Читать книгу The Hebrew Bible - David M. Carr - Страница 22

“Textual criticism” is not general study of a text. Instead, textual criticism studies the diverse ancient manuscript copies of biblical texts, analyzing their development and providing data that can be used to choose which reading of a biblical text to follow. Over the centuries, scribes have introduced tens of thousands of minor changes into biblical texts as they have copied them by hand. Some changes were introduced by accident, as when a scribe might accidentally copy a given line twice. Other changes seem more intentional, where a scribe seems to have added a clarification of a place name or a theological correction or expansion. The ancient copies are often termed manuscript witnesses because they “witness” to diverse forms of these hand‐copied texts.

FIGURE 0.1 Scholarly edition of the same text as in Figure 0.2, below. In contrast to that early manuscript this edition has chapter and verse numbers along with scholarly notes at the bottom about alternative Hebrew readings to the ones given in the body of the text.