3rd Edition of Emanuel Tov's "Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible"

Fortress Press announced here that the third revised and expanded edition of Emanuel Tov's classic Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible will be released on November 1, 2011. This work has become the standard reference work in the field, and the new edition apparently will be incorporating some of the developments in Tov's thinking over the last decade, as well as an extensive section on the relationship between textual criticism and exegesis, which promises to be interesting.

Big Valley Christian School

Today I had a great opportunity to discuss textual criticism and the reliability of the text of the Bible with the junior high students at Big Valley Christian School in Modesto, CA for their first chapel service of the year. I explained the basic premises of textual criticism, some of the more significant examples of the manuscript evidence available for the Bible, and also a few examples of text-critical problems. It was a very simple presentation, but I think they enjoyed it and hopefully learned something. The main conclusions to be drawn?

1) The Bibles has been preserved essentially through the ages with a very high degree of accuracy.

2) In some cases, textual criticism can help restore the original text more precisely.

The Hebrew University Bible Project

The Hebrew University Bible Project got a little sensationalistic attention from an AP reporter recently here. In truth the scholars of the Bible project should be commended for their extraordinary efforts in exhaustively collating the textual evidence, but there is nothing revolutionary about it. Ironically, the policy of the HUBP is not even to give evaluation of variants... :) The end result of the project will be the fullest listing of the evidence to date, but most of the significant problems have already been discovered and discussed. Nevertheless, we can look forward to the completion of the project as a great help for OT textual criticism... hopefully sooner than 2211! For anyone who wants more information on the Hebrew University Bible, fuller explanation can be found on pages 19-20 of my master's thesis here.

Papyri, Technology, and Armchair Archaeologists

The University of Oxford recently announced that it is calling on the general public for help with the Oxyrhynchus papyri here. Anyone with internet access can now help in cataloguing the many papyrus manuscripts by transcribing and measuring them with a simple user interface on ancientlives.org. I've been transcribing a few manuscripts myself and have been surprised at just how user-friendly the interface is. This collaborative effort between "Oxford University papyrologists, the Egypt Exploration Society, and a team in Oxford University’s Department of Physics" promises to be a great technological aid in analyzing the mass of manuscripts, and I for one am excited about the possibilities. Though undoubtedly there is no substitute for hands-on interaction with original manuscripts, the internet is opening a window of opportunity with ease of access and technological capabilities. If you haven't worked on any papyrus manuscripts yet, here is your chance!

Dead Sea Scrolls-Septuagint Alignments against the Masoretic Text

R. Grant Jones has a helpful website here including lists of alignments between DSS manuscripts and the LXX against the MT, disagreements between the LXX and MT in Genesis, and the textual affinities of NT citations of the OT.

Syriac Manuscripts Online

I recently found a good link to a number of significant Syriac manuscripts available online.

http://www.syriac.talktalk.net/On-line-Syriac-MSS.html

Did Rehoboam Marry David's Grandson?

2 Chronicles 11:18, according to the Masoretic Text, says that Rehoboam took as wife Mahalath, the son of Jerimoth, the son of David. What we have here is an obvious textual error, where the original בת "daughter" was accidentally changed to בן "son" by a thoughtless scribe under the influence of the far more numerous genealogical statements regarding men in the OT. The Masoretes recognized this error in the written text of their manuscripts and corrected it with the proper "daughter" in the margins as a Qere reading. There are only a few medieval MT manuscripts which have "daughter" in the text itself. This gives me the opportunity to make a few points:

1) Sometimes common sense is the biggest help in evaluating the textual tradition. Here it is clear that Rehoboam's wife was not David's grandson. There is no need to defend the factually incorrect consonantal text of MT with some sort of awkward gender-neutral use of "son" contrary to convention (see even the end of the same verse which uses "daughter"). Textual corruption is far more likely.

2) The more difficult reading is not always to be preferred. If it is corrupt, it should be rejected.

3) The Qere (marginal notes to be read) often provides textual variants superior to the Kethib (the consonantal text written by the scribes).

4) The fact that the medieval manuscripts so strongly support the obviously corrupt reading may indicate that they all stem from a very restricted pool of parent manuscripts. This error is unlikely to have be made so broadly across the manuscript tradition unless it traced back to a very small pool of erroneous texts.