The interested reader who tries to get into the original text is likely to wind up holding something like the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or United Bible Societies’ Greek New Testament in their hands. These sorts of resources are valuable.
And yet their claim to be the best current approximation of this mythical original text must be qualified, in part because we have become accustomed to reading the Bible through layers of paratext which are almost invisible.
Let us illustrate with the Hebrew Bible. If we provisionally agree that the original text of Isaiah is something like the 66-chapter book we know today, rather than something more extreme like First Isaiah, then Qumran’s Great Isaiah Scroll is going to be the closest physical ancient artifact to a fresh, first-edition Isaiah.
Here’s what it looks like, starting with the first few verses of chapter 2.
Now, if use the magic of unicode to produce a transcription, we get something like this:
הדבר אשר חזה ישעיה בן אמוץ על יהודה וירושלים והיה
באחרית הימים נכון יהיה הר בית יהוה בראש הרים ונשא
מגבעות ונהרו עלוהי כול הגואים והלכו עמים רבים ואמרו
But this is not how most readers will encounter the text. If we fast forward from about 125 BCE to about 920 CE, we can now look at the Aleppo Codex, not a scroll but something that looks quite like a book.
The underlying letters here are the same, but now there’s a bunch of additional markings above, below, and sometimes even inside the letters. To try out our unicode trick again, we arrive at a text something like this, courtesy of Miqra al-pi Ha Masorah:
הַדָּבָר֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר חָזָ֔ה יְשַֽׁעְיָ֖הוּ בֶּן־אָמ֑וֹץ עַל־יְהוּדָ֖ה וִירוּשָׁלָֽ͏ִם׃ וְהָיָ֣ה ׀ בְּאַחֲרִ֣ית הַיָּמִ֗ים נָכ֨וֹן יִֽהְיֶ֜ה הַ֤ר בֵּית־יְהֹוָה֙ בְּרֹ֣אשׁ הֶהָרִ֔ים וְנִשָּׂ֖א מִגְּבָע֑וֹת וְנָהֲר֥וּ אֵלָ֖יו כׇּל־הַגּוֹיִֽם׃ וְֽהָלְכ֞וּ עַמִּ֣ים רַבִּ֗ים וְאָֽמְרוּ֙
The various additional markings are conveniently designed in such a way that an older text, like the Great Isaiah Scroll, can be marked up without displacing any of the underlying letters. These new marks show how to pronounce vowels, how to make various distinctions in consonant pronunciation, and even offer a guide to chanting the text aloud. The also divide the text into little approximately sentence-sized bites, the famous “Bible verses”.
None of these features were available to readers of the biblical text in its first thousand years, but now the reader has all sorts of choices made for them. How to pronounce an ambiguous word, how words relate to each other grammatically, and even how the words are corralled into verses.
Now let’s move forward even further, to the Biblia Hebraica Kittel of the early twentieth century:
Now we’ve got poetry-style line divisions and verse number. In the second and third lines, a careful reader will spot a superscript a and b, which lead to the following notes:
There the reader, if willing to learn the arcane symbols, can learn a bit about alternative manuscript traditions and even the opinions of the editor Kittel himself.
So does something like BHK give you something like the original text of a given book of the Hebrew Bible? Sort of. If you take both the text and the footnotes, you get a medieval text of the Hebrew Bible plus scholarly opinions about where it might stray from the hypothetical original. If you just take the letters of the text, you can guess reasonably well what letters are in the text of the Great Isaiah Scroll, and by extension whatever final form of Isaiah gave rise to the Isaiah scroll and its relatives.
But while you may have access to the consonants of the Great Isaiah Scroll through BHK, you will read those consonants aloud with vowels according to a tradition written down by nearly anonymous scribes who added the vowels and various other indicators in the second half of the first millennium CE. The modern reader, unless extremely careful, will by default read Isaiah’s work through the eyes of the ben Asher family in Tiberias in the third century of Islamic rule there.
While the Masoretes divided the text into verses, there were no verse numbers of chapters yet. Those would wait for archbishop Stephen Langton, who divided a Latin Bible into chapters in the thirteenth century, in merry old England. His invention of chapter divisions proved so handy that soon not just Christians, but Jews as well, were dividing their scriptures accordingly.
Today, everybody uses chapters. They feel like part of the Bible, and they are, in the sense of Bible that means the kind of single-volume scriptural presentation with page numbers and a table of contents and a standardized order of books that has been popular since Langton’s times.
Let me just give two examples that I think illustrate how easy it is to confuse text and paratext.
Today, if I go to the great Wikipedia and find the article entitled “Isaiah Scroll”, a section entitled “Scribal Profile and Textual Variants” begins as follows:
The text of the Great Isaiah Scroll is generally consistent with the Masoretic version and preserves all sixty-six chapters of the Hebrew version in the same sequence.
Did you catch that? The Isaiah Scroll, we are to believe, preserves sixty-six chapters in 125 BCE, just like the Masoretic Text of 920 CE, and all of this is somehow accomplished long before Stephen Langton ever invented the chapter. We cannot fault Wikipedia too much for this. Wikipedia just parrots its sources, and its source here speaks similarly.
Here’s another example.
In Judges 6, Gideon finds himself having a somewhat confusing conversation. An angel of YHWH appears to Gideon and addresses him. Gideon replies. YHWH speaks to Gideon, and Gideon replies. Are we to understand YHWH and the angel of YHWH to be two distinct figures here, with Gideon speaking first to one and then the other? The footnotes to the New English Translation of the Bible argue these are two distinct figures, arguing this in part on the basis of the fact that Gideon first calls the angel adoni, but afterward calls YHWH adonay. And yet this is a distinction that cannot be found in any manuscript of Judges for over a millennium after Judges was written. It is, in fact, a distinction of Masoretic vowel-points. And her the NET treats a vowel-marking decision made in Tiberias in the tenth century CE as if it were a simply factual feature of the Bible.
It would be more accurate for the NET notes to say that medieval Jewish scribes recorded an oral tradition about Gideon addressing YHWH as Adonai, not that Gideon in fact did so.
None of this is to disparage the nakdanim. They did some amazing work. But if the nakdanim define the contents of the Bible, let the prefaces of our Bibles say so. Instead, there is a mostly unacknowledged compromise being played out in Bible production. Instead of attempting the very difficult task of producing a critical text, the Masoretic Text, points and all, is simply treated as if it were the original, except when it becomes excessively inconvenient.