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The task of the biblical text critic is to try to make sense of biblical verses. The text critic faces many kinds of problems. I would like to offer as illustrations two cases where I would recommend emending the text—actually changing the biblical text as it has come down to us to a version I consider more original. In short, I believe there is a better text than the one we know.
One case I will discuss comes from the Hebrew Bible, the other from the New Testament. Readers may disagree with me, but even so, I hope they will find the highlighted problems intriguing.
The first example comes from Ecclesiastes, that odd book of cynicism and epicureanism. It is a rather simple example. Chapter 10:7 reads as follows:
I have seen slaves on horses and princes walking like slaves on the ground.
The question is whether to emend the text by inserting the word “riding” (in Hebrew, rokebim) in the first line, so that the text would read thusly:
I have seen slaves riding on horses and princes walking like slaves on the ground.
There is no great theological doctrine at stake here, not even a difference in meaning, only elegance of expression—and a desire to arrive at a more original text, what we might call the better text.
The text I have translated is the Hebrew textus receptus, known as the Masoretic text. Why change it? The words are understandable, and the sense is quite clear. The sage is making an observation on the human scene: Things are not as they should be; a striking example is the reversal of roles between the slaves at the bottom of the social scale and the officials or princes at the top. The image used to portray the reversal of roles is that of travelers on a road. Princes should ride horses while slaves walk, but their roles have been reversed, a circumstance that the sage laments
So what is wrong with the text?
In other old Hebrew manuscripts (not the one that forms the basis of the Masoretic text), there are other readings. In two, the word for riding appears as I have inserted it.1
There are two basic explanations for these differences: Either the Masoretic text is an original and the word in question, rokebim, has been added by a scribe or editor to the other manuscripts to expand or clarify the message, or one or the other of the two manuscripts with the added word is original, and the Masoretic text reflects a defective text in which the word rokebim has been lost.
After careful study and due deliberation, I would say that the latter is the correct interpretation and that the word rokebim should be restored to the text to secure the original reading intended by the poet.
The most common error in copying manuscripts is what scholars call haplography, which simply means skipped writing, caused by homoeoteleuton, which means that the scribe’s eye skipped to a second appearance of the same word or word ending. (This is the opposite of a rarer occurrence called dittography, which is a second copying of the same material caused by the scribe’s eye going back to the point in the text that he has just copied.)
Here the text as I would restore it reads abadim rokebim, “slaves riding.” In Hebrew, both words have the same ending, –im (technically, –ym). After the scribe copied the first word, his eye lit on the same ending in the second word, and he went on copying from there, thus omitting the second word.
The restoration of the missing word would provide the proper word to balance the word “walking” in the second line. In addition, the added word would provide a better metrical balance between 043the two lines. In the Masoretic text, there are 9 syllables in the first line and 13 in the second. By restoring the missing word, we have 12 and 13 syllables, a very close fit.
One more bit of evidence in favor of the restoration is found in a parallel passage in the Song of Deborah (Judges 5:10):
You who ride (upon) tawny asses
You who sit upon the judgment seat
You who walk upon the road—Sing!
This ancient poem was surely known to the author of Ecclesiastes. And although it is true that the circumstances in the Song of Deborah are quite different from what they are in Ecclesiastes, the basic picture is much the same: Both describe different classes and groups of people as travelers who either ride or walk. The parallelism between “ride” and “walk” is inescapable.
So all in all, I would emend the text of Ecclesiastes by adding the word “riding.”
My second example comes from the Epistle of James. Chapter 4:4 begins with an epithet. The writer is chastising his audience, whom he calls moichalides, “adulteresses” in Greek. The question is whether this should be emended to read moichoi kai moichalides, “adulterers and adulteresses.”
The standard Greek New Testament simply reads moichalides, “adulteresses.”2 It is not hard to understand how the editors decided this: That is the reading found in the best and oldest manuscripts, including the fourth- to fifth-century C.E. Codex Sinaiticus, Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus. The alternative reading appears only in later manuscripts and in a corrected copy of Sinaiticus; the corrector inserted the words in the text after it had been completed. It is obvious that the corrector added these words to a manuscript that had previously omitted them. But why? Presumably because he had other manuscript evidence for the correction. Or, if such evidence was not available, then on the basis of his understanding of authorial intent. In short, he was trying to do back then what I am arguing should be done now—to recover the original text. Of course, it can be argued that the corrector’s additions were an arbitrary change based on his ideas of what the text should say rather than what it does say. That is the view of some text critics, but I don’t think it is the proper one, especially because it is assumed that the corrections were made at the same time or shortly after the original document was inscribed.
In the Greek New Testament, the preferred shorter reading is given a probability rating of A on a scale of A to D, from the most probable to the least probable.
The argument behind this follows traditional established norms: The shorter and more difficult reading is to be preferred (lectio brevior and lectio difficilior preferendae sunt). This principle is founded on the well-grounded belief that additions are made to clarify the text, not to make it more obscure. Therefore, a short, difficult text is to be preferred to a longer, clearer text.
In the case we are discussing, there can be no doubt that the adopted text is both shorter and more difficult. In fact, the shorter reading, as it stands, is extremely difficult to explain or even understand. The problem centers on the sudden intrusion of a feminine plural noun in the midst of a general statement addressed to and concerning the whole community. It is as though the writer wished to isolate women as guilty of violating this one of the Ten Commandments while excluding men from consideration.
To avoid this problem, most translations translate the word, not as adulteresses, but as adulterers, as if the Greek included both genders. But in antiquity, and particularly in the Bible, this is unheard of.
Whether adultery is here intended in a literal or figurative sense (as a symbol of apostasy or defection from the covenant relationship with God), persons of both sexes have to be included, which is why women are mentioned here explicitly. But mentioning only women here would exclude men, and in the case of adultery, the consensual participation of two persons of opposite sex is required. To claim that the author is either excluding men from consideration here, or that men are subsumed under the feminine term for adulteresses, is unjustified by usage or evidence.
The correct interpretation of the evidence, in my opinion, is to recognize that the longer reading is more original and to be preferred in this instance, even though such a conclusion seems to contradict conventional wisdom about the superiority of shorter, more difficult readings.3
This is simply another case of haplography. Haplography, by definition, produces a shorter text than the original and almost inevitably leads to a more difficult, if not completely incomprehensible, text. In every such case, the so-called shorter and more difficult text is wrong and should be corrected.
In the present instance, the preferred, shorter and more difficult reading could easily have resulted from a simple instance of haplography owing to homoeoarcton (the occurrence of the same letters at the beginning of two words on the same or different lines of the manuscript). In this passage, the scribe’s eye probably jumped from the first four letters of the first word, moichoi, to the first four letters of the third word, moichalides. As a result of this error, the first two words of the text were elided and lost. Such errors can occur when only one or two letters are identical; when four letters are the same, the chances of such an error are far greater.
An argument based on a mechanical error, such as haplography, is always better than an argument based on a deliberate change in the text. I would contend therefore that whoever corrected the manuscript of the Codex Sinaiticus was restoring the original text when he inserted the two missing words. Whether he did so on the basis of an older and more original manuscript or whether he reconstructed the text on the basis of his general wisdom and experience in such matters, we may never know.
For the two cases I have discussed here, we have extant ancient manuscripts that support the emendations I have proposed. If, however, we confine ourselves to cases in which there is manuscript or versional evidence for the original, longer reading lost through haplography, we are seeing only the tip of the iceberg. There must be thousands of cases in which the haplography occurred early enough in the process of transmission that no trace of the original reading has survived. If we could find these cases, it would be like finding a new cache of Dead Sea Scrolls. Unfortunately, the resistance to such an exploration would be very great from those scholars who are unthinkingly wedded to the old mantras of lectio brevior and lectio difficilior preferendae sunt.
