A Review of Biblia Hebraica Quinta 5 (Part One)

Three fascicles of Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ) have now appeared: General Introduction and Megilloth (2004), Ezra and Nehemiah (2006), and Deuteronomy (2007). They are beautifully produced and deserve a place on the shelf of every serious student of the Hebrew Bible. In this post, through a comparison with a sample available of the forthcoming Oxford Hebrew Bible (OHB), and in light of general considerations, I begin a review of BHQ 5:

Biblia Hebraica Quinta 5. Deuteronomy (Carmel McCarthy). Gen. ed. Adrian Schenker et al.; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2007.

BHQ is the successor project of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). It remains a diplomatic edition of a single medieval manuscript, Codex Leningradensis (L), to the point that obvious errors in the codex are now reproduced in the body of the edition and only corrected in footnotes. It is also a new product with a number of innovative features. An obvious BHQ improvement vis-à-vis BHS is that run-on lines, with overflow text placed on the line above or below and preceded by a bracket, have been eliminated.

 Given the above, BHQ Deuteronomy 31:28-32:47 immediately strikes the eye. L’s layout is not respected in BHQ 5. McCarthy claims to reproduce the format prescribed in an extracanonical tractate of the Talmud entitled Masseket Soferim.[1] But so does Aron Dotan in his edition of Codex Leningradensis,[2] and though Dotan and McCarthy agree on stichography, they disagree on other formatting details. Space does not permit a discussion of the disagreements here. McCarthy in BHQ 5 does not report L’s formatting in a note. This is at odds with BHQ practice elsewhere. Sidnie White Crawford’s Oxford Hebrew Bible (OHB) sample, which covers Deut 32:1-9, sets aside the stichographic arrangement of OHB’s copy text (L once again), though line distinctions are preserved.

Given stichographic arrangements of האזינו and other poetic texts in manuscripts found at Qumran, Masada, and beyond, one might have wished for text-critical analysis thereof. It is not clear why features of ancient manuscripts which attest to traditional parses of the transmitted text should be neglected by text criticism.

 OHB’s apparatus and commentary discuss a total of 20 lemmata in Deut 32:1-9; BHQ 5 discusses 15 (adjusting for the fact that BHQ 5 treats the crux interpretum of 32:5 as a single lemma). The lemmata treated in OHB and left unnoted in BHQ 5 read as follows:

32:3 גדל M SP ] גדל<ה>  Q4QDt^b (syn)

32:4 פעלו M SP ] פעליו*? G (τὰ ἔργα αὐτοῦ) (assim gram)

32:6 הֲלַיְהוָה M^mss SP ] הֲ־לַיְהוָה M (gram); cf ταῦτα κυρίῳ G (prps explic) §

32:6 עשך M SP ] ועשך* G (καὶ ἐποίησέν σε) (+ conj)

32:7 ימות M (cf Ps [sic] כימות Ps 90:15) G (ἡμέρας) ] יומת SP (prps meta)

 OHB’s coverage of a greater number of loci is praiseworthy. BHQ makes the respectable choice of ignoring purely orthographical variants, but it is not clear why it sometimes treats differences with respect to lexis, gender, number, and presence/absence of the conjunction, and sometimes does not. Both BHQ and OHB miss a locus worthy of note and discussion in 32:4:

32:4 הוא M SP ] יהוה* G (κύριος)

 This explanation of the textual data in hand was proposed by Emanuel Tov.[3]

 A lemma by lemma comparison of BHQ and OHB across Deut 32:1-9 demonstrates that BHQ and OHB are characterized by occasional errors of omission and commission. Sample OHB Deut is more careful to note variants attested in Qumran manuscripts; BHQ Deut, variants in the Targums. OHB and BHQ come to starkly different text-critical conclusions on more than one occasion. In documentation of the claims just made, I will offer a discussion of three textual loci in forthcoming posts: Deut 32:2, 5, and 8-9. BHQ 5’s strengths and weaknesses compared to those of the OHB sampler will be illustrated thereby.

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[1] Carmel McCarthy, “A Diplomatic Dilemma in Deuteronomy 32,” Proceedings of the Irish Biblical Association 27 (2005) 22-32.

[2] Aaron Dotan, ed., Biblia Hebraica Leningradensis. Prepared according to the Vocalization, Accents, and Masora of Aaron ben Moses ben Asher in the Leningrad Codex (Peabody: Hendrickson, 2001) 305-308; 1241-1242.

[3] Emanuel Tov, Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies: The Parallel Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Texts of Jewish Scripture (Bellingham: Logos Research Systems, 2003.