56. When The Old Testament writers completed their scrolls, they depended on scribes, men who patiently copied the Scriptures by hand when extra copies were needed and when the original scrolls became too worn to use any longer. By the time Jesus was born, the books of Moses had been copied and recopied over a span of more than fourteen hundred years!
57. Before beginning his work each day, a scribe would test his reed pen by dipping it in ink and writing the word Amalek and then crossing it out (cf. Deut. 25:19). Then he would say, "I am writing the Torah in the name of its sanctity and the name of God in its sanctity."
58. The scribe would read a sentence in the manuscript he was copying, repeat it aloud, and then write it. Each time he came to the name of God, he would say, "I am writing in the name of God for the holiness of His name." If he made an error in writing God's name, the scribe had to destroy the entire sheet of papyrus or vellum that he was using.
59. After the scribe finished copying a particular book, he would count all the words and letters it contained. Then he checked this tally against the count for the manuscript that he was copying. He counted the number of times a particular word occurred in the book, and he noted the middle word and the middle letter in the book, comparing all of these with the original. By making these careful checks, he hoped to avoid any scribal errors.
60. The Bible was written in several languages. Most of the Old Testament books are in Hebrew, but parts of Daniel are in Aramaic. The New Testament books are written in koine ("common") Greek, though they contain Latin, Aramaic, and Hebrew phrases.
61. The Masoretes were a group of Jewish scholars who wanted to ensure that the Old Testament documents would not become corrupted over time. Since the Hebrew language has no vowels, they created a system of inserting "vowel points" into the text to help priests and readers know how to pronounce the words properly. Their careful work has led to almost no changes in Old Testament wording for more than a millennium. Translators today still refer to the "Masoretic" text.
62. The Hebrew language slowly changed, as languages do, throughout the centuries after the Old Testament writers passed away. The language of Moses would seem strange to a modern Israeli, just as the language of Chaucer or even Shakespeare is difficult for us to discern.
63. The Greeks, who borrowed the twenty-two-letter alphabet used in Hebrew and Phoenician, added five new letters at the end of their alphabet. These five additional letters are the reason why the Greeks are credited for inventing the vowel system.
64. Approximately two thousand years of history pass within the Bible's pages. Great empires came and went around the ancient Near East: Sumer, Akkadia, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and Greece. Along with those rising and falling empires and cultures, Hebrew and Aramaic fell into disuse and were eventually replaced by Greek. Sometime around 250 B.C. someone decided to preserve those writings in a complete translation of Hebrew scripture.
65. At least three or four centuries elapsed between the close of the Old Testament writings and the opening of the New Testament . This silent period is called the intertestamental period and was comparable in length to the time that the judges ruled, or about the same number of years kings ruled Israel.
