“Much in every way! Chiefly because to them were committed the oracles of God” (Romans 3:2).
In Romans 3:1, Paul the Apostle asked, “So what’s the advantage of being a Jew?” (CEB). He now proceeds to answer that question here in verse two: the Jewish people were “…entrusted with the oracles of God” (NET).
For some, the word “oracle” conjures up the image of a mystical artifact, or a being who shares cryptic prophecies and visions of the future. But in the context of Romans 3:2, the word “oracle” refers to a divine communication or revelation. (1) Paul employs that terminology to describe the Hebrew Scriptures, thus affirming the Jewish people’s honored role in publishing God’s written revelation. In fact, the people of Old Testament Israel embraced that privilege with remarkable dedication…
“The reason we do not possess many older copies of the Hebrew Scriptures is because of the reverence with which the Jews protected the purity of God’s Word. The Jews considered the text so sacred that they ceremoniously disposed of worn copies. The worn copies were first stored in a special room in the synagogue, called a Genizah. After a number of copies accumulated, they were all buried together (usually in the grave of some Jewish scholar). The Jews believed that this would protect readers from misreading God’s Word because of worn spots in older manuscripts.” (2)
Another scholar discusses the extraordinary consistency that exists between today’s Old Testament and earlier Biblical manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls….
“The main reason for all this consistency is that the scribes who made the copies had a profound reverence for the text. Jewish traditions laid out every aspect of copying the text as if it were law, from the kinds of materials to be used to how many columns and lines were to be on a page; nothing was to be written from memory. There was even a religious ceremony to perform each time the name of God was written. Any copy with just one mistake in it was destroyed. This guarantees us that there has been no substantial change in the text of the OT in the last 2000 years and evidence that there was probably very little change before that.” (3)
Finally, we have the testimony of Flavius Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian and contemporary of the Apostle Paul…
“How firmly we have given credit to those books of our own nation is evident by what we do; for during the many ages that have already passed, no has been so bold as either to add anything to them, or take anything away from them, or to make any changes in them; but it becomes natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very birth, to esteem those books to contain divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and if occasion be, to die for them” (4)
(1) λόγιον. (n.d.). billmounce.com. https://www.billmounce.com/greek-dictionary/logion
(2) McDowell, J. (1997). Josh McDowell’s handbook on apologetics (electronic ed.). [pg. 20]
(3) Geisler, N. (2018, June 5). How Reliable is the Modern Bible? Ankerberg Theological Research Institute. Retrieved December 12, 2025, from https://blog.atriresearch.org/articles/how-reliable-is-the-bible
(4) Against Apion by Flavius Josephus. (n.d.). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2849/2849-h/2849-h.htm