As a scholar, how confident are you as to the reliability and the faithfulness of transmission of the Old Testament as we have it today?
This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘Where Did the Old Testament Come From?’ (2006).
I'm 100 percent certain that it is the word of God. And if I add 'as originally given,' I do not thereby mean to say that we have serious doubt as to the contents of the Old Testament. For instance, if you look at the Hebrew number of the Psalms, they are different from our numbering of them. If you look at some of the Septuagint manuscripts, the Septuagint has 151 psalms, and the question is, how do they get the extra one? But talking substantially of the thing as a whole, I do not myself think that there is any doubt of the contents of the Old Testament as a whole.
As to the meaning of some of it and how it should be translated, there are places where the meaning of phrases is in doubt. I was looking at Exodus where it says, 'And he said, the LORD has sworn: the LORD will have war with Amalek from generation to generation' (Exodus 17:16). But that first phrase, 'the LORD hath sworn,' in the Authorised Version is, 'Because the LORD hath sworn.' In the Revised Version, 'the LORD hath sworn' represents Hebrew for 'a hand on'; or you could possibly translate the preposition 'on' as 'against,' for 'a hand on the throne of the LORD' or 'a hand against the throne of the LORD.' The question, 'What does the Hebrew mean?' is still debated to this very day. Does it mean 'A hand upon the throne of the LORD!'? (Exodus 17:16 ESV). God's saying, 'I have lifted up my hand,' which is a way of taking an oath; or is it, as the NIV (1984) suggests, 'For hands were lifted up to the throne of the LORD'? Namely, Moses sitting upon the rock lifting up his hands, and when he got tired Aaron and Hur came alongside and held up his hands as a gesture of supplication to the throne of the Lord. Is it talking about that, or would you follow the scholar Barthélemy, who says it means a hand has been raised against the throne of the Lord, namely Amalek? Now there are, in that sense, uncertainties of what the Hebrew may mean. There are things of that order.
There are doubts in various places whether the Hebrew should be read with these vowels, or perhaps with some other vowels. There are sometimes doubts about whether a letter has been rightly transcribed. The letter r in Hebrew looks like this: ר, just a little curve at the top, with the top line coming round a little bend on to the vertical stroke. The letter d is very similar: ד, except the top line protrudes a little bit at the top of the vertical stroke; and in some manuscripts they get confused by the copyist because they are so similar. Therefore, in many places you will find suggestions in the footnotes, if you read the NIV or something else, that the word might be this, the Septuagint has taken it as that, and it's a question of reading what was there originally. There are multitudes of questions like that, practical questions. But taking the Scripture as a whole, if you ask what my attitude to it is, I say I believe that is the word of God in toto as originally given. We were not made any promise that God would supervise all the copying of the manuscripts and guarantee that we shall always have a perfect copy. There is no such guarantee, but from our side we have to recognise that there are some uncertainties of that order. They don't cast doubt upon the fact that, as originally given, this was the revealed word of God, transmitted by inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
I would add that there is another way in which the word of God can convince us, and that is as we read it, not simply as a concatenation, a string of facts unrelated, but we perceive its coherence and that it is devised by God as a coherent account. What that means I cannot now pause to describe to you, but in my mind that is a very important thing. One of the marks of truth is coherence. Truth must be in correspondence with the facts; we rightly look to see the historical element and if it corresponds with the facts as they're known in history. But truth is also a question of coherence. And in saying that, I mean there are other avenues by which we come to see that the Bible is God's truth.
