ecn-pa:scott (03/08/83)
"The Dead Sea scrolls caused a lot of embarassment among biblical scholars when it was realized that it varied to an amazing degree with received texts." That's just not true! The Dead Sea scrolls varied little from the Masoretic text which is probably what you meant by "received texts". If anybody is interested, I'd be glad to dig up some documentation on the number of differing letters and words, but off the top of my head, I think that there were only (for example) a couple of words difference between the previously accepted text for Isaiah and the one in the Dead Sea scrolls other than obvious misspellings. There were essentially *no* semantic differences between the two. Assertions should be documented! (mine included... well, I offered...) Yours for better netting, Scott Deerwester Purdue University (pur-ee!scott)