Tracking The Errors
Contemporary scholars seeking
to understand the history of the
Hebrew Bible's text utilize a range
of other sources, including ancient
Greek and Syriac translations, quota-
tions from rabbinic manuscripts, the
Samaritan Pentateuch and others.
Many of these are older than the
Masoretic text and often contradict it,
in ways small and large.
Some of the errors are natural
outgrowths of the process of scribal
transmission — essentially typos in
which the scribe mistook one let-
ter for another, skipped a word or
transposed words. In other cases, the
scribes may have changed the text
intentionally to make it more com-
prehensible or pious.
The level of variation differs from
book to book. Hendel estimates
that it ranges from approximately
5 percent in Genesis to some 20-30
percent in books such as Samuel and
Jeremiah. While many changes are
small, others are more substantial.
Dead Sea Scrolls
The scholars behind The Hebrew
Bible: A Critical Edition argue that
textual scholars now have enough
evidence at their disposal to make
reasonable judgments about where
the text has been corrupted, why and
how to fix it, thanks in large part to
the discovery and publication of the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
These ancient manuscripts, though
largely fragmentary, are by far the
oldest Hebrew copies of the Bible, and
they gave scholars a key by which to
judge the accuracy of the subsequent
texts.
"The Dead Sea Scrolls have cre-
ated a new era in the study of textual
history of the Hebrew Bible," Hendel
said. "The kind of thing that we're
doing couldn't have been done even
15 to 20 years ago because the field
wasn't really ripe
Hendel's team uses a two-fold
approach: In the case of the more
limited variations, they make the
correction in the text according to
their best judgment while noting the
variants and the reasoning in the
accompanying notes. Where entirely
separate versions seem to exist, HBCE
will reproduce both side by side, indi-
cating multiple editions.
The effort is now bearing fruit as
the Society of Biblical Literature is
preparing this fall to publish the first
HBCE volume, Proverbs, edited by
Michael Fox, an emeritus professor at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Hendel hopes the project will con-
tinue to print a new volume every
year or two.
There have been various previous
attempts to produce a single, cor-
rected text of the Bible dating back
for over a century. All have foundered
due to the inherent difficulty in peer-
ing back through the centuries.
Instead, the preferred method has
been to produce what is known in the
field as a "diplomatic edition" — that
is, a reprint of some version of the
Masoretic text accompanied by notes
listing possible variants and correc-
tions that one could make to the text.
In fact, there are two such scholarly
biblical projects currently taking place.
One, the Hebrew University Bible
Project, was established in 1956 to
assemble every known textual variant
of the Hebrew Bible. Unlike HBCE, the
project is designed to assemble varia-
tions, not to choose one that is correct.
At the same time, the German
Bible Society is producing the Biblia
Hebraica Quinta, its fifth version of
a diplomatic Hebrew Bible, with the
first published in 1906. Intended as a
more accessible, single-volume text,
it strikes a middle ground, indicat-
ing preferred readings but without
altering the text itself. The project has
published 10 of the Hebrew Bible's 24
books.
Finding Fault
Criticisms of the HCBE effort fall into
two very broad categories.
The first main critique is primarily
practical: Is it possible to accurately
reconstruct the biblical text after so
many centuries, through so many
linguistic layers and with so much
uncertainty?
To this, the editors of HBCE
respond that errors and uncertainty
are inherent in any of the bibli-
cal texts one could print and thus
unavoidable.
But there is also a second, more
fundamental critique of HBCE —
namely, can such a thing as an origi-
nal truly be said to exist? Was there
ever a moment when the biblical text
crystallized into a single version or
has it simply continued to evolve?
In other words, by chasing what the
field of textual study calls an ur-text,
the scholars of HBCE may, in fact, be
chasing a ghost.
Hendel argues that what he and
his team are presenting is not meant
to be a definitive text but simply the
most definitive that one can achieve.
And he says he is not put off by the
criticism.
"There's a lot of pushback in the
field. A lot of people think that this is
still premature, or just unthinkable
Hendel said. "But that's OK, I live in
California. We can do new things" ❑
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