They discovered that very little had changed and that the Hebrew Bible had been transmitted with incredible accuracy over a millennium. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls allowed scholars to see how much the biblical text had changed in over 1000 years of transmission. 5 Before their discovery, the earliest complete Old Testament manuscript was the Leningrad Codex, dating to A.D. to the first century A.D., with some of the earliest, such as 4Q17 (4QExod-Lev f), dating to the early Hellenistic era, approximately 250 B.C. 4 The manuscripts date from the third century B.C. Between in 19 numerous excavations discovered a variety of scrolls and fragments in 11 caves, including copies of every book of the Old Testament except for Nehemiah and Esther. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of over 900 manuscripts discovered in the caves around Qumran near the Dead Sea. 3 Some scholars believe the Nash Papyrus was used by an Egyptian Jew in his daily worship. Ancient Jewish sources state that it was common practice to read the Ten Commandments before saying the Shema prayer. 2 It contains the 10 commandments from the book of Exodus, and the Shema Yisrael prayer (“Hear, O Israel: the LORD God, the LORD is one”) from Deuteronomy. it was the oldest known biblical text prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Written in Hebrew and dating to the second century B.C. The Nash Papyrus is a manuscript that was purchased in Egypt in 1902 from an antiquities dealer by Walter Llewellyn Nash.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Public Domain 1 So what are the oldest biblical texts discovered to date? The Nash Papyrus The Nash Papyrus. The earliest manuscript in existence dates to the 8 th century AD, some 900 years later. For example, Julius Caesar chronicled his conquest of Gaul in his work On The Gallic War in the first century B.C. What we have are copies of the original which date to hundreds of years after their composition. Like every other ancient text, the originals have not survived the ravages of time.

Earliest old testament manuscripts