In
2002, David J.A. Clines, one of my favourite Old Testament scholars, published
an article, “What Remains of the Old Testament? Its Text and Language in a
Postmodern Age,” in Studia Theologica 54 (2001): 76-95. It was
originally delivered as the Mowinckel lecture given to the Faculty of Theology
at the University of Oslo on September 24, 2001. A pre-publication version can
be found here.
For
those who are interested in textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, this is a
must-read. Here is one important quote from the article:
1. The
More Manuscripts, the More Variants, We saw earlier a text in the Hebrew Bible
in parallel transmission (2 Kings 22 // Psalm 18) that displayed a sizeable
number of variants (104) when the two forms were compared with one another.
When we went on to compare with those Masoretic Hebrew Bible texts the Hebrew
text that Septuagint manuscripts witness to in common we found more variants
(9). When we considered an individual Septuagint manuscript, Vaticanus, we
found more variants still (9). When we examined a group of manuscripts, the
Lucianic recension, we found yet more variants (39). When we brought the Syriac
into the frame, we discovered again more variants (9).
When we
looked at the one Qumran fragment of 2 Samuel, we found further variants (9).
We can hardly doubt that if the Qumran text of 2 Samuel 22 were entire, or if
there were more than one Qumran manuscript containing this chapter, there would
be more variants still.
Every
time we find a manuscript, we find variants. Let us consider the situation
with
the text of Isaiah. Our textbooks tell us that 1QIsaa has many variants
compared with the Masoretic text, but no one tells us how many. In an early
article, Millar Burrows listed (by my count) 536 variants, excluding ‘a great
many other variants’ whatever they were, and excluding corrections made to the
original manuscript of 1QIsaa by the original scribe or an early corrector. If
that is the correct number of variant, it would mean that in this single
manuscript alone, there is a difference from the Masoretic text in at least one
out of every 31 words.21 But that is too small a number; if we look at the
variants that Otto Eissfeldt collected for the seventh edition of Biblia Hebraica
(the 1951 edition of what is usually called the third edition of Biblia
Hebraica, BH3), we find (again by my count) that the figure is more like 1698
variants, i.e. one in every 9.77 words.
