Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).
I didn't put a page number beside the bibliographic reference because I don't have one specific quote on which to comment. There are so many!
The topic that came up in my reading today was the Urtext, the original text of the Bible. Some believe that there was an original text, and all the different versions are corruptions descending from it. Others don't believe that, however. They think there are a variety of legitimate readings. Tov refers to Greenberg, who compared the MT and the LXX of Ezekiel and demonstrated that "various details in both texts are equally valid at the exegetical level and that each of them has an internal logic, so that in his mind they are original to the same extent" (173-174). One criterion that a reading is valid is that it makes some sense: the passage has an internal logic and makes sense within its context. But what happens when two different versions fit this criterion? For Greenberg, both were "original texts," if you will, notwithstanding their differences.
I'm somewhat of a linear thinker, perhaps because that's easiest for me. So it makes some sense to me that there was one original text. I mean, there had to be, right? When Jeremiah wrote his prophecy, for example, that was the original text! Soon afterwards, the text may have gotten miscopied, and things may have gotten lost or added in transmission. But there was still an original text, right?
But then, Tov brings up that "Most of the biblical books were not written by one person nor at one particular time, but rather contain compositional layers written during many generations" (169). He sites the example of the Deuteronomist, who made additions and revisions to Joshua-Kings and Jeremiah. That's what the paper I'm about to finish is about, only it focuses on II Samuel 7 and I Kings 8:1-30 (as my most devoted readers realize!). So, in the eyes of many critical scholars, it's not so much the case that one prophet named Jeremiah wrote all of the book that bore his name. People added to it and interpreted it, and their interpretations and additions became part of the book itself. What if different communities were doing this? Then you end up with different versions. So, with this being the case, I can see how the text was fluid. But didn't there have to be one original text, what Jeremiah wrote? I can't get away from that linear thinking!
Then there's the question of how to define "original text." According to Tov, many scholars don't conceive of the original text as, say, what Jeremiah put to the scroll. Rather, they define it as the text or edition that "contained the finished literary product and which stood at the beginning of the process of textual transmission" (171). But who says that the process of textual transmission couldn't have begun before the book was even finished? Tov states that "sections of the earlier formulations of the biblical books which were circulated at the time have coincidentally been preserved in textual witnesses" (169).
And, despite the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which date to the second century B.C.E., the early biblical manuscripts among these scrolls are not always early enough. Tov says that, in general, "we still have no knowledge of copies of biblical books that were written in the first stage of their textual transmission, nor even of texts which were close to that time..." Yet, Tov lists exceptions. The Book of Daniel at Qumran dates close to when the book was initially written, assuming its date was the time of the Maccabees (second century B.C.E.). And the copies of the Septuagint for the late biblical books are close in time to the earliest LXX translations for those books (second century B.C.E.). But the Qumran texts differ from the Septuagint texts, and the biblical texts may have been more fluid before the third century B.C.E. So, for Tov, we really can't say that the biblical texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls contain the exact same stuff as the original texts.
Yet, Tov says elsewhere that the use of the proto-Masoretic texts was widespread in Second Temple and later Judaism (28): Since M contains a carefully transmitted text, which is well-documented in a large number of copies, and since it is reflected in the rabbinic literature as well as in the Targumim and many of the Jewish-Greek revisions of G, it may be surmised that it originated in the spiritual and authoritative center of Judaism (later to be known as that of the Pharisees), possibly in the temple circles. I remember reading in the newspaper a long time ago that the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text are overwhelmingly similar, demonstrating the consistency of the biblical text in its transmission.
But could the biblical texts have been messy and diverse and later become standardized and more consistent? That may be the crux of a scholarly debate: did the biblical texts become messier with time, or more consistent?
I guess this post reflects more of the destablizing elements of Tov. But he does try to present conservative and liberal arguments. In light of all this, I try to trust the living God to guide me, whether the Bible in front of me is like the original text or not, if there even was an original text!