Old Testament Textual Criticism – Its Principles and Practice: Apropos of Recent English Versions

Abstract

The publication of The Hebrew Text of the Old Testament by L. H. Brockington (Oxford University Press/Cambridge University Press, 1973, 269 pp., £4.50) gives opportunity for a brief reconsideration of some of the general problems and issues in Old Testament textual criticism. The practice of textual criticism revolves round the twin poles of evidence and criteria. It is doubtful if the criteria themselves have changed a great deal of recent years; but there have been important developments where evidence is concerned, first and foremost the discovery of the Qumran scrolls. The attitudes adopted towards criteria have also developed and altered over the last generation or two. To these various changes the recent scholarly English translations of the Old Testament are heirs: within the last decade the Jerusalem Bible (JB, 1966), the New English Bible (NEB, O.T. 1970) and the New American Bible (NAB, 1970). Probably the Revised Standard Version (RSV) may still be classed as 'recent', since a slightly revised edition of it, under a new title (the Common Bible), appeared as recently as 1973. 1 But first, the book. The sub-title of Brockington's volume on the Old Testament text reads as follows: The Readings adopted by the Translators of the New English Bible. In its own fashion, then, the book serves the same function for the Old Testament that R. V. G. Tasker's The Greek New Testament (Oxford and Cambridge, 1964) performed for the New. It invites comparison and contrast with two other works as well: the NAB appendix offering textual notes on the Old Testament, and B. M. Metzger's Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (London and New York, 1971). It must of course be recognized that there are major differences between the two Testaments as regards textual criticism. Whereas Tasker's text, like any modern one, is eclectic, there is no way in which editions of the Hebrew Bible can abandon the Massoretic Text 1 It in perhaps rather early yet to survey the textual treatment of the Old Testa-ment in Today's English Version, of which few sections have as yet been published.