"For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled."
(Matthew 5:18 NKJV)
A "jot", (or "yud") is the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet in use at the time of Jesus life on earth. This letter corresponds to the Greek letter iota and the English letter 'i'. In each of these languages, this is the smallest letter. In English the letter has acquired a dot above it to help distinguish it, especially in handwriting where it could easily be mistaken for another letter such as an 'e' or part of another letter such as a 'u.' The dot has become important for the very reason that it is the smallest letter. In the Russian alphabet, the corresponding letter has been doubled and looks like a backwards 'N' with the center slanting stroke connecting the doubled vertical strokes. Incidentally the reason that our 'j' also has a dot is because it used to be in 'i'. In the 1611 King James Bible, there are only about 31 'j's and they never occur at the beginning of any word. The only places where 'j' occurs in the 1611 KJV is in names like Abijah where there were previously in English spelling two 'i's together in a word or name. Over the next few decades English spelling continued to change until in the 1670's the Authorized King James version had the letter 'i' replaced by 'j' in many places as we see today. That is why the lower case 'j' has a dot, because it is/was an 'i'.
So have any yuds "passed from the law"? Well, there are two ways to understand Jesus words in Matthew 5:18. One way is literal and the other not literally. To understand Him not literally, He is saying that "not one little detail of the law will be lost until all is fulfilled." But if He meant what He said literally, then He is talking about the actual written letters of every word of the Torah scroll. Of course, if He meant it literally, then indeed it, of necessity, includes every detail in meaning also.
So it should be evident that He clearly intended to say that not one little detail of meaning will be lost until all is fulfilled. But did He also mean it literally that not one yud letter would be lost? If so, then we have a significant problem when we look at the manuscript evidence available today. Well, perhaps not a "problem" but certainly an issue to be resolved and understood at least.
What then is this evidence? The Hebrew text widely available and universally accepted today is the "Masoretic" text of the Hebrew scriptures. The next most widely known and used source for the translation of the Old Testament is the Greek Septuagint (LXX) translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. There are quite a number of significant differences between the LXX Greek and the Masoretic Hebrew. This then raises the question; what is correct? What was original? But if we only had the Greek LXX and the Hebrew Masoretic, we could perhaps assume that the Masoretic is correct because it is Hebrew which has the original 'yud's, none being lost. But is there other evidence within the Hebrew manuscripts? Yes.
The Dead Sea Scrolls clearly show that there are 'yud's (and vav's) missing in the much later Masoretic text. The major "contribution" of the Masoretic scribes who worked between the 6th and 10th centuries CE was a system of vowel points intended to preserve the pronunciation of the Hebrew scriptures when reading aloud. It is casually stated that they only added this system of dots and other marks around the Hebrew letters, without changing any letters. This is commonly believed, but the manuscript evidence says otherwise.
The Great Isaiah Scroll is now available on the Internet as a high resolution photograph. It is presented as one very large picture of the entire Isaiah scroll unrolled all the way. It is quite readable on-line, once you become familiar with the script it is written in. Upon comparison with the Masoretic text, it is evident that there are indeed letters in the DSS Isaiah that have been removed and replaced by the dots of the vowel point system. But what is very unfortunate, is that it was done inconsistently. There are places where the dot was added and the yud was left in the text, there are places where the dot was added in place of the letter yud, and there are places where the same dot was added where there was no yud in either the DSS or the Masoretic. This means that it is impossible to determine from the Masoretic text what the original may have been.
Since it is obvious that the Masoretes did make these changes, it is therefore clear that they were the ones who removed yuds and vavs from the Hebrew scriptures. And since they did their work over five hundred years after Jesus spoke these words, we are left with one of two conclusions: 1) everything was fulfilled before the time of the Masoretes, or 2) He did not mean what He said literally.
Perhaps there could be another possibility; that there remains, maybe in a cave somewhere, not yet discovered, a Torah scroll that is still a faithful copy of the original. But that remains an unsatisfactory answer as long as it is not discovered. We must assume, for now, that none exists.
But we have only talked about the actual evidence in the book of Isaiah, which is not part of the "law". What about the Torah (Law of Moses) which is only the first five books of the Bible? Well there is another manuscript witness in the Samaritan Pentateuch. I have a copy of "The Torah: Jewish and Samaritan Versions Compared" arranged by Mark Shoulson. In his book, he has arranged two Hebrew text columns on each page, on the right is the Masoretic text and on the left the Samaritan. They are aligned word by word so each word is in the same place in its respective column. He has also used bold font for every place were the words are not identical. Where there is a word missing or added, there is a corresponding blank area where the word is missing. The very first difference shown is in Genesis 1:11 where the letter vav exists in the Samaritan, which is missing in the Masoretic. It corresponds to the word "[[and]]" in the verse:
11 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb that yields seed, [[and]] the fruit tree that yields fruit according to its kind, whose seed is in itself, on the earth”; and it was so.
The next difference is in the next verse where the letter yud is missing in the Masoretic and the vowel point is not the usual one for replacing a yud. It is the word "[[brought forth]]" in verse 12:
12 And the earth [[brought forth]] grass, the herb that yields seed according to its kind, and the tree that yields fruit, whose seed is in itself according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
Then in verse 14, two vavs are dropped and replaced with two dots, both in the fourth word. Then the 7th, 8th and 9th words in the Samaritan are dropped from the Masoretic. (Or perhaps these words were added to the Samaritan.) These larger changes, of which there are a great many, do not change the fact that the evidence is exceedingly plain that the Masoretes did indeed drop yuds and vavs also in a very great many places.
It needs be made known that the Samaritan Pentateuch has a great many alterations from the Jewish version because in it the Samaritans are the "chosen people" and Mt. Garizim is the place God has chosen for their worship rather than Jerusalem. So the whole story is changed to be consistent with them being the chosen people. This does not change the fact that one is clearly a corrupted "copy" of the other. And there are a great many places where the story line is not altered, and has no reason to be altered for their agenda where the vavs and yuds are present in the Samaritan but missing from the Masoretic. It is therefore abundantly evident that neither is a letter for letter copy of whatever the original was.
In view of this evidence, the question must be raised; what other changes have been made in the Masoretic? Since we have no more than a few tiny scraps of manuscripts of the Torah (as far as I know) to compare, and which also show the same evidence of vavs and yuds being dropped by the Masoretes, we cannot even speculate about what else may have been changed. So perhaps we should presume that nothing else of significance has changed, and therefore been lost forever. No one can prove that one way or the other.
There is however in my opinion another effect of the Masoretic vowel point system that may have affected our understanding of the text, and perhaps significantly. It is an area of research that I would like to see undertaken, with the aid of our modern computer technology.
To explain this issue, we must understand more of the impact of the Masoretic vowel point additions to the text. Supposedly the intent was to preserve the pronunciation of the Hebrew language. Whether that was the only intent or only part of a plan to make other changes also, is irrelevant to the issue at hand.
In the Hebrew scriptures, there are many "word-plays." A "play on words" is like a pun in English. It is a statement that has more than one meaning, or where within the statement there are two or more words that sound alike or look alike or are spelled exactly alike but have different meanings. Hebrew poetry uses word-plays a lot. Word-plays are common in prose as well.
If you look up a word in Strong's Concordance, #7585 for example, it is the word Sheol, the place of the dead, the grave. But if you will notice it is spelled two ways; one way with a vav, and the other way without a vav. Now if you notice carefully there is a dot above the vav in the spelling with it, and in the word without the vav, the same dot is above the left edge of the aleph. This is evidence of the inconsistencies of the Masoretic conversion. But now notice that the next entry, #7586, has the same letters with different dots. It is a word that has two meanings. It is a form of the verb "to ask" ("asked"), and also the name Shaul, or Saul. There is a play on words in 1 Samuel 8 and 9, where the people asked (Heb. shaul) for a king, like the other nations, and God gave them Saul (Shaul) as king.
And afterward they asked for a king; so God gave them Saul the son of Kish, a man of the tribe of Benjamin, for forty years.
(Acts 13:21)
There are many such words in Strong's numbering system where there are two or more words that have the same consonant letters and only differ by the vowels. Without the vowel points, the words would look identical. This means that anyone reading the text may see a play on words that another person may not catch. You know that many times people don't "get" a pun, because they don't think of the double meaning of the word or words in the pun. If it was only a matter of missing a joke, that may not be so bad, but the word plays in the Hebrew text are not primarily for humor, in fact rarely so, but the second meaning is significant. I contend that there are treasures buried and hidden in the Hebrew text that can only be seen if you look past the Masoretic points. There may be even more if we knew what the original was. I suspect that research in this area may bring up insights and truths that will resolve problems and help bring the body of Christ together in the unity that the Bible requires and predicts.