Footnote
b Not all the manuscripts found at the Dead Sea agreed so exactly with the surviving Bible text. Some showed quite a lot of textual variance. However, these variations do not mean that the essential meaning of the text has been distorted. According to Patrick W. Skehan of the Catholic University of America, most represent a “reworking [of the Bible text] on the basis of its own integral logic, so that the form becomes expanded but the substance remains the same . . . The underlying attitude is one of explicit reverence for a text regarded as sacred, an attitude of explaining (as we would put it) the Bible by the Bible in the very transmission of the text itself.”8
Another commentator adds: “In spite of all uncertainties, the great fact remains that the text as we now have it does, in the main, represent fairly the actual words of the authors who lived, some of them, nearly three thousand years ago, and we need have no serious doubt on the score of textual corruption as to the validity of the message which the Old Testament has to give us.”9