Thanks to the still-humming ETC blogroll, I noticed that Drew Longacre just posted a short blog post at his OTTC site on the similarity of the Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa-a) and the MT. This question became something of the flashpoint over the last year after the now famous Wes Huff interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast where he said it was word-for-word the same.
Many counter-apologists jumped on this as misleading and it went round and round on the interweb (Wes later clarified in a video with John Meade). Apparently the issue is not dead since Bart Ehrman jumped into the fray this week. (I do not recommend you go down the YouTube rabbit hole on this one if you value your time).
Drew gives some of this backstory in his post. But I want to ignore all that and higlight instead Drew’s 2013 DSD article that deserves much more attention. It addresses some of the largest differences between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the MT. Here is what he says about that:
Third, I would point out a series of difficult passages in the second half of the scroll that differ considerably from the Masoretic text, often with 1QIsa-a missing entire verses of the MT. Eugene Ulrich has argued that 1QIsa-a reflects an earlier version of Isaiah in these passages and that the MT has grown with additional verses being added. I have argued in an article that most of these passages were actually missing in the exemplar from which 1QIsa-a was copied, because it was damaged along the bottom edge. Thus, every column was physically damaged and missing one or more lines. You can see this, e.g., in how the scribe originally left blank lines for the missing verses. If correct, and I’m quite convinced it is, it means that most of the biggest differences between the Great Isaiah Scroll and the MT are easily explained as copying problems in the former.
I don’t think we’ve blogged about Drew’s DSD article here before. The full title is “Developmental Stage, Scribal Lapse, or Physical Defect? 1QIsaa’s Damaged Exemplar for Isaiah Chapters 34-66” and is online here (or in free pre-pub here). Here is the abstract:
The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran (1QIsaa) does not generally reflect a text form earlier than the Masoretic text. Instead, the convergence in 1QIsaa of patterns of spacing irregularities, literary and textual problems, and secondary supplementations, as well as a consistent pattern of distribution, are best explained on the basis of the hypothesis of an exemplar for chapters 34–66 with a damaged bottom edge. Upon reaching the defective edge in each column of his exemplar, the scribe dealt with any lacunose or illegible text in one of two ways before continuing with the unaffected text at the top of the subsequent exemplar column. Sometimes he left blank spaces in his new copy to be filled in with the correct text from other manuscripts at a later time. At other times he attempted full or partial reconstructions of the text based on whatever text remained legible in the damaged exemplar, memory, and contextual clues.