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Originally posted by oneisraelite

"The Massoretes were slaves to Massorah and handed down one and one only text. Even textual peculiarities clearly due to error or accident, were perpetuated by rabbis who puzzled their brains to ferret out mystical interpretations of these peculiarities. Broken and inverted letters, consonants that were too small or too large, dots that were out of place -- all such vagaries were slavishly handed down as if God-intended and full of Divine meaning."

"The big problem is that we "know" that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, while the main Hebrew version (the Massoretic Text) is very late (it is even younger than the Aramaic NT and Greek NT, let alone the Septuagint and the Pe****ta OT), and is full of corruptions.
The Massoretic text is well known for its numerical inconsistencies. The Septuagint (Greek OT, LXX) and Aramaic OT (Pe****ta OT, POT) solve many of these problems. This already heavily indicates that the Massoretic is a corrupted version (whether intentional or not) while the LXX and POT, though translations, are more reliable - because they stem from an OLDER Hebrew version (perhaps even the original Hebrew itself).
There are also other problems with the Massoretic text, from whence most of our OT translations (KJV, NIV etc) come from. Many Messianic prophecies seem to have been "played around with" in the Massoretic text (such as "pierced my hands and feet" and "virgin"). How do we know? Because the LXX and POT retain the Messianic prophecies, as fulfilled in the New Testament. Since the Massoretic was produced in the Middle Ages, and since there is evidence of "anti-Messianic conspiracies" in ancient times (i.e. read up on Aquila), it seems easy to come to a certain conclusion... Keeping in mind that the LXX was primarily produced BEFORE Yeshua [sic] came to us in the flesh, so there was no incentive when the Septuagint was produced to tamper with the Messianic prophecies."

"(a) Pre-Massoretic text
The earliest Hebrew manuscript is the Nash papyrus. There are four fragments, which, when pieced together, give twenty-four lines of a pre-Massoretic text of the Ten Commandments and the shema (Ex., xx, 2-17; Deut., v, 6-19; vi, 4-5). The writing is without vowels and seems palæographically to be not later than the second century. This is the oldest extant Bible manuscript (see Cook, "A Pre-Massoretic Biblical Papyrus" in "Proceed. of the Soc. of Bib. Arch.", Jan., 1903). It agrees at times with the Septuagint against the Massorah."

Another pre-Massoretic text is the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritan recension is probably pre-exilic; it has come down to us free from Massoretic influences, is written without vowels and in Samaritan characters. The earliest Samaritan manuscript extant is that of Nablûs…"

The form of the letters in the manuscript copies of the Samaritan Pentateuch, called the Samaritan alphabet, is different from that of the Hebrew copies, and is probably the same as that which was in general use before the Babylonian captivity.

"There are important differences between the Hebrew and the Samaritan copies of the Pentateuch in the readings of many sentences. In about two thousand instances in which the Samaritan and the Jewish texts differ, the Septuagint (LXX) agrees with the former. The New Testament also, when quoting from the Old Testament, agrees as a rule with the Samaritan text, where that differs from the Jewish [Massoretic Text]." – Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary

fellowcitizen of the commonwealth of Yisra'el,
NOT the man-made, fictional USA.
Ephesians 2:12 & 19
An act done by me against my will is not my act.

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