It's clear that the Uthman's Quran recension is a very stable text tradition, and I'm sometimes asked: is there any text in antiquity that shows a similar kind of stability over such a long time? The answer: Yes there is. The (proto-)Masoretic tradition of the Hebrew bible.

The Masoretic Text (MT) is one of several text traditions of the Hebrew Bible, and it is the tradition in which it is printed today. We technically speak of the Masoretic Text only when it has full vocalisation signs and marginal reading notes. https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-bible-and-the-masoretic-text…

This tradition gets the form as we know it around the 10th century, and has remained basically unchanged since then. However, with new discoveries (especially the Dead Sea Scrolls) it became clear that a consonantal skeleton of the MT is much much older. https://www.thetorah.com/article/judean-desert-texts-outside-qumran…

Many text from around the 1st century CE show this MT-like consonantal skeleton. Texts of this type are typically called Proto-Masoretic Texts. Emanuel Tov says these manuscripts are "Virtually Identical" to the 10th century codices like the Aleppo Codex. So how similar are they?

One of the scrolls Tov mentions is the Masada Psalms scroll copy a (MasPsᵃ), and this one is accessible online, so we can do a little test. In the following I'm comparing Psalms 82 and 83 as they appear in MasPsᵃ to modern print editions. https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/explore-the-archive/image/B-371063…

MasPsᵃ's Psalm 82 is, letter-for-letter completely identical to the MT. I've grayed out the letters that were not readable, and gave a light red background to the parts that were difficult to read, but the conclusion is obvious: there is no difference, the text was unchanged.

Most of Psalm 83 is also present. There are however two small deviations. Ps 83:8 is lacking a wåw so it reads: gəḇål ʿammon wa-ʿămåleq "Gebal, Ammon and Amalek" instead of the standard gəḇål wə-ʿammon wa-ʿămåleq "Gebal, and Ammon and Amalek" No difference in meaning.

The other difference is not a lacking consonant, but rather an extra consonant, in Ps 83:14 the MT read ʾɛ̆lohay "O my God!", whereas the scroll reads ʾɛ̆lohim "O God!" A rather minimal difference, but a difference none the less.

So how does that compare to the Quran? The portion we looked at for the Proto-MT to MT comparison consisted of 695 characters, so let's do a similar portion for the Quran, Q20:1-25. We'll compare the famous Birmingham fragment to the modern print edition.

Q20:1-13 we encounter one deviation from the modern print qurans. Q20:10 fa-qāla is spelled without the ʾalif ڡڡل not ڡڡال. This is regular in early manuscripts, and modern print Qurans consistently deviate from the Uthmanic text in this regard.

For Q20:13-25 a couple more differences appear. Three more cases of qāla spelled without ʾalif, ǧanāḥika spelled without ʾalif and ʾatawakkaʾu spelled without the wāw it has in modern print Qurans.

Between modern print Qurans and ancient manuscripts differences are in fact more common than between the MT and proto-MT. However, in the Quran deviations almost exclusively pertain to spelling differences, while the two deviations in MasPsᵃ are textual in nature.

The types of deviations you see in MasPsᵃ are not unheard of in early manuscripts however. In fact, on this same folio we see Q20:31 originally started with wa-šdud/ʾašdud bihī ʾazrī "confirm my strength with him", wa- "and" was later scratched away (absent in modern text)

Some variants showing up between manuscripts whether a word starts with wa- 'and' or not is quite typical, and in fact such insignificant differences are so ancient that they were already present in the original four regional codices of the Uthmanic Text.

For example, Q3:133 starts at sāriʿū "hasten" in the codices of Syria and Medina, whereas in Kufa and Basra, it reads wa-sāriʿū "and hasten!" These spelling difference are in fact also found in early manuscripts.

Cases where a missing letter gives a meaningfully different interpretation such as ʾɛ̆lohay "O my God!" vs. ʾɛ̆lohim "O God!" are quite rare in the Quranic text, but one may compare the regional variant Q43:71 taštahīhi "desire it" (Syria/Medina) vs. taštahī (Kufa/Basra) "desire"

Outside of respectively the Masoretic Text and the Uthmanic Text, differences are much more pervasive. for the Hebrew Bible we're lucky to have quite broad access to other text types, e.g. the Samaritan Pentateuch and the text that underlie the Septuagint, Peshitta translations.

For the Quran, the Uthmanic Text is absolutely dominant. However, there is still the famous Sanaa Palimpsest whose lower text clearly reflects a non-Uthmanic text tradition. There are also scattered reports in literary sources of deviations that different companion codices had.

I hope this gives a bit of a sense of the relative stability of the MT, compared to the UT. Its stability is very impressive (and quite comparable), and has been stable for an even longer time! Also make sure to check out Tov's wonderful series on the MT: https://www.thetorah.com/series/proto-masoretic-text…

If you enjoyed this thread and want me to do more of it, please consider buying me a coffee. https://ko-fi.com/phdnix. If you want to support me in a more integral way, you can become a patron on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/PhDniX

@Thread Reader App unroll