Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Methodology A study of a text in order to understand its development. Textual criticism deals with the nature and origin of all the witnesses of a composition or text—in our case, the biblical books. This analysis often involves an attempt to discover the original form of details in a composition, or even of large stretches of text, although what exactly constitutes an “original text” (or “original texts”) is debatable.

In the course of this inquiry, attempts are made to describe how the texts were written, changed, and transmitted from one generation to the next. Scholars who express a view on the originality of readings do so while evaluating their comparative value. This comparison—the central area of the textual praxis—refers to the value of the readings (variants) included in the textual witnesses. However, not all differences should be subjected to a textual evaluation. In our view, (groups of) readings that were produced at the literary growth stage of the biblical books (literary variants) should not be subjected to textual evaluation, since they were not produced during the course of the transmission of texts. This definition does not refer specifically to the traditional text of Hebrew—Aramaic Scripture, the so-called Masoretic Text (MT), but rather to all forms of Scripture.

One of the practical results of the analysis of textual data is that it creates tools for interpreting Hebrew and Aramaic Scriptures. Interpretation is based on a text or texts and can only proceed if the nature of that text has been determined. By the same token, all other disciplines, such as the historical, geographical, and linguistic analysis of Scripture, operate from a text base. In each case, the scholar has to identify the text base for the exegesis, and by necessity this involves the analysis of textual data beyond the text base.