The Purpose of Textual Research - Post #3 on Old Testament Manuscripts and Source Texts

The Purpose of Textual Research

“Old Testament textual research sets out to identify accidental errors in, as well as deliberate changes to, the text of the Hebrew Bible that were made over the course of time. It seeks wherever possible to correct these changes by first identifying variations in transmission through a comparison of the existing manuscripts against each other and against the ancient translations, and then reconstructing the original version by means of rigorous scholarly criteria. (See the next section for the procedure used in New Testament textual research.)

On the basis of manuscript evidence alone the best attainable wording of the Hebrew Bible is as it was around 200 B.C. Because of the incomplete nature of the text witnesses available to us today, this oldest attainable text form cannot, however, be reconstructed to the same extent in all cases. In order to present a uniform text in a printed edition of the Hebrew Bible, the construction of a text form corrected according to scholarly criteria (as in the case of the New Testament) must thus be dispensed with. Rather, it is expedient to print a copy of the “Masoretic Text” and then to list where necessary the extant textual variants in what is called the critical apparatus at the foot of each page. Also in this location any scholarly suggestions for improvement of the Masoretic text can be noted.”

- Dr. Rolf Schäfer und Dr. Florian Voss Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/Intro-ScholarlyEditions-GBS_2.pdf

(Quick clarification: The “critical apparatus” is not something found in your modern English/Spanish/French/etc. translation. It is found in the source text used by translators to then create the modern translation. But they are also made available for anyone who wants to use them. For more on critical apparatuses see here https://bit.ly/2qchqis or here https://bit.ly/2qE74I2 .)