Book Notice and Giveaway: Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew

I don't post here too often these days, but when I do, I announce a wonderful, new book and a giveaway! We're giving away two copies of Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew: An Intermediate Study of the Grammar and Syntax of the Old Testament by H.H. Hardy II and Matthew McAfee.

Lest one thinks this book is only an intermediate Hebrew Grammar (as if that wouldn't be sufficient), it also includes a chapter on Old Testament textual criticism along with a guided lesson for students to learn to do it for themselves.

To enter the giveaway, share the link of this post on Facebook or X (@ETCtomwas) and tag the ETC Blog in it or simply Share or Repost the original social posts. I'll announce the winners of the giveaway on Friday afternoon!

More from the publisher:

Learning any language is no small task, not least one that sounds as unusual as Hebrew does to most English speakers’ ears. Going Deeper with Biblical Hebrew primarily aims to equip second-year grammar students of biblical Hebrew to read the Hebrew Scriptures. Using a variety of linguistic approaches, H. H. Hardy II and Matthew McAffee offer a comprehensive and up-to-date textbook for professors and students.

From an endorser:

Both practically accessible and linguistically rigorous, Hardy and McAffee’s valuable resource meets the needs of students and professors. Though not shying away from the technical details, the authors carefully balance the technical semantic information with the important pragmatic implications. Using famously complex passages (such as the Nephilim) as examples both draws students in and illustrates the importance of the issues. Overall, the authors make the technical relatable and, most of all, practical to second-year Hebrew students. –JoAnna M. Hoyt

Table of Contents

Hebrew Scribes at the End of the Line

Composing a text by hand demands an awareness of certain details that we can ignore when using a word processor. One of these details is if the next written word corresponds to the available space. At times, the space didn’t for Hebrew scribes, and when this happened, they had several ways to navigate this situation. Let’s review some of these. For more information on these practices, see Tov’s discussion in chapters 4 and 5 of his book Scribal Practices. This list depends on and derives in part from his helpful discussions.

First, scribes could utilize the margin to finish the word. This practice is not uncommon. Here is a portion of column 2 of 1QIsaa illustrating this practice.

Second, a scribe could fill in the remaining line with space fillers. The scribe of 1QIsaa resorts to using dots in 1QIsaa Col 3:6.

 

Third, a scribe at times began a word at the end of a line but didn’t finish it. Instead, the word was written in full at the beginning of the next line. Here is an example from 1QIsaa Col 2:11.

 

Fourth, it is possible that the scribe of 1QIsaa began a word and simply failed to finish it. See 1QIsaa Col 6:3.

 

Fifth, a scribe might begin a word at the end of the line and complete it on the next line. Tov states that this was a practice of scrolls written in paleo-Hebrew. 11Q1 Col 3:5, 6, 7 are examples of this.

 

Sixth, a scribe might resort to a smaller “font-size” to fit the word in the available space. See 1QIsaa Col 16:30 (the first line in the photo below).

Seventh, a scribe might write part of the word above the line. Here are some examples from 4QPsx.

 

Eighth, a scribe might cram words together leaving little space between the words. This tendency is common in 4QPsx and here in 1QIsaa Col 16:24.

Ninth, a scribe might leave bigger spaces between letters as here in 4QDeuth 1:5–7. Tov labels this device “proportional” spacing. 

 

These pictures were taken from photos found at the Leon Levy DSS Digital Library and the DSS Digital Project.

New Book: How Old Is the Hebrew Bible?

In How Old Is the Hebrew Bible? A Linguistic, Textual, and Historical Study (Yale, 2018), Ronald Hendel and Jan Joosten provide an accessible treatment of some of the complex issues regarding inquiry into the history of the Hebrew Bible. In short, they are convinced that within the Hebrew Bible there is a traceable diachrony from Classical Biblical Hebrew (CBH; texts dated to the monarchy) to Late Biblical Hebrew (LBH; texts dated to the Persian period). The book is only 221 pages. It is not intended to be a full or complete study of all of the evidence but it does present some intriguing arguments for its thesis.

My interest in the book goes beyond the linguistic to the textual critical. In chapter 4, the authors address “Textual History and Linguistic History.” They state the problem plainly, “Textual variation interferes with diachronic linguistics” (p. 47). However, the situation is not hopeless in the eyes of the authors. The Masoretic Text is “notoriously layered” (p. 48) and the MT’s vowel pointing at times does preserve evidence of a later grammatical development (cf. Isa 1:12; p. 49), but our authors conclude, “Textual criticism and diachronic linguistics complement each other. The judicious combination of the two approaches paves the way to a correct understanding of the text” (p. 50, and similar on p. 53 regarding the consonantal text).

So how do we know whether we are reading early or late Biblical Hebrew in any one narrative or book? Under “The Criterion of Accumulation,” the authors say that the comprehensive difference between CBH and LBH could hardly be the result of textual corruption. Rather, only an accumulation of late features can date a text as late (cf. ch. 3). That is, early texts may contain anomalous late linguistic features due to sporadic linguistic modernization. The authors final assessment of the Masoretic Text in this regard is worth quoting in full:

The fact is that the MT of Isaiah and the Pentateuch does not exhibit this modernizing profile. On the whole, the MT is a rather conservative and well-preserved text. Occasional modernizations exist, but they did not affect the MT to the extent of making the diachronic approach impossible (p. 55).

They close the chapter with a section on Textual Criticism and Redaction Criticism, which addresses the matter of different literary editions; that is, textual change not due to scribal mistakes and modernizing versions (pp. 56–57).

The authors conclude the chapter as follows:

When textual criticism is brought into the picture, it has the global effect of confirming the diachronic approach. The textual history of the Hebrew Bible provides an explanation for occasional “false positives,” late features occurring in a relatively early text. In addition, such late features in the CBH corpus can often be shown to have entered the text secondarily, as scribal mistakes, as occasional modernizations, or as products of textual growth. Textual criticism and historical linguistics  reinforce one another, and together contribute to a better understanding of the biblical text (p. 59).

I’m only part way through chapter 5 of the book, but overall, the authors are to be commended for their treatment and presentation of the matter of historical linguistics and its relationship to TC. I plan to write a follow-up post attempting to engage the authors on one of their examples from chapter 4 with a view to show how they think diachony and TC work together.

Textus now Published by Brill

Brill has recently picked up the publication of Textus: A Journal on Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Here is the description:

The importance of the discipline of textual criticism received an enormous boost from the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls showing that the study of these ancient documents is absolutely necessary for the exegesis of the Biblical literature. Textus covers that area as well as many additional ones, pertaining to all the fields that are traditionally studied by textual critics.

To celebrate this occasion Brill has made the articles of the first issue free online. You can access them here.

The first article, "Introduction," is an editorial by Emanuel Tov, who had this to say about the new launch of the journal:

From 2018 onwards, Textus will be published by Brill Publishers with a broader mandate. The establishment of an international editorial board consisting of recognized experts in various subdisciplines of textual criticism will ensure the high quality of the studies to be published in this journal. The journal is to be published annually.

The importance of the discipline of textual criticism was enhanced greatly with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls; it was seen that the study of these ancient documents is absolutely necessary for the exegesis of biblical literature. Textus covers this area as well as many others that pertain to all the fields that are studied traditionally by textual critics:
– All the subareas relating to the text of the Hebrew Bible (Jewish and Samaritan) in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times (printed editions), the Masorah, its vocalization and accents;
– The Bible texts found in the Judean Desert including manuscript studies on these texts;
– Primary and secondary translations of the Bible, each in its own cultural and linguistic environment;
– Textual analysis of words, segments, or books in Hebrew and translated Scripture;
– Linguistic studies pertaining to textual issues;
– Quotations from the Bible in nonbiblical sources;
– History of research on text-critical issues.

As always, I'm happy whenever there are new initiatives to publish work in the area of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament textual criticism. Brill's relaunch of Textus appears to be a welcomed addition.