Last Post on Tov's Textual Criticism

Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 344-345, 348, 364.

I finished Tov today. I'm not sure what book to start tomorrow, but we'll see!

I had a hard time focusing on my Tov reading today, but here are some points:

1. As I said in my post, Tov the Destabilizer, Tov maintains that there were earlier formulations of biblical books that circulated before the books were even finished (169). In today's reading, I got to see what he meant by that. According to many biblical scholars, the Deuteronomist added stuff to the biblical text. Apparently, there are passages in particular manuscripts that lack certain Deuteronomistic additions.

For example, Judges 6:7-10 is considered Deuteronomistic, and it's absent from 2QJudgA. Here's the passage (NRSV), with vv 7-10 in italics:

⁶Thus Israel was greatly impoverished because of Midian; and the Israelites cried out to the Lord for help. 7 When the Israelites cried to the Lord on account of the Midianites, ⁸the Lord sent a prophet to the Israelites; and he said to them, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: I led you up from Egypt, and brought you out of the house of slavery; ⁹and I delivered you from the hand of the Egyptians, and from the hand of all who oppressed you, and drove them out before you, and gave you their land; ¹⁰and I said to you, “I am the Lord your God; you shall not pay reverence to the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you live.” But you have not given heed to my voice.’ 11 Now the angel of the Lord came and sat under the oak at Ophrah, which belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, as his son Gideon was beating out wheat in the wine press, to hide it from the Midianites.

For Tov, 2QJudgA preserves the version of that passage that existed before the Deuteronomist added vv 7-10.

Another example is I Kings 16:34, which many view as Deuteronomistic and discontinuous from its surrounding verses:

"In his days Hiel of Bethel built Jericho; he laid its foundation at the cost of Abiram his firstborn, and set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spoke by Joshua son of Nun."

According to Tov, this verse is absent from the Lucianic version of the Septuagint.

I have one question: Do 2QJudgA and the Lucianic version of the Septuagint lack all Deuteronomistic additions? Something tells me "no," but Tov may say that they were drawing from manuscripts that lacked the Dtr contribution for specific passages, but not all of them.

2. Tov mentions H.L. Ginsberg in his chapter on emendations. H.L. Ginsberg loved to emend the text! One of my professors at Jewish Theological Seminary actually defended Ginsberg on this: "You know, people like to say that emending the text is speculative. Well, accepting the text as written is speculative, too!" After all, how do we know that the text before us is not corrupt, while the emendation reflects the earlier reading?

I can't really prove that statement wrong, but if you can't go with the written text, what can you go with?

And that concludes my reading of Tov's Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible.