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. 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