spotlight Express Your individuality • Controversial Effort Scholars work to assemble Bible's books closer to original versions. JTA RELIABLE AND DEPENDABLE SERVICE VATIEW6Wilmr f OUR BRICK I TINTDECKS ONEST TUT WAS Are your Brick Pavers lifted and uneven? We Can FIX THEM LI We offer Discounts for Brick Driveways and Large Jobs Honest guys that give you an onest price! We will beat any competitor's price! SAVE UP TO $ 100 Specializing ail Dffr9 , Stamped Concrete Ed Aggregate Brick Pavers, Powerwash, Repairs, and Sealing. High Pressure Washing, Aggregate and all types of decks. when you book by 6.30.14 I . 4 Servicing Oakland, Lapeer & Genesee Counties CALL US TODAY 248.909.1512 BEFOR www.honestguyspowerwash.com E1,1r adll 1917050 QUALITY KOSHER 1P a4 catering TURNING MOMENTS INTO MEMORIES. 248-352-7758 WWW.OUALITYKOSHER.COM 1867060 WE HAVE THE PRESCRIPTION... 10% OFF 1- PAVING AND SEALCOATING Expires: 6.30.14 Also Available: Line Striping • Crack Filling Pothole Repair Metro Detroit's Premier Asphalt and Pavement Enterprise CALL D.S.G. TODAY! (248) 877-6678 We come to you. Our fully trained staff can come in as little as 24 hours to service your pavement needs. The Doctor is on call! 248.877.6678 110 May 22 • 2014 1902410 A ccording to Jewish tradition, the Torah is so sacred that even a single error made on a single let- ter renders the entire scroll unusable. And yet the Hebrew Bible — including the Torah, its first five books — is riddled with corrup- tions and alterations that have accrued and been passed down over the mil- lennia. Now an international team of scholars is working to fix all that. For the past 14 years, the team behind The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE) has been laboring on a project to sift through the text and reverse the accumulated imperfections and changes, returning the books of the Hebrew Bible to something like their original ver- sions. The first volume is due later this year. "It is a little chutzpadik," acknowl- edged Ronald Hendel, HBCE's gen- eral editor and a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of California, Berkeley. It's also a messy, painstaking and controversial endeavor that has been criticized by some of the world's leading biblical scholars. The critics argue that what Hendel and his team are attempting to do is misleading, counterproductive or flat-out impos- sible. "I think it will actually end up causing more problems," said Michael Segal, a senior lecturer in Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The difficulties in the project stem from the Bible's long history of transmission from scribe to scribe through the centuries. HBCE is try- ing to reverse engineer that process, to sift through the various extant texts of the Bible and — by analyz- ing grammatical glitches, stylistic hitches and contradictions of the texts — establish a reading closer to A Torah scroll if not the original, then at least the archetype on which the subsequent copies were based. The goal is to rewind the clock as far as possible toward the time when the various biblical texts attained their canonical form, around the start of the Common Era. The text of the Hebrew Bible now being used descends from what is called the Masoretic text, which was assembled between the 6th and 10th centuries by Jewish scribes and scholars in present-day Israel and Iraq. But even among the various versions of the Masoretic text there are subtle differences. Many of today's printings of the Hebrew Bible come from the Second Rabbinic Bible, a text assembled in 16th-century Venice. The Jewish Publication Society uses the Leningrad Codex, which at approxi- mately 1,000 years old is the oldest complete surviving text. Still others use the 10th-century Aleppo Codex, which the Torah scholar Maimonides praised for its accuracy but has been missing much of the Torah since a 1947 fire.