Corruption or Correction? Textual Development in the MT of 1 Samuel 1

Abstract

Textual criticism generally aims at determining the original wording of a given passage in an ancient text, in our case the Hebrew Bible.Text-critical decisions mostly concern variants, alternative readings found in the various textual witnesses of the piece of literature in question, but at times reconstruction of the original reading is also necessary, although some scholars perhaps find it disputable.Textual criticism thus concentrates on small details of the text, mostly one detail at a time.On the other hand, textual history, which is akin to textual criticism, is more concerned with the overall view of the development of the text at hand and the character of its various witnesses and textual traditions.In order to reach reliable decisions on the details, textual criticism needs all the information there is on the textual history of the text in question, but all text-historical information and the information on the character of the witnesses is based on the evidence of the small details of the text.The two ways of looking at textual evidence are clearly interdependent, which means that caution is needed.A certain overall view tends to turn the decisions on the details toward a direction that further corroborates that very same overall view.For instance, the notion of the MT representing a reliable and very old textual tradition tends to create text-critical decisions that support this notion.It is like the domino effect: dominoes all falling in one direction, one way or the other.How can we make them fall in the right direction?Of all the rules that have been formulated to assist decision-making in textual criticism, the most worthwhile is the one according to which "the reading that is capable of explaining the emergence of the alternative readings should be regarded as the original." 1 I would like to go further on this line and maintain that the first and foremost question in textual criticism is not "which one of the readings is the most original?"or "which reading best of all suits the context?", but instead, "what happened to the text?" or "how did the various readings come about?".Even when making decisions on small details of the text, the primary criterion is not the suitability of the readings in 1 For criticism of this rule, see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992/ 2 2001), 309.According to Tov, "to some extent textual evaluation cannot be bound by any rules.It is an art in the full sense of the word…" (p.309).The emphasis on "transcriptional probability" by Karen H. Jobes and Moisés Silva, Invitation to the Septuagint (Grand Rapids, MI/Carlisle, UK: Baker Academic/Paternoster, 2000), 128-130, comes very close to my thinking.

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