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In sum, this chapter has depicted the complicated history of the biblical text throughout the past 2,300 years. This description would have been much more complex had all the facts been known, but most of the data from antiquity have been lost. The discovery of large treasury troves of biblical manuscripts in the 19^th and 20^th centuries reminds us how little we know about the history of the biblical text. Modesty is in order, but the Dead Sea Scrolls have helped us to understand the condition of the biblical text much better. Until the first century of the Common Era, the Jewish people used a variety of Bible texts, from which the Masoretic Text emerged in the first century CE as the majority text for all of Israel. However, for in-depth Bible study, all textual branches need to be taken into consideration.

The biblical text has been transmitted in many ancient and medieval sources that are known to us from modern editions in different languages. We possess fragments of leather and papyrus scrolls that are at least two thousand years old in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, as well as manuscripts in Hebrew and other languages from the Middle Ages. All these textual witnesses differ from one another to a greater or lesser extent. The analysis of these textual differences holds a central place within textual criticism.

It is not only the differences among the various textual witnesses that require involvement in textual criticism. Textual differences of a similar nature are reflected in the various attestations of a single textual tradition of Hebrew–Aramaic Scripture, namely the parallel passages (e.g., Samuel and Kings compared with Chronicles) in the Masoretic Text, often described as the main textual tradition of Scripture. Such internal differences are visible in all attestations of MT, ancient and medieval, and even in its printed editions and modern translations since they are based on different sources.

Possibly, one would not have expected differences between the printed editions of Hebrew–Aramaic Scripture, for if a fully unified textual tradition had been possible at any one given period, it would certainly seem to have been after the invention of printing. However, such is not the case since all printed editions of Hebrew–Aramaic Scripture, which actually are editions of MT, go back to different medieval manuscripts of that tradition, or combinations thereof, and therefore the editions also necessarily differ from one another.

The Hebrew Bible is the Bible of the Jewish people, and it also became the holy writ of the Samaritans and Christians in all their denominations; therefore the study of the text of the Bible is not only concerned with Jewish sources, but also with a wide variety of Samaritan and Christian sources. All of them together bring us closer to a deeper knowledge of the words of the Bible, even if much remains unknown.