Abstract
Abstract This article offers an introduction to the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) project. This includes a description of the background to THEOT and its primary purpose of mapping the history of the transmission of the Ethiopic Old Testament. The bulk of the article summarizes the project’s preliminary findings, generally, and, in particular, about Ethiopic Psalms, Song of Songs, Deuteronomy, Ruth, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, and Haggai. Some attention is also given to evidences of contact with the Hebrew text tradition, although the Ethiopic is clearly a daughter version of the LXX.
Highlights
It was the microfilm projects of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, that began to change the possibilities for textual studies of the Ethiopic Bible, and since the turn of the twenty-first century, the dramatic increase in manuscript digitization has brought us squarely into a new position
While there are a few disadvantages to the the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) methods, the main advantage is that its statistical approach offers the ability to describe with precision both large patterns in the tradition as well as many minute phenomena.[19]
19 Perhaps the greatest disadvantage involves the necessity of ignoring the nuancing of words when aligning columns solely on the basis of shared roots. This decision obliterates all of the categories of evidence that Semitic languages encode in their morphological systems for nuancing a morpheme: singular and plural nouns, number in verbs, aspect of verbs, indicative and interrogative, etc. These categories are not insignificant, but the information gleaned from scripts that were programmed to distinguish among all of these options would deliver very little more about textual history than what is gleaned without these distinctions
Summary
It was the microfilm projects of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, that began to change the possibilities for textual studies of the Ethiopic Bible, and since the turn of the twenty-first century, the dramatic increase in manuscript digitization has brought us squarely into a new position. In small and larger ways, the text would continue to change, until another flux moment occurred, when the dominating form of the tradition was replaced by a new majority form of the text. It is precisely on this aspect of the tradition that our project focuses. It seeks to identify the forms of the text that dominated certain epochs It wants to reconstruct and understand the nature of these processes of emergence. Variants that could arise independently through the same common scribal error (polygenesis) do not contribute much to this process, for they cannot be used to prove a genetic relationship among manuscripts
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