250 Marc Zvi Brettler
commentary omits such notes because he is very reliant on the MT, the
standard Hebrew text that crystallized aft er the destruction of the Second
Temple in 70 CE.15
Greenberg’s strong preference for the MT is seen already in his Under-
standing Exodus (1969), where he assures his readers that this choice is not
“dogmatic” but is because the MT is “the best witness” and because this was
the main text studied for generations.16 Greenberg justifi es his position in
a lecture he gave in 1978 in Göttingen, Germany, the capital of biblical tex-
tual criticism: (1) in the case of Ezekiel or other prophets, we can no longer
recover the ipsissima verba, “the original words of the prophet”; (2) even if
we have a more modest goal, of interpreting the text at the period of can-
onization, we must remember that “the notion of ‘the hypothetical textual
form’ (in the singular) that existed at the time of canonization posits an
identity between canonization and text stabilization that is fl atly contra-
dicted by all the evidence we have”; and (3) any reconstructed text is hypo-
thetical, and the job of the exegete “is to interpret text in hand.” Greenberg
notes that textual criticism of the Bible should be diff erent from textual
criticism as generally practiced in the humanities since the biblical scholar
must also consider the role of “faith communities” in producing the text.17
Greenberg shares this feature of what may be called textual conserva-
tism — that his Scripture is MT, no more, no less — with many of the other
Jewish fi gures explored in this volume. For most of them, retention of the
MT is a religious value judgment,18 while Greenberg has articulated alter-
native reasons for retaining MT when expositing biblical texts, allowing
what has been called the textus receptus (received text) of the Jewish com-
munity to remain its textus receptus. Greenberg’s position is not, however,
fundamentalistic — he does, on occasion, suggest emendations or follow
other versions than MT. His belief derives instead from what it means to
study a biblical text as a text. However, when he is engaged in studying his-
tory of religion, and he believes that the MT does not refl ect the early text,
he follows an earlier reconstructed text, preserved in non-MT witnesses.
Yet in all cases, he is studying the Hebrew text of the Bible. Translations,
he believes, have their place in terms of understanding certain problems of
the Hebrew, but the Hebrew text is of paramount importance. His tremen-
dous care for understanding the nuances of each Hebrew word and gram-
matical form is evident throughout his writing and explains his decision to
publish his grammar of biblical Hebrew so early in his career, in 1965 — to
allow students an opportunity to encounter the Hebrew text in an unmedi-
ated fashion.19