EmanuelTov-textualCriticismOfTheHebrewBible-augsburgFortressPublishers2001.pdf (original) (raw)
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The Text of the Hebrew Bible. From the Rabbis to the Masoretes, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013
The variants of Hebrew medieval manuscripts and the readings of the Aramaic, Syriac and Vulgate versions belong to the textual tradition of the MT. None of the distinctive characteristics of the Septuagint correspond to the medieval manuscripts or to those three versions. 2 But in the books of Kings, the medieval Hebrew manuscripts (Ms/Mss) and the Targum (T), Peshitt˙a (S) and Vulgate (V) attest readings which agree with both the Greek Kaige text as extant in the B text and with the Old Greek as preserved by the pre-Lucianic text. 3 1 The research for this paper was done under the auspices of Research Project "Edición electrónica políglota-sinóptica de 1-2 Reyes," funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Investigación, Ciencia e Innovación. We thank Prof. Juan JosØ Alarcón, member of the research team that carried out this project, for his careful revision of the Aramaic and Syriac variants quoted in this paper. 2 The Greek version falls on the side of the textual pluralism featured in Qumran versus the tendency to textual fixation already manifest in the other Dead Sea caves, see E. Tov, "The Nature of the Large-Scale Differences between the LXX and MT S T V, Compared with Similar Evidence in Other Sources," in A. Schenker (ed.), The Earliest Text of the Hebrew Bible: The Relationship between the Masoretic Text and the Hebrew Base of the Septuagint Reconsidered (Atlanta/Leiden: Society of Biblical Literature/Brill, 2003), 121-144; id., "The Text of the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek Bible Used in the Ancient Synagogues," in id., Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran. Colleted Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 171-188; id., "The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Textual History of the Masoretic Text," in N. Dµvid, A. Lange, K. De Troyer and S. Tzoref (eds.), The Hebrew Bible in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 41-53. 3 The terms and sigla used in the paper are the following: MT = the Masoretic Text; G or OG = the original Greek of the Septuagint; LXX B or B = the text of the group of manuscripts B 121 509 and in general the majority text; LXX A = the text of the group of LXX manuscripts A 247; LXX L = the text of the group of manuscripts 19 82 93 108 127; AL = the common text of the groups of manuscripts A and L; Hex = the Hexaplaric text; OL = the Old Latin version or text; SyroH = the Syrohexaplaric text; Arm = the Armenian version or the Armenian text; Aeth = the Ethiopic version of the Ethiopic text; T = the Targum or Aramaic version or text; S = the Syriac Peshitṫa version or text; V = the Latin Vulgata version or text; Vrs = the Aramaic, Syriac and Vulgate versions together or some of them; R: Rossi mss; K: Kennicott mss. The rest of the signs follow Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia conventions.
Manuscripts and Authors of the Psalms (2016)
It is well known that pre-modern manuscripts have individual scribal peculiarities. Two examples discussed here are the distinctive treatments of the sibilants samekh and śin in the Qumran manuscript 4QPs-f, and the unusual second person feminine singular suffix כִי – in the traditional Masoretic Text (MT) of Psalm 103, the unusual forms not being attested in the 4QPs-b copy of the text. It is noted that while it is acknowledged that manuscripts such as the Qumran scrolls have individual peculiarities, in general the peculiarities of the MT have been treated as if they stem from the “original author” of the composition. Given the decentralization of the MT in recent scholarship on the text of the Hebrew Bible, it is better to treat these forms also as most likely simply representing scribal peculiarities. This fluidity of linguistic features is part of a broader phenomenon where each manuscript of a biblical book in antiquity was a performance of a community tradition where the exact wording was not as important as the effective conveying of what was understood to be the meaning of the tradition.
1 Different Types of Exegesis in the Scrolls The first Scripture scrolls were discovered in Cave 1 seventy years ago and since then they have not ceased to enrich Bible research. Merely some of the aspects of that research were affected by the discovery of the scrolls, viz., the study of the text and language, and its exegesis, while most literary-critical problems remain untouched by the Judean Desert scrolls. Thus, the scrolls have no bearing on the issue of the distinction between Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah, as they are simply too late to be relevant to the history of the books before the third or second century BCE. We do not have the answers to many of the questions regarding the identity and origin of the scrolls, but these questions are irrelevant for most issues relating to matters of text, language, and the exegesis of small details. In my estimation , some fifteen percent of the Scripture texts were copied at Qumran,1 while the remainder were taken there by the Qumran settlers. The complete corpus reflects a multitude of approaches to the text. In addition to the Scripture texts, the members of the community also imported a large group of Bible commentaries and rewritten Bible compositions; in addition, they penned several pe-sharim at Qumran. We are talking about a Qumran corpus that included 242 different Scripture texts according to the latest count. This calculation includes tefillin and me-zuzot that previously had been excluded from the counting. However, these liturgical texts need to be included because they are as much biblical texts as the fragmentary biblical scrolls that are included. We count fragments of 210-212 biblical scrolls from Qumran together with twenty-five tefillin and seven mezuzot.2 As far as we can tell, no attention was paid to the quality or character 1 This evaluation is based on my view that fifteen percent of the Scripture texts were copied in the style of the Qumran Scribal Practice; see Emanuel Tov, Textual