Ernst Würthwein (1909–1996)

It's a good thing Ernst Würthwein doesn't listen too closely to his own advice.

Textual criticism is the attempt to reconstruct a lost original document based on later corrupt copies. This inherently has two parts: Cataloging and assessing the surviving materials, and then reconstructing the text. Würthwein does a good job of the former, describing the Masoretic Text (the type of text to which all recent Hebrew copies belong), the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek Septuagint translation, and many other translations made later, either from Hebrew or from the Septuagint.

So far, so good. Then Würthwein sits down to analyze them so that he can reconstruct the text. And what he says boils down to, "The Masoretic Hebrew is the best." This is a widely-held position, supported by many Christians and effectively all Jewish scholars (after all, it is the Jews who, with meticulous care, copied the Masoretic text) -- but there are overwhelming reasons to think it isn't always true. In the Book of Samuel, for instance, the Masoretic text has many clear defects that can be corrected based on the Septuagint.

So it's often better to learn from Würthwein's examples than his words. The latter, while they may still defer a little too much to the Masoretic Text, show a much broader array of the tools available to the Old Testament critic. Combine this with a few other books on the field and you'll be off to a solid start in Old Testament Textual Criticism.

The book is a translation, but Erroll F. Rhodes is a good translator; the fact that the original is in German is rarely evident and should not pose any major problems.… (més)