Tuesday, March 7, 2017

Percentage Attestation of the Hebrew Bible in the Dead Sea Scrolls

Everyone who has worked with the DSS has probably had that annoying time when you are working on a passage and check to see if any scrolls have it, only to find that there are none. The preserved remains are often quite meager, though it's extremely hard to quantify precisely how much. But in a fun, informal Facebook conversation, Rick Brannan crunched some numbers on Logos comparing the Lexham DSS Interlinear and Lexham Hebrew Bible modules and suggested that about 33% of verses in the Hebrew Bible have some attestation and about 30% of the total number of words are at least partially attested. Isaiah skews the overall results, such that it would be around 25% by word count if we exclude Isaiah. I initially suspected closer to 10-15% attestation by word, so I was pleasantly surprised by that result. :)

2 comments:

  1. No, thank Rick for counting them! :) It's not really a precise measurement... just an interesting general stat.

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