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

  Table of biblical manuscript counts by book. (A Nehemiah fragment once held by the Museum of the Bible was shown in 2020 to be a modern forgery and is not evidence.)

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

  Israel Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library

Objections & responses

The site says every Old Testament book except Esther is represented, then admits no verse of Nehemiah has been identified. Isn’t that a contradiction?

It is a real wrinkle in wording. Ezra-Nehemiah is one book in the Hebrew canon, so every book except Esther is defensible on a technicality, but a plain reader hears it as Nehemiah is there, and it is not. The accurate statement is that Nehemiah is unattested at Qumran apart from its pairing with Ezra. A small Nehemiah fragment has been reported from the antiquities market, but its provenance is disputed and the fragments once held by the Museum of the Bible proved to be modern forgeries, so nothing should be built on it.

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.