Greek Translation, Qumran, and the Long Question of When It Closed

Long before the Masoretes, the Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek for Jewish communities in Egypt. The Septuagint began with the Torah in the third century BCE and grew over the following two centuries to cover the rest, sometimes translating a Hebrew text noticeably different from the one the Masoretes later fixed, its Jeremiah is around an eighth shorter and differently ordered. It became the Bible of the early church, and the divergences between it and the Hebrew are one of the reasons Christian and Jewish canons parted.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, found at Qumran from 1947 and dating from roughly the third century BCE to the first century CE, put the question to a direct test. They include fragments of every book of the Tanakh except Esther, and they are about a thousand years older than the Aleppo and Leningrad codices. The great Isaiah scroll agrees with the Masoretic Isaiah closely enough that almost no differences affect the sense. But the scrolls also preserved copies aligned with the Septuagint and with the Samaritan Pentateuch, showing that several text-types circulated side by side and that the Masoretic form was one stream among others before it became the only one.

When the collection closed is unsettled. Older textbooks credit a Council of Jamnia around 90 CE with fixing the canon. That reconstruction, proposed by Heinrich Graetz in 1871, was dismantled from the 1960s by Jack P. Lewis, Sidney Leiman and others: the rabbinic sources describe discussion of whether Ecclesiastes and Song of Songs render the hands unclean, not a council closing a list. Most scholars now treat the canon as settling gradually, with the Torah and Prophets long established and parts of the Writings still argued over into the second century CE.