Restoration Project: The Hebrew Bible - The BAS Library
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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > August 1998

Restoration Project: The Hebrew Bible

We should produce a new critical edition of the Bible containing a better and more nearly original text.

By Ronald S. Hendel

Some years ago the Vatican announced plans to restore Michelangelo’s famous paintings on the walls and ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Some art critics were incensed that the conservators had the audacity to attempt to restore these hallowed biblical scenes, including the Creation and the Last Judgment. They argued that Michelangelo intended the paintings to be dark and shadowed, and that to strip off the dark outer layers was tantamount to blasphemy. The Italian conservators replied that they were only removing dirt, candle wax and soot that had accumulated over the centuries—and were repairing previous crude attempts at restoration. […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Jane and John Dillenberger, “Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling—To Clean or Not to Clean,” BR 04:04.

2.

See Frank Moore Cross, “The Text Behind the Text of the Hebrew Bible,” BR 01:02, and “Original Biblical Text Reconstructed from Newly Found Fragments,” BR 01:03.

Endnotes

1.

I was surprised to learn that, according to the research of an organization of orthodox Torah scribes, more than 50 percent of the Torah scrolls they checked contained scribal errors; see the comments of Moshe Sokolow in Jewish Book World 15:3 (Winter 1997), p. 16.

2.

The edition used most commonly by biblical scholars, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, reproduces a single Masoretic manuscript and includes an unsystematic collection of textual variants at the bottom of each page. The massive Hebrew University Bible (of which only Isaiah and Jeremiah are completed) includes a fuller collection of textual variants. Neither edition attempts to note consistently which variant readings are preferable and which are secondary.

3.

A preliminary attempt is in my book, The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition York/Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1998).