editions or ‘standardised’ copy-texts, but rather to approach the question of textual stabi-
lisation from a more broadly comparative perspective.^16 These studies call for the aban-
donment of the practice whereby the ‘original’ text is reconstructed by working back-
wards from the final ‘copy-text.’ Instead, each extant ancient manuscript is treated a pri-
ori as a potential ‘pristine’ text. In doing so, information concerning how the texts were
treated in transmission is adduced, while the introduction of subjective presuppositions,
so required by a hypothetical reconstruction of an ‘original text,’ are avoided.
Talmon argued this very point when he proposed that, in the absence of any evidence in
the manuscripts from the second to first centuries B.C.E. that identified a single pristine
text (or three pristine texts, as Cross’s local text theory posits), all variant readings should
be treated as alternative readings unless their genetic relationship to other texts could be
demonstrated.^17 Similarly, Goshen-Gottstein argued that no single recension can be
(^16) See the studies by D.J.A. Clines, "What Remains of the Hebrew Bible? Its Text and Language in a Post-
modern Age," Studia Theologica 54 (2001) 76-95; M. Cogan, "Some Text-Critical Issues in the Hebrew
Bible from an Assyriological Perspective," Textus 22 (2005) 1-20; F.H. Polak, "Statistics and Text Filia-
tion: The Case of 4QSama/LXX," Septuagint, Scrolls and Cognate Writings (eds G.J. Brooke and B. Lin-
dars; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992) 215-276; I. Young, "The Biblical Scrolls from Qumran and the
Masoretic Text: A Statistical Approach," Feasts and Fasts: A Festschrift in Honour of Alan David Crown
(eds M. Dacy, J. Dowling, and S. Faigan; Sydney: Mandelbaum Publishing, 2005) 81-139, and "Textual
Stability in Gilgamesh and the Dead Sea Scrolls," Gilgamesh and the World of Assyrian: Proceedings of
the Conference Held at the Mandelbaum House, the University of Sydney, 21-23 July, 2004 (Ancient Near
Eastern Studies Supplement 21; Leuven: Peeters, 2007) 174-183. 17
S. Talmon, "Aspects of the Textual Transmission," 96. See also the comments on textual emendation
according to external parallels in S. Talmon, "The ‘Comparative Method’ in Biblical Interpretation – Prin-
ciples and Problems," Congress Volume: Göttingen 1977 (VTSup 29; ed. J.A. Emerton; Leiden: Brill,
1978) 343-47.