Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Ken Penner" <pennerkm AT mcmaster.ca>]

> Which brings up the question: with the intermediate freer 
> spellings evidenced during the Second Temple period, why was 
> the stricter spelling preserved in the MT? Does the MT 
> preserve what was the scholarly edition, as opposed to the 
> quick and dirty popular editions that happened to be 
> preserved at Qumran?

Kutscher makes an impressive case that the MT represents an older textual
tradition than does 1QIsa^a. He postulates that "1 Isa^a (or its
predecessors) is descended from a text identical (or at least very similar)
to that of the Masoretic Text, but by no means can we assume the
converse--i.e., that the Masoretic Text is descended from a text of the type
of 1 Isa^a" (The Language and Linguistic Background of the Isaiah Scroll,
3).