Psalms

Sources

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

  Explore the archive by manuscript, site, and language

• Wikipedia, “Great Psalms Scroll” (11Q5) (opens in a new tab)

Objections & responses

The Great Psalms Scroll has a different order, omits some psalms, and adds others, including a prose piece about David’s compositions. Some scholars think it’s an alternative Psalter. Isn’t that a different book, not a wrinkle?

The debate between liturgical collection and alternative Psalter is real and unresolved, and wrinkle undersells it. What the scroll shows is that the last third of the Psalter was still being arranged in the first century BC while the individual psalms themselves were stable. Content was fixed; ordering was not fully fixed. That distinction matters, because it is exactly the sort of nuance a hostile reader will suspect is being hidden, and it applies to the Book of the Twelve as well.

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.