Subject: Re: Is 1:25

From: [email-masked] (Tim McLay)
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 1996 00:59:27 -0300 (ADT)

Sorry for the delay in responding.  I only read my mail once a day.

Kevin Woodruff's original post concerned conjectural emendation, but his
statements alluded to an attitude toward MT, to which I drew attention.
Again in his clarification, Kevin states:

"Although it [MT] is a late tradition, it displays a high degree of
accuracy and we should give it the benefit of doubt before pronouncing it
"corrupt" or "non-sensical."

My questions emerge due to phrases like "we should give it the benefit of
doubt" and "extreme conservatism toward the consonantal text." Although the
subject was emendation, the statements certainly alluded to a more general
attitude toward MT.  And, our attitude toward MT has a great deal of
influence on our text-critical decisions.  Many scholars believe that MT
does deserve the benefit of the doubt as a general rule.  Does it? or is it
a witness like any other?  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.  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.

Furthermore, the analogy of the MT tradition to the Byzantine text in the NT
does hold.  If the committee working on BHQ holds to its original intention,
there will be one textual apparatus devoted to variants in the Hebrew mss.
of the Masoretic tradition. This apparatus will be beneficial for showing
the small differences that exist among the Masoretic witnesses (since BHQ
will use the Leningrad codex as its base), because the text of MT became so
standardized.  This is independant from the SP, LXX, etc.  That is a
majority text and is so defined in text books on textual criticism of the
Hebrew Bible.

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Tim McLay           [email-masked]
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada

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From: Sigrid Peterson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 5 Aug 1996 03:09:32 -0400 (EDT)

According to Tim McLay:
[...]
> statements alluded to an attitude toward MT, to which I drew attention.
[...]
> 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
> 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
> 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
<s>Textus</> vol XV, 1990, originally written in Dutch in 1940, now in 
English.

James Barr, in the first few pages of <b>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.

Sigrid Peterson   UPenn   [email-masked]