Mon Aug 5 03:14:15 1996
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From: Sigrid Peterson
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Subject: Re: Is 1:25
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Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 03:09:32 -0400 (EDT)
In-Reply-To: <199608020359.AAA06967@loki.atcon.com> from "Tim McLay" at Aug 2, 96 00:59:27 am
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According to Tim McLay:
>
[...]
>
> Kevin Woodruff's original post concerned conjectural emendation, but his
> statements alluded to an attitude toward MT, to which I drew attention.
>
[...]
> does deserve the benefit of the doubt as a general rule. Does it? or is it
> a witness like any other?
MT as we know it based on Codex Leningradensis is the ONLY witness to the
Hebrew text of these books we and the Masoretes held to be authoritative.
Lacking the story of the text, except in vignettes, there is no way to
know how it became the ONLY witness--perhaps it was the only scroll
rescued from the burning Temple in 70 AD, and the Romans confiscated
other existing copies. Yet someone has pointed out to me that most
probably much of the text had been memorized. But to what textual
evidence is the appeal, when two memorized versions disagree?
> Perhaps, I am reading too much into Kevin's
> statements (if so I apologize), but the issue is relevant nonetheless.
>
> So, I agree that there is much in Qumran, LXX, etc. that agrees with MT, but
> there are also significant differences and many minor ones.
And these do not occur to the same extent in the first five books,
do they?
With respect to
> major differences, they are hardly confined to Samuel and Jeremiah. There
> is Job, Ex. 35-40, Daniel 4-6 + the additions, the chronological system in
> Kings, key transitions in Josh-Judges, Prov. and the AT of Esther. Small
> textual differences abound. Which brings up my initial question, what place
> does MT hold when doing textual criticism? Further methodological questions
> arise when dealing with books where there are major differences.
>
MT is our source for a continuous Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Hebrew
Bible. It is the surviving text form from among the varieties of texts
known at Qumran, a fairly good chunk of which agreed for the most part
with what we now call MT.
I hope I've just described the situation in fairly neutral terms, but
somehow I doubt it. The LXX -- the Torah in Greek -- and the OG
translations of the rest of the Books of the Hebrew-Aramaic scriptures
may sometimes antedate the texts that we have from Qumran, but not
necessarily. They may witness to a different Hebrew Vorlage, but not
necessarily. For the most part, except for the Minor Prophets Scroll from
Naxal Xever, south of Qumran, there aren't many early witnesses to the
Greek text. As far as I know, and I've worked with a portion of the Parallel
Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Jewish Scriptures developed by Emmanuel
Tov and a team from Penn in the mid-80s, there is NO way to tell whether
a conjectured archetypal Hebrew text was translated into Greek and then
evolved into the version in Greek we now have, or whether the differences
developed in the transmission of the Greek, independently of developing
difference in the Hebrew-Aramaic text. The ability to make
generalizations about the original form of the text is absent, even for
so small a unit as the Biblical book, as LXX or OlD Greek can vary even
from chapter to chapter.
For further information on some of this, see, in addition to books and
articles of Emanuel Tov, the long article by Isaac L. Seeligmann, in
Textus vol XV, 1990, originally written in Dutch in 1940, now in
English.
James Barr, in the first few pages of Comparative Philology,
stresses that versional evidence for the text of the OT cannot have the
same value that Greek ms variation has for the NT. What *would be of
value would be to clarify the development of the Greek versions of the
Hebrew Bible.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Tim McLay tmclay@atcon.com
> Halifax, Nova Scotia
> Canada
>
Sigrid Peterson UPenn petersig@ccat.sas.upenn.edu
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