Textual criticism can bring about some intense reactions. For some, this is do to the sheer boredom of the task. Others view the job as unnecessary…textual errors would imply some sort of warped view of Biblical inspiration. The fact is that although the Old Testament was copied with amazing precision, there are still errors. These errors create the need for textual criticism (an attempt to discover the wording of the original manuscript). Ellis Brotzman’s Old Testament Textual Criticism offers the beginning to intermediate student of textual criticism an explanation of the process.

Why “Old Testament” textual criticism? Is there a difference between Old Testament and New Testament textual criticism? While there are many similarities, there are significant differences. One of the major differences is the language, the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, the NT in Greek. Brotzman explains in greater detail:

The earliest books of the Old Testament were copied by hand for some three thousand years before they were first produced in printed form. Moreover, the earliest forms of the Old Testament text were written in an exclusively consonantal form…The complete system of vowel notation, as distinct from the consonantal text, was only written down at a later stage (between A.D. 600 and 1000). (p. 18)

Brotzman correctly understands that a foundational piece toward participating in textual criticism is understanding the “history of the transmission” process. For this reason, he spends about 100 of his 200-ish pages getting his readers up to speed on the following:
- Writing systems in the ancient Near East
- Transmission of the Old Testament in Hebrew
- Ancient Versions of the Old Testament
- The Dead Sea Scrolls
- Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS), the Old Testament in Hebrew
After this foundation has been laid Brotzman can head into scribal errors and pointers on how to make informed decisions as to what the text should have said.

As an example of the historical foundation, the Masorites (A.D. 500 – 1000) were of vital importance in the preservation of the Hebrew Bible. Their key contribution was their addition of vowels and accent marks. Previously, these symbols were non-existing outside of the spoken/verbal language. Imagine what would happen if we removed vowels and punctuation from our written language. Our generation would understand the text, but the precision of the text would begin to disappear as our language changed.

Another key moment in the history of Old Testament transmission was the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The story of the discovery is interesting. An extremely abbreviated version is as follows. In 1947, two shepherds found some caves with jars in them. The jars contained carefully preserved leather scrolls wrapped in linen. The shepherds took the scrolls into town, the scrolls ended up in the right people’s hands…and, eventually the caves near the Dead Sea was excavated and more documents showed up.

Brotzman mentions three significant aspects of the Dead Sea Scroll discovery.
1) They “take the textual scholar back around one thousand years earlier than previously known Hebrew manuscript evidence.”
2) “While there are many small differences between the Masoretic Text and the various Qumran documents, the overall agreement between them is striking.”
3) They “have certified the overall faithfulness with which the text was copied” & “they also point out that the text in the last two centuries B.C., and up through at least a part of the first century A.D., existed in various text types rather than only one.” (p. 95)

Obviously, Brotzman goes into much more detail and explores a wider range of topics than the two I have used as examples. What may come through in the examples I have given is that Brotzman is a conservative Bible scholar. He seeks to handle the Hebrew variants as carefully as possible.

Brotzman becomes more hands on with his advice on textual criticism as the book continues. For example, he states: “A…general principle of internal evidence is that of the level of difficulty of two or more readings. In such cases, the ‘more difficult’ reading is to be preferred. This principle is based on the tendency of scribes to simplify and clarify the texts that they were copying much more often than they would have made them more difficult.” (p. 128) He goes on to clarify that sometimes this is not always the case.

One final question should be addressed in the discussion of textual criticism. What kind of errors are we talking about? Is there any reliability to the Hebrew text at all? Brotzman mentions Bruce Waltke who states that “on average, there is about one textual note in BHS for each ten words. Textual criticism, by its very nature, focuses on the variant readings, but the 90% or more of the text that exists without variation must also be kept in view.” (p. 23)

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, textual criticism has some stereotypes of being boring. And, while people interested in the Bible should be aware of textual criticism, it could be argued that it deserves its stereotype because to some extent it is boring. The vast majority of the 10% mentioned above by Waltke would be the equivalent of a modern day debate over whether Lincoln meant “Fourscore and seven years ago” or “Fourscore plus seven years ago”…perhaps 10 manuscripts use the word “and”, 3 use the word “plus”. Our information tells us: A) It’s really not significant to the meaning of the text, and B) You can be pretty confident that “and” was the original wording.

Brotzman spends one chapter examining the book of Ruth. At the end he offers this observation:
In all of the textual problems addressed in the apparatus of BHS, only one resulted in the failure to determine a probable original reading. Many of the textual problems cited were of minimal importance to exegesis, and the rest were of only minor import. While the specific results for the Book of Ruth cannot be applied across the board to the rest of the Old Testament, at least the results for this short book give the beginning student an overall appreciation for the state of the Masoretic Text. (p. 168)
The overall theme is that the Hebrew Old Testament that we have today is quite accurate.

For the topic Brotzman chooses to tackle in his book (OT criticism), he explains himself quite well. He covers things briefly (with footnotes for further study), yet he touches on everything long enough to allow the reader to feel as though they have a good grasp of the issues at hand. In one sense, the book has become sort of a modern day classic in the Old Testament criticism world (a larger world than you might think). It’s hard to imagine a better book for a beginner interested in understanding the basics of Old Testament textual criticism.


Recommended: Yes