Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) 300-303.
Tov discusses and critiques common text critical approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Here are three:
1. One approach is to deem original the readings that are broadly attested. Tov quotes Barthelemy: If a form of the text occurs in only one tradition, for example, the Targum, Syriac, or Vulgate, one is less inclined to regard it as original than if it occurs in more than one such tradition.
The problems Tov sees with this approach are (1.) the similarities may be due to coincidence, as different traditions follow a common interpretive tendency, and (2.) the versions can be interdependent, for the Septuagint, Symmachus, Aquila, and Theodotion influenced the Vulgate, and the Septuagint influenced the Syriac Peshitta. If creators of the versions knew of each other’s work, then it’s not surprising that they have common similarities. That doesn’t mean all of their similarities reflect the original text, though.
2. The second approach is to say that the earlier versions are better than the later ones. Tov quotes Walton as saying that “the older one is likely to have been less exposed to textual corruption than the younger one.”
But Tov denies that older is always better, citing the example of the later Masoretic Text and the earlier Qumran texts: For example, the community which transmitted [the Masoretic Text] has left the biblical text virtually unchanged for some two thousand years, whereas the Qumran scribes modernized and changed the orthography, morphology, and content of the text already in the Second Temple period within a relatively short period of textual activity. Thus 1QIsaA, dating from the first century BCE, is further removed from the Urtext [(original text)] of Isaiah than a Masoretic manuscript written in the tenth century CE.
Newer versions can come from a community that really preserves texts, whereas older versions may be from scribes who felt free to innovate. Which would you trust to be closer to the original text? Moreover, as Tov said regarding Samuel and Chronicles, Chronicles is a later book than Samuel, yet it’s Chronicles that has the old name, “Meribaal,” whereas Samuel has the later “Mephibosheth” (see Latin Mass on Saints and Health Care; Mephibosheth/Meribaal). Newer versions can have older stuff.
3. The third approach is to go with the difficult reading rather than the easier one, whenever there is textual variation. The reason is that scholars can envision a scribe correcting a difficult passage to make it easier, but why would the scribe want to make an easy passage more difficult? Therefore, for many critics, the difficult reading is closer to the original.
But, as Tov points out, there are times when a textual difficulty is the result of a scribal error. If something in the text makes little sense and doesn’t fit into its context, maybe it’s not original, but rather the result of a scribal error. Many critics assume this in their work.
I’ll be interested to see Tov’s criteria of text criticism as I continue reading. I don’t know that much about the King James Version-only debates, but one argument I vaguely recall from the “anti” side is that the Alexandrian texts (the ones behind the NIV and many other non-KJV versions) are earliest and great in number, so they must be the most authentic. Tov doesn’t throw that kind of criteria totally out of the window, but he does show that it’s not always reliable.