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Glossary

Old Testament manuscripts from Qumran to Leningrad

By Marc Zvi Brettler

Ancient texts are different from modern books. Today copyright laws not only assure the author his or her fair share of royalties, but also that the text printed is the text the author wanted to print. Before the introduction of copyright laws, many diverse texts for a single work circulated. Some publishers copied their base text exactly, others shortened it, while others expanded upon it. In addition, different copyists used different manuscripts as the basis for their editions. All of these things happened to the text of the Bible. Since the most important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible are […]

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Footnotes

1.

B.C.E. and C.E. are the scholarly, religiously neutral designations corresponding to B.C. and A.D. They stand for “Before the common Era” and “Common Era.”

2.

If this prophecy could be reinterpreted in this way to refer to later events, phrases like “in the latter days” would be reinterpreted to refer to the “end of days.”

3.

See Mathew Black, “The Strange Visions of Enoch,” BR 03:02.

4.

It was formerly known as 4QExa.

Endnotes

1.

Y. K. Kim. “Palaeographical Daring of ¸46 to the Later First Century,” Biblica 69:2 (1988), pp. 248–257.

2.

Bruce Metzger, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 40–41.

3.

Kurt and Barbara Aland, The Text of the New Testament (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans 1987) pp. 101–102; and Metzger, p. 6.