The Hebrew University Bible and Biblia Hebraica Quinta

Abstract

The publication of two full volumes of The Hebrew University Bible (HUB), in 1995 and 1997, followed in 1998 by the publication of an initial, sample fascicle of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), provides the opportunity to offer a perspective on the place each project may eventually have in the history of the text of the Hebrew Bible.1 When viewed in terms of the history of textual criticism since the sixteenth century, the concept underlying the Hebrew University Bible Project (HUBP) has been revolutionary from its inception in 1955. The Hebrew Old Testament Text Project (HOTTP), which had its inception in 1969, sponsored by the United Bible Societies (UBS), independently joined the HUBP in that revolution. The two projects had quite different needs out of which they separately grew, but they converged in concept as the independent work on each progressed. The HUBP came into being because of the perceived necessity to locate the newly recovered Aleppo Codex in the history of the development of the text of the Hebrew Bible. The HOTTP came into being because of the perceived necessity to assist recently formed national translation committees around the world in dealing with difficult passages, which often had conflicting solutions among the translations in the former colonial or common Western languages resorted to by the local translation committees. Because the HOTTP committee was formed by Eugene Nida, the world-renowned linguist who headed the Translations Department of the UBS, its members were selected in large part because of their awareness of the changes being effected in the concept and practice of text criticism by the recovery of the Judean Desert Scrolls. Results from decades of study of the scrolls have affected both projects profoundly. The chief result of study of the Judean Scrolls for text criticism has been a completely new appreciation of the history of transmission of the biblical text.2 That history is the only ground upon which a valid and responsible hermeneutic of text criticism should be established.3 While the terminology used by the two projects is slightly different, the history perceived is the same. The discovery of the scrolls and the recovery of Codex Aleppensis provided both the near beginnings of the history of textual transmission and the near climax of its development in the hands of the Ben Asher family at the end of the ninth century CE and the beginning of the tenth. It was now possible to look at that history with a kind of confidence never before experienced in the annals of text criticism.4 The HOTTP decided early on that a clear distinction should be made between the history of the literary formation of the text, and the subsequent history of the transmission of the text. While those two histories overlap somewhat, it became clear that text criticism had become a servant, if not slave, to the particular hermeneutic of exegesis out of which this or that scholar worked. A received would sometimes be condemned as corrupt in order for the scholar to construct a different text to fit what the scholar thought the text should have said; then would begin the search for a variant reading in the versions, or in Kennicott and de Rossi, to substantiate the new reading. And if such could not be found, then conjecture filled the bill. This view of text criticism still prevails in some circles as can still be seen in commentaries and translations published in the second half of this century. The New English Bible ( 1970), The New American Bible (1970), the Bible de Jerusalem (lst ed., 1970), the New Revised Standard Version (1989), and even somewhat the Tanakh (published by the JPS in 1988), provide examples of translations built in part on the older view of text criticism. The older Revised Standard Version remained basically true to the King James Version as a formalequivalence translation. HUBP and HOTTP both reject conjecture as a valid textcritical choice unless a conjectural can be shown to have been the ancient cause of subsequent disparate readings; but such cases are relatively rare. …