THE TEXT of the OLD TESTAMENT

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

List of Plates..........................................................................................ixPreface to the Fifth German Edition.....................................................................xiTranslator's Note.......................................................................................xiiIntroduction............................................................................................xiiiI. Script and Writing Materials.........................................................................1II. The Masoretic Text..................................................................................10III. The Samaritan Pentateuch (w).......................................................................45IV. Preliminary Considerations on the Versions..........................................................48V. The Septuagint (G)...................................................................................50VI. The Aramaic Targums (T).............................................................................79VII. The Syriac Version (Peshitta, [S]).................................................................85VIII. The Old Latin (L).................................................................................91IX. The Vulgate (V).....................................................................................95X. The Coptic Versions (K)..............................................................................100XI. The Ethiopic Version ([??]).........................................................................102XII. The Armenian Version (Arm).........................................................................103XIII. The Arabic Versions ([??])........................................................................104XIV. The Aims of Textual Criticism......................................................................105XV. Causes of Textual Corruption........................................................................107XVI. The Methods of Textual Criticism...................................................................113XVII. The Theological Significance of Textual Criticism and the History of the Text.....................121Appendix: Resources for Textual Research................................................................123Plates..................................................................................................133List of Sigla...........................................................................................232Abbreviations...........................................................................................238Bibliography............................................................................................242Index of Authors........................................................................................277Index of Subjects.......................................................................................283Index of Scripture References...........................................................................290

Chapter One

1. Script

Excavations and discoveries of the last hundred years have revealed an unexpected wealth of literary activity in Palestine and Syria. Several different writing systems were invented there during the second millennium B.C., and even foreign systems of writing such as the cuneiform script were in use as well. Here also, presumably, the first step was taken in the transition from complex writing systems with hundreds of letters to the alphabet, that simplest of all forms of writing, with only some twenty-odd letters — a step so significant for human intellectual history. All this was certainly not without significance for the formation of the Old Testament, and must receive due recognition in any consideration of the roles of oral and written tradition among the Israelites and the Jews. We can only allude to this in passing, limiting ourselves here to some comments on those systems of writing which were directly related to the initial writing of the biblical texts and their continuing transmission.

All the manuscripts and fragments of the Hebrew Old Testament which have come down to us from Jewish sources, from the earliest examples, e.g., the Qumran texts (cf. pp. 31f.) and the Nash Papyrus, are with few exceptions written in the script still in use today known as the square script ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) or the Assyrian script ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) from its place of origin. This script was in general use in the time of Jesus: the allusion to the letter yod as the smallest of the alphabet (Matt. 5:18) would be true only of the square script. This script was derived by a gradual process of development from the Aramaic script which was used extensively (pl. 5). The earliest recorded examples are the 'Araq el-Emir inscription in East Jordan from the fourth or early third century B.C. and the earliest Qumran fragments from about 200 B.C. (4QSam^b and 4QJer^a). The Jews were aware, however, that this script was not their earliest. One Jewish tradition attributes its introduction to Ezra, about 430 B.C. The later rabbis were embarrassed by the implication that it was a postexilic innovation. Accordingly they told how the Torah was first given in the square script, but because of Israel's sin the script had been changed, and then in Ezra's time the original form was restored. Although this was obviously special pleading and without any historical value, it clearly reflects the awareness of a change of script in the postexilic period. Most probably the Jews' gradual adoption of the Aramaic language, the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, was followed by their adoption of the Aramaic script, so that by inference it was in this script that the sacred writings were first written, and only eventually in the square script which developed from it.

When the earlier parts of the Old Testament were first written down in the preexilic period, another script was in use in Palestine and Syria. This was the Phoenician-Old Hebrew script, the ancestor of all the alphabets of past and present. It is known to us in a later, more developed form in a series of texts, the earliest dating from the eleventh or tenth century. The best-known examples are: the abecedary ostracon from Izbet —arah (eleventh century B.C.; pl. 49), the Ahiram sarcophagus from Byblos (ca. 1000 B.C.), the farmer's calendar from Gezer (ca. 950), the Moabite stone (ca. 840; pl. 2), ostraca from Samaria (ink on clay, eighth century), a palimpsest papyrus from Murabba'at (eighth or seventh century), the Siloam inscription (ca. 700; pl. 3), and ostraca from Lachish (ca. 588; pl. 4) and Arad (sixth century).

Its origins must lie far earlier than any of the examples yet discovered. Early examples of alphabetical inscriptions include the Sinai script found in a group of inscriptions in the mines of Serabi el-Hadem on the Sinai peninsula and dated by William F. Albright ca. 1500, the (related?) proto-Palestinian script found on artifacts from middle and southern Palestine of the period from 1700 to 1200 B.C. (Gezer,...