Manuscript Confidence in Deuteronomy 32:8

"When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). Whatever "sons of God" means in that verse — a phrase every serious reader recognizes as describing heavenly beings present at creation — is the same phrase textual scholars find standing behind Deuteronomy 32:8, in the earliest manuscripts we have of that passage.
The manuscript evidence strongly favors "sons of God" over the later, more familiar "sons of Israel." The Dead Sea Scrolls reading of Deuteronomy 32:8 agrees with the ancient Greek Old Testament translation in reading "sons of God" or "angels of God," while the later standard Hebrew text underlying most modern translations reads "sons of Israel" instead. This is not a marginal or speculative claim floated by one school of thought against another; it reflects the near-consensus of textual criticism on the Hebrew Bible. And the "sons of Israel" reading is harder to make sense of in its own context: the passage describes the Most High "dividing mankind" and "fixing the boundaries of the peoples" at a point in the story before Israel existed as a nation at all — making a phrase like "according to the number of the sons of Israel" an odd, anachronistic anchor for an event that predates Israel's existence. "Sons of God," by contrast, coheres perfectly with the identical phrase used elsewhere for members of the divine council — Job 1:6, and Job 38:7 itself, both describing heavenly beings, not a not-yet-existing nation.
This confidence is not manufactured to support a theory; the theory follows the evidence, not the other way around. When the earliest witnesses, the most contextually coherent reading, and the Bible's own parallel usage of the exact same phrase all point the same direction, that is about as strong as textual confidence gets for any disputed verse in the Hebrew Bible.