4. (a)What did Ezra encourage that benefited the Jews? (Ezra 7:6) (b) What new development took place from about 280 B.C.E.?

⁴ After this restoration, “Ezra the copyist” was one who encouraged “a reading aloud of the book of the law of the true God day by day” by the Jews in assembly. (Nehemiah 8:13, 18) Many copyists appear to have been busy in those days, writing out the Scriptures by hand for the use of the Jews, who were now scattered in communities throughout the ancient world.

5. (a) How did scribes guard against error in making copies of the Scriptures? (b) What does a comparison of the “Dead Sea scroll” of Isaiah with tenth-century manuscripts show? (Deuteronomy 4:2)

⁵ Copies of the Hebrew Scriptures were written out with painstaking care and the scribes took unusual precautions to make sure that these were free from error. They checked by counting the number of words, even the number of letters, and if even one letter was wrong, they would discard that section of the manuscript and rewrite it. As proof of this accuracy, manuscripts dated as being of the tenth century C.E. contain essentially the same record as the recently discovered “Dead Sea scroll” of Isaiah, which was copied in the first or second century B.C.E. More than a thousand years of copying and recopying had resulted in no distortion of the Bible text!

6. Why can we be sure that the Bible text today is correct?

⁶ Similarly, minute attention to detail was shown in recopying manuscripts of the Christian Greek Scriptures. Thus we are assured that the Hebrew and Greek texts, from which our modern-day Bibles have been translated, are essentially the same as the original handwritten copies that were “inspired of God.” Comparative study of tens of thousands of manuscripts in many languages proves this to be so.