tems will be attempted to frame an analysis that works across different languages, scripts
and media.
Textual Criticism, Its Objectives and Presuppositions
A characteristic of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible has been the concern of scholars
to reconstruct the ‘original’ form of each individual text. This is “the text or edition (or a
number of consecutive editions) that contained the finished literary product and which
stood at the beginning of the process of textual transmission.”^6 Indeed, according to Tov
it is this “final authoritative copy which it is the object of textual criticism to reconstruct,
even if only in isolated details.”^7 The text critic of the Hebrew Bible, then, aims to recon-
struct one text that he or she believes to be historical.^8
This approach must proceed from two obvious assumptions. The first is that a single text
did in fact stand at the beginning of the transmission process, before it was corrupted by
mechanical and recensional processes.^9 This must necessarily be true, otherwise the ob-
jective of this approach to textual criticism must be redefined. The second assumption is
that the end result of the process was the standardised form of the Hebrew scriptures that
(^6) E. Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (^) (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001 (^2) ) 171.
(^7) E. Tov, Textual Criticism, 177.
(^8) According to P.K. McCarter, Textual Criticism: Recovering the Text of the Hebrew Bible (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1986) 12, “The goal [of text criticism] is the determination of a primitive text to which the
various surviving copies bear witness.” 9
See E. Tov, Textual Criticism, where this ‘original text’ is more specifically defined as “... a text which
was considered authoritative (and hence also finished at the literary level), even if only by a limited group
of people, and which at the same time stood at the beginning of a process of copying and textual transmis-
sion.”