The Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls: The ... - josephprestonkirk

164 A NEW EDITION OF THE HEBREW BIBLE
The “basically inferior alternative” referred to by Kittel is a diplomatic
edition, featuring a text of MT and an apparatus of selected variants.
Kittel decided that the practicality of a diplomatic edition was preferable
to the difficult judgments and uncertainties involved in establishing a
truly critical edition. His scholarly heirs in the Biblia Hebraica Quinta
Project—the new revision (of the old revision) of Kittel’s diplomatic edition—hold
to the same position:
Indeed it seems to us premature to produce a critical text of the Hebrew
Bible. The complexity of the textual situation does not yet allow such a
reconstruction at the present time. 38
This view is also reflected in the position of the Hebrew University Bible
Project, for which the ultimate goal is not a critical text, but a comprehensive
anthology of possible textual variants. The chief editor, Moshe
Goshen-Gottstein, announced that the goal of this project is “to present
nothing but the facts,” eschewing as far as possible all subjective judgments.
39
It is difficult to say whether a clear case has been established for
excluding the production of critical texts from the business of the textual
critic of the Hebrew Bible. 40 In fact, as Emanuel Tov has pointed out,
most modern translations and scholarly commentaries incorporate their
own critical texts of the Hebrew Bible, 41 though their text-critical decisions
are rarely defended in detail. These “stealth” critical texts of the
Hebrew Bible are probably the dominant form in which the Bible is
known in modern culture. Is it justifiable for textual critics to abdicate the
task of producing critical texts, with the result that the most difficult and
delicate work of textual criticism is ceded to translation committees?
I suggest that Louis Cappel was correct in calling for the production
of critical texts of books of the Hebrew Bible, and I further propose that
the field of textual criticism may now be sufficiently developed—in terms
of adequacy of method and abundance of data—to undertake such a task.
The text-critical knowledge gained by the study of the Qumran texts,
along with parallel advances in the study of LXX and the other versions,
ought to be put to good use. This means doing what textual criticism is
supposed to do: produce better texts and editions of works that are
important to us. Surely the Hebrew Bible deserves no less.
38. Adrian Schenker, “Eine Neuausgabe der Biblia Hebraica,” ZAH 9 (1996): 59.
39. Moshe H. Goshen-Gottstein, The Book of Isaiah: Sample Edition with Introduction
(Hebrew University Bible Project; Jerusalem: Magnes, 1965), 7.
40. For further discussion, see Hendel, Text, ch. 7.
41. Tov, Textual Criticism, 373–74.