Biblical Hebrew Forum

[George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>]

Ah, the wonderful world of textual criticism - that thin line between the 
lectio difficilor (the more difficult reading) and the reading that makes 
most sense. Add to this human expression, scribal practices, manuscript 
families, and hypothetical reconstructions, and you have an entire industry.

It is fun, though, sometimes.


Regards,

GEORGE ATHAS
Moore Theological College (Sydney, Australia)
www.moore.edu.au



________________________________
From: Gabe Eisenstein <gabe AT cascadeaccess.com>
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2009 16:46:49 +1100
To: B-Hebrew <b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Iron and Curses in Deuteronomy 28

[...]

Here's something else to consider. Another piece of "sloppiness" on the
part of someone is that verse 18, which is the partner of verse 4,
leaves out the reference to cattle found there. You could attribute it
to Moses, but a Qumran version of the text has the "cattle" phrase in
verse 18, just as in verse 4. I assume everyone will accept the simplest
hypothesis here, namely that the phrase was lost by scribal error in the
MT. But here again we are on a slippery slope to the hypothesis that
there were originally more coherent subtexts than what we have now.


Gabe Eisenstein