Читать книгу The Hebrew Bible - David M. Carr - Страница 21

So let us assume that you have in your hands a Jewish Tanakh or some contemporary version of a Christian Old Testament. Unless you read Hebrew fluently, you will be working with an English translation of the Bible. Let us prepare for this study of the Hebrew scriptures by looking at the different components that go into this Bible above).

First, as discussed above, every translation builds on a number of decisions about which Hebrew text to translate. There is no single authoritative ancient copy of the Hebrew scriptures, even in the original Hebrew. Instead, we have several different sorts of ancient Hebrew manuscripts and ancient translations that used old Hebrew manuscripts, all of which are the products of centuries of hand‐copying and occasional miscopying. Scholars preparing to do translation must engage in the practice of “textual criticism” or (more often) build on textual criticism by text‐critical experts (see box). Biblical verses are preserved differently in the different ancient manuscripts, and it is not always easy to decide which manuscript reading of a given section to translate. Nevertheless, such decisions must be made, for each verse and chapter, in order to even begin the process of producing the translation you now have.