It is a fair question, and an honest seeker should ask it: if the Old Testament was copied by hand for thousands of years, how do we know it wasn’t corrupted along the way? Skeptics press hard here — pointing, for instance, to the thousands of differences between the Samaritan and the Masoretic texts, and to old accusations that the wording was deliberately changed. The differences are real. They are also far smaller in importance than the raw numbers make them sound. Here is the honest picture.
Three witnesses, not one
There is not a single chain of copies behind the Old Testament, but three great independent streams — which, as we’ll see, is a strength, not a weakness.
| Witness | What it is |
|---|---|
| Masoretic Text (MT) | The traditional Hebrew text, copied with extraordinary discipline and given its vowel-points by the Masoretes (c. AD 600–1000). It is the basis of the King James Old Testament. |
| Septuagint (LXX) | The Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, made c. 250–100 BC. The Bible of the Greek-speaking Jewish world and the early church — most New Testament quotations of the Old follow it. |
| Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) | The Torah (the five books only), preserved by the Samaritan community in an old paleo-Hebrew script. |
The Dead Sea Scrolls changed the picture
Before 1947 you had these three traditions and no way to look behind them. Then the Dead Sea Scrolls (copied roughly 250 BC–AD 70) were found — and they revealed that in Jesus’ own era the Hebrew text existed in several forms side by side: a proto-Masoretic stream, a “pre-Samaritan” type, and texts matching the Septuagint’s Hebrew source. So the three traditions are not three corruptions of one lost perfect text; they are three branches that diverged early, and the Scrolls let us watch the branching. The great surprise was how little the Masoretic stream had changed: the medieval Hebrew text proved to be a remarkably faithful copy of a text already fixed a thousand years before.
What the Samaritan differences actually are
The number usually quoted is about 6,000 differences between the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Masoretic Text. That sounds alarming until you look at them:
- The vast majority are trivial — spelling, grammar, fuller word-forms, and harmonizations (the Samaritan text likes to smooth things out: if a command is given in one place, it copies the matching fulfilment-wording back in so the two agree).
- About 1,900 agree with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text — which means the Samaritan text actually preserves some genuinely old readings, not just late inventions.
- Only a small handful are theologically loaded — and those cluster around one subject: Mount Gerizim. The Samaritan text even adds a whole commandment to the Ten (in both Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5) to build an altar on Gerizim, and repeatedly changes Deuteronomy’s “the place which the LORD shall choose” (future — ultimately Jerusalem) to “the place which the LORD hath chosen” (past — Gerizim, already settled).
“Forced changes” — who changed what?
The accusation runs both directions: the Samaritans said the Jews altered the text to favour Jerusalem; Jewish and Christian scribes said the Samaritans altered it to favour Gerizim. On the evidence, the tendentious edits are clearly the Samaritan ones — the Gerizim readings are isolated, consistent in their aim, and easy to identify as sectarian. As for the charge that Jewish scribes systematically corrupted the Masoretic Text, that does not survive contact with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which show the Masoretic stream faithfully preserved across a millennium. There are a few known traditional scribal adjustments, but the wholesale-rewrite theories collapse under the manuscripts. Deliberate changes exist — they are simply local, visible, and few, not a hidden conspiracy.
So how much does it matter?
For anything that matters: remarkably little. The overwhelming bulk of all the differences, across all three witnesses, are spelling and style. Not one core doctrine, not the Law, not the Messianic promises, not Isaiah 53, not the Psalms, rises or falls on them. The places where scholars genuinely debate — the shorter Greek Jeremiah, parts of Samuel, a handful of numbers — are arguments about which edition is more original, not about what God requires or promised.
And here is the turn an honest skeptic should feel: three independent witnesses that agree upward of ninety to ninety-five percent, with every single disagreement out in the open and checkable, is powerful evidence for the text’s reliability. If only one manuscript tradition existed, you could never cross-check it. Instead we can triangulate — and when we do, the message lands exactly where it always stood. The differences are the audit trail that proves how carefully the whole was carried.
The Word that outlasts its copyists
Scripture itself never promised one flawless copy locked in a vault; it promised something sturdier — a word that outlives everything that carries it:
“The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.” — Isaiah 40:8
“Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” — Matthew 24:35
It is worth noting that Jesus and the apostles quoted the Septuagint — a translation — freely and authoritatively. God was never hostage to a single perfect manuscript; His word carries through the hands that copy it. For this site’s purposes, the King James Old Testament rests on the Masoretic Text, the sturdiest stream of the three, with the Septuagint and Samaritan standing as witnesses that, far more often than not, confirm it.
So you can open it and read it without fear. The text you hold is not a fog of uncertainty; it is one of the best-attested documents in human history, and the thing it says has never been in doubt. The only question it leaves you is not whether it is reliable, but what you will do with what it plainly says. (And the New Testament’s record is even stronger — see Can We Trust the New Testament Text?, along with Believing God and What Is the Bible?)