The Bibles we read today come from different manuscripts that don't always match. That creates a problem if you're translating the Scriptures from Hebrew or Greek into English (or any other language).
Which manuscript should you follow?
With the Old Testament, for example, you're working from three equally important textual traditions (see pages 32—34). When these manuscripts don't agree, how do you decide which version to translate? This is where the painstaking work of textual criticism comes in.
When comparing the same passage in different manuscripts, there are basically two kinds of variations (or variants) that might occur during the copying process:
• a change the scribe made unintentionally (in other words, a mistake);
• a change the scribe made intentionally.
Of course, some changes can't be categorized either way. To determine which reading should carry more weight, the textual critic looks closely at the nature of the variation.
UNINTENTIONAL CHANGES
Scribes do make mistakes. They're only human, after all. Here are some specific examples of unintentional changes that could have happened when scribes were copying ancient manuscripts.
TRANSPOSED LETTERS: Sometimes a scribe seems to have mixed up two letters. One likely example can be seen in these two readings of Proverbs 14:32:
REVISED STANDARD VERSION, FOLLOWING
THE SEPTUAGINT
|
ENGLISH STANDARD
VERSION, FOLLOWING
THE MASORETIC TEXT
|
The wicked is overthrown through his evil-doing, but the righteous finds refuge through his integrity.
|
The wicked is overthrown through his evildoing, but the righteous finds refuge in his death.
|
At the end of the verse, the Hebrew text behind the Septuagint reads (bétümmö; "in his integrity"), while the Masoretic Text reads (bémötö; "in his death"). So the difference between these variants is only two letters.
IN HIS INTEGRITY
|
in.lnz ininz
|
IN HIS DEATH
|
|
|
While most English translations follow the Masoretic Text, scholars are divided over which reading is original. (For an explanation of the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text, see pages 33—34.)
MISTAKEN LETTERS: Some letters in the Hebrew alphabet look alike, and scribes could easily get them confused. For example, Genesis 10:4 identifies a group of people known as the "Dodanim" ( ). However, 1 Chronicles 1:7 refers to the same group as the "Rodanim" ( ). Most scholars think 1 Chronicles 1:7, with Hebrew letter "1 (resh, "r"), is correct and that Genesis 10:4 reflects a mistake using the similar-looking letter -T (dalet, "d").
DIFFERENT VOWELS: Hebrew writing originally used only consonants. In the Middle Ages, a system was created to indicate the vowels by adding tiny dots and dashes above and below the consonant characters. Proverbs 10:24 ends with the consonants y, t, and n. The Masoretic Text shows the vowels as i and e, but the reading reflected in ancient Aramaic translations suggests the vowels u and a. Many English translations continue to follow this ancient understanding of the meaning of the verse.
READING IN THE
MASORETIC TEXT
|
READING REFLECTED IN
ARAMAIC TRANSLATIONS
|
yiten
he will grant the desire ofthe righteous
|
yutan
the desire of the righteous will be granted
|
WORD DIVISION: "God is nowhere." That's a great message! But wait—maybe someone really meant to write "God is nowhere." This kind of mistake was easy to make when copying long passages of Scripture. Here's an example from Hosea 11:2 involving different ways of spacing the Hebrew letters. Following the Septuagint, the New Revised Standard Version has "They went away from me." But following the spacing in the Masoretic Text, the New American Standard Bible has "They went away from them."
NEW REVISED STANDARD
VERSION, FOLLOWING
THE SEPTUAGINT
|
NEW AMERICAN STANDARD
BIBLE, FOLLOWING
THE MASORETIC TEXT
|
They went away from me.
(literally "from before me, they")
|
They went away from them.
(literally "from before them")
|
EYE SKIP: In the copying process, a scribe is constantly looking from a source manuscript to the copy he's making and back to the source. In returning to the source, he looks for the word or phrase he just copied, to see what comes next.
An eye skip happens when the scribe goes back to the right word or phrase, but it's at a later spot in the text. When he starts copying from the new spot, any material in between gets lost.
Look at Leviticus 4:25—26 and notice that the two underlined phrases are identical:
25 Then the priest shall take some of the blood of the sin offering with his finger and put it on the horns of the altar of burnt offering and pour out the rest of its blood at the base of the altar of burnt offering. 26 And all its fat he shall burn on the altar ...
This quotation is from the English Standard Version, based on the Septuagint. But the words in red are missing from the Masoretic Text because a scribe skipped them. Looking at the source text, he saw the Hebrew phrase mizbach ha'olah ("altar of burnt offering") and wrote it down on his copy. Then, when he looked back at the source text to see what came next, his eyes went to the second occurrence of the phrase and started copying from there. He jumped ahead to verse 26 before he had finished verse 25.
HOMOPHONES: These are words that sound alike even though they are spelled differently, like "there," "their," and "they're." Homophones could lead to errors when scribes were copying a manuscript that was being read aloud to them. For example, the two Hebrew words below sound exactly the same, "10," but they mean entirely different things.
The word on the left is a prepositional phrase with a suffix, meaning "to him" or "for him"; the word on the right means "no." For a scribe taking dictation, it would have been easy to hear "LO" and write the wrong word (as appears to have happened at 1 Sam 2:16 and Isa 9:2).
HAPLOGRAPHY: This refers to omitting identical words or phrases that occur side by side. Basically, it amounts to writing once what should have been written twice.
In the Masoretic Text, the end of Judges 20:13 says,
"Benjamin [ , bnymn] were not willing to listen." The singular subject "Benjamin" doesn't match the plural verb "were," suggesting an omission. A note in the margin explains the error: the text should read "the sons of Benjamin [ , bny bnymn]," but the similarity between the two Hebrew words caused the scribe to skip the first one.
DITTOGRAPHY: This is essentially the opposite of haplography—writing twice what you should have written only once. Here's an example from the Masoretic Text of Leviticus 20:10:
If there is a man who commits adultery with
the wife of a man who commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, he shall be put to death.
Some translations follow this reading exactly (for example, KJV, NASB); others regard the repeated
phrase (in red) as a scribal mistake and omit it
(ESV, NRSV).
INTENTIONAL CHANGES
In addition to making mistakes, scribes occasionally made deliberate changes to the text they were
copying. Technically speaking, there are four types of intentional variants.
TlaaUNE SOPHERIM: This is Hebrew for "emendations of the scribes," and the scribes actually provide a list of the things they changed intentionally. There are 18 of these in the Hebrew Bible, according to scribal tradition.
ITTURE SOPHERIM: This means "omissions of the scribes"— things they left out.
GLOSSES: Sometimes a scribe may have added a word or phrase to the text to explain something he thought would be too difficult for a reader to understand.
EUPHEMISMS: If a scribe thought the original
text was risqué or indelicate, sometimes he might substitute a different word or phrase.
There are some well-known examples of intentional variants, because the scribes more or less give us a heads up to what they're doing. Habakkuk 1:12 is an interesting example of tiqqune sopherim. The Masoretic scribal tradition informs us that the text originally read "You will not die" —with "You" referring to Yahweh. But in many Masoretic manuscripts, the phrase was changed to "We will not die"—and chances are that's what you'll find in your English translation. Somewhere along the way, a scribe or a scribal school thought it was offensive to suggest that God could die. They changed the text, but they left a little notation to explain the change.
Another example of tiqqune sopherim occurs in 1 Samuel 3:13. The King James Version says the wicked sons of Eli "made themselves vile," but the English Standard Version says they "were blaspheming God." These are two quite different translations. The Hebrew has three consonants reading "were blaspheming themselves" (on}, meaning "for themselves," "about themselves," "with respect to themselves")—hence the KJV reads "made themselves vile." But the original text actually had five consonants. If we fill in the other two, we get the word "God"
KING JAMES VERSION,
FOLLOWING THE
TlaaUNE SOPHERIM
|
ENGLISH STANDARD VERSION, FOLLOWING
THE ORIGINAL TEXT
|
for his sons were cursing themselves
|
for his sons were cursing God
|
So the original text had the sons of Eli blaspheming God, and at some point a scribe thought that idea was too offensive to reproduce. By deleting two
consonants, the scribe changed the wording and the meaning.
EVALUATING TEXTUAL VARIANTS
With many variants, it's hard to say whether the scribe intended to make a change. If we can't really tell that it's an unintentional error, and if the scribes haven't told us it's something they changed on purpose, what are we supposed to do? Here are some principles that textual critics have developed to guide their work:
PREFER THE OLDER READING: Generally, older manuscripts are considered more reliable than later manuscripts because they are closer in time to the original composition—which means there have been fewer opportunities for copying errors to occur. However, even our oldest manuscripts are copies, so this principle has limitations. An early manuscript can still include errors or deliberate changes.
PREFER THE READING FOUND IN MULTIPLE MANUSCRIPTS: If a particular reading is found in just one manuscript, it's less likely to represent the original. Normally we can expect the best and oldest reading to show up in more than one or two manuscripts. However, this guideline should be balanced with the previous one about the manuscript's age. Evidence from just a few older manuscripts might outweigh the evidence from many recent manuscripts. Scholars also might give more weight to a reading that appears in multiple manuscripts across several textual traditions.l PREFER THE DIFFICULT READING: One principle (called lectio dificilior in Latin) says the more difficult reading is probably the original. There's some logic to this idea: a scribe would tend to simplify as he copied a text, not make it harder.
PREFER THE SHORTER READING: Ascribe would tend to add words to explain the meaning, not take words out—so the original is more likely to be the shorter reading (called lectio brevior). However, by lengthening the reading, the scribe often made it more difficult—so the principles of lectio diffcilior and lectio brevior sometimes work against each other.
PREFER THE READING THAT BEST FITS THE AUTHOR: This involves paying attention to an author's writing style. Remember, Hebrew developed over time, just like any other language. If you're in a passage full of older ways of writing and you find a variant reflecting a newer style, chances are that a scribe has "corrected" the writer's old usage.
A similar approach can be applied to an author's vocabulary. If one manuscript uses WordA where another uses Word B, which word is original? Well, if Word B is never used by that author anywhere else, it's a good bet that the original is Word A.
The literary forms and techniques can also give us clues. In some cases, the author is doing something deliberate in the structure of the text that can help us discern the original reading.
No one's omniscient. No textual scholar can look you in the eye and say, "We have reproduced the original text exactly—in every word, every syllable."But in most cases, scholars can tell with a high degree of certainty what the text would have originally said—or at least they can give a highly educated guess. They can say, "You know, we have a really good idea that the text we're now presenting for modern study and scholarship is very close to what would have been the original content of the Bible."
****On a related note, here's a guideline not to follow: Some textual scholars choose to follow the Masoretic Text simply because it's the Masoretic Text. They've just decided this tradition has a special heritage that gives it priority over other traditions. But this is not a good rule of thumb, because sometimes the Masoretic Text can be shown to have a copying error. Moreover, even within the Masoretic tradition, there are differences between manuscripts.
Adapted from Michael S. Heiser, "OT 281: How We Got the Old Testament," Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016), and from Amy Anderson and WendyWidder, Textual Criticism of the Bible, rev. ed., Lexham Methods Series (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, forthcoming; see facing page for pre-order information).
Dr. Michael S. Heiser is a scholar-in-residence for Faithlife, the makers of Logos Bible Software. He is the author of The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible and has taught many Mobile Ed courses, including Problems in Biblical Interpretation: Difficult Passages I.