Does Redaction Affect Biblical Inerrancy?

Question 131764: Has the Bible ever been redacted by later biblical writers?  One example I am thinking of comes from Genesis 11:31, where the text states that Terah, Abram, Lot and Sarai left Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan.  Since the Chaldeans did not inhabit this area at this time, should it be assumed that a later biblical author added this or that this was written by Moses?  Does the idea of redaction violate the idea of biblical inerrancy at all?  Thank you so much for your time!

Answer:  When discussing the reliability of the Biblical text, the concept of transmission plays a large part.  Scholars want to know how the Biblical texts were transmitted from the original documents (called autographs) to the current collection of manuscripts we have now.  Another question that comes up is how the original authors of Scripture wrote the text in the first place.  Let’s look at that second question first before preceding to the first question.

The author of Hebrews writes, “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways” (Hebrews 1:1).  What we can glean from this verse is that Scripture was delivered to men by God through the agency of the Holy Spirit in many ways, shapes and forms.  In the OT we see numerous examples of what can be called direct revelation in which God directly speaks to the human author and then commands that what was spoken be written down (cf. Exodus 17:14-16; 24:3-4; 24:7).  Another method of revelation must be oral tradition.  I say this because there is no Biblical record of any direct revelation of the events of Genesis being given to Moses.  Therefore it is safe to assume that the events recorded in the book of Genesis must have been passed down largely by word of mouth or some written documents now lost to us.  We also know that a large part of the OT – from Joshua to Kings – is a chronicle of the history of the Jewish nation and is in a largely narrative form.  Finally, the OT contains a section of wisdom literature, or writings, that make up the balance of the canon.

All told, the text of the OT contains the recordings of direct revelation, the accumulation of oral tradition, historical narratives and wisdom literature and poetry.  In some cases we know who wrote a particular OT book, but in other cases we don’t know with certainty who wrote an OT book.  We do know that for all intents and purposes, the Jews believed the OT canon was ‘officially’ closed with the deaths of the last of the OT prophets (i.e., Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi).

That takes care of the question of source, how about transmission?  The Bible makes quite clear that the Pentateuch was given a special place of prominence in the lives of the Jewish people.  It was to be read publically at regular intervals, and therefore great care would have been given to ensure its survival.  We also know that by the time of Daniel, there was a larger collection of OT material simply referred to as ‘the books’ in which Daniel was able to refer to the prophecy of Jeremiah (cf. Daniel 9:2).  So as writings were deemed valuable or authoritative, they would have been collected, copied and transmitted to later generations.

The process of transmission was done with the utmost care and precision.  There were official scribes whose sole responsibility was to copy the sacred texts, and thus preserve God’s revelation to man.  They engaged in the practice much like we do today.  These scribes would determine, to the best of their ability, the most accurate form of the Hebrew text they could find and copy these documents meticulously.  Given the fact that these men all believed they were preserving the very word of God for future generations, we can be sure that they took every means available to ensure proper and accurate transmission of the text.

With that said, let’s address your question of redaction.  Were the OT texts redacted during the process of transmission?  The answer to that question is “yes.”  These scribes were not averse to making what they saw as necessary corrections to the text.  Typically these corrections amounted to updating the text to help make it more understandable to current readers of their day.  We see this primarily in the area of location names, such as Ur of the Chaldeans (as you mentioned above) and Dan (e.g., Genesis 14:14; 15:7).  We also see comments added to the text that mention a particular landmark is still standing to this very day (e.g., Genesis 26:33; 35:20).  This is not unusual.  Even now, preachers and commentators do a sort of redaction of their own.  For example, Paul wrote several letters to churches located in Asia.  In order for us to understand where these churches are located, we need to ‘redact’ the text and mentally insert the phrase ‘modern-day Turkey.’  Similarly, when the Bible speaks of the Babylonian and Persian empires, we need to translate that to mean modern-day Iraq and Iran.

More to the point, does this redaction detract from the notion of Biblical inerrancy?  The answer to that question is “no.”  We should be quick to point out that critics of Biblical inerrancy will jump on these redactions to make outrageous claims that the Biblical text cannot be trusted because we don’t know how much it’s been altered.  Here’s what we need to take away from this.  Up until the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest extant copy of the OT text (called the Masoretic Text, or MT) is the Codex Leningradenis dated to 1008 AD (there is an older codex, the Aleppo Codex dated to 930 AD, but it is incomplete).  Now since we consider the canon of the OT to have been closed around 3^rd or 4^th century BC, this is quite a gap between our copy of the MT and the original writings.  This leaves the door wide open for critical attacks on the accuracy of the MT.

However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we now have copies of the OT that date to between 250 BC and 135 AD – that’s 900 to 1200 years earlier that the oldest copies we currently have, and much closer to the original writings (which in literary criticism is the ‘gold’ standard).  Furthermore, what we see when we compare the MT to the Dead Sea Scrolls is a large degree of agreement between the texts.  What does this tell us?  That in approximately 1,000 years of transmission of the OT text, we can be reasonably certain that the text we have now is the same text used over 1,000 years ago.  Finally, most good English translations of the Bible (e.g., NKJV, ESV, NIV, and NASB) provide copious amounts of footnotes indicating textual variants and the source of the text in question.  So I reiterate that the question of earlier redaction affecting Biblical inerrancy can be answered emphatically “no.”