Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989)
Article: Aims of OT Textual Criticism
Author: Bruce K. Waltke

WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989) p. 93

Aims of OT Textual Criticism

Bruce K. Waltke

Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible is living through a period of reconceiving its discipline. Historically text critics, whether they worked on Homer, Moses, Isaiah, Paul, or Shakespeare, tried to produce a text as close as possible to the text that left the author’s hand. They agreed that to reconstruct such a text the critic must assess the history of the text’s transmission in light of available MSS, expose additions, omissions, and other corruptions, and eliminate them. Today, however, not all text critics of the Hebrew Scriptures aim to establish a text that most nearly represents the author’s original intentions. This essay identifies five aims of contemporary textual critics of the Hebrew Bible, critically appraises the views, and. draws a conclusion.

I. Restore the Original Composition

Before the advent of modern biblical criticism, OT text critics conceived their task in terms of intentions of inspired charismatic figures such as Moses, David, Solomon, and Isaiah. They aimed to rid the text of the historical clutter that came to be attached to these writings, and by eliminating the contaminations of other authorial interventions they hoped to recover as much as possible the ipsissima verba of the inspired person. Their aim is like that of Tanselle in modern text criticism: “to establish the text as the author wished to have it presented to the public.”1

This goal has the advantage of being in accord with the nature of great literature; viz., it is the product of a literary genius. It has the disadvantage of not recognizing editorial additions to the text.2

WTJ 51:1 (Spring 1989) p. 94

II. Restore the Final Text

With the advent of historical and source criticism the text critic of the Hebrew Bible conceptualized his task differently, though the practice remained essentially the same. More and more scholars came to regard the received text not as the ipsissima verba of one particular charismatic figure, but as the final redaction of earlier oral and written sources, the ipsissima verba of a final redactor.3 They distinguished between the oral and written processes that went into making the final text of a biblical book and the processes by which the final text, once established, was handed down or transmitted. Higher critics aimed to recover the genetic processes by which the final version of a text came into existence, and text critics aimed to recover the processes of its written transmission so as to restore it to its final, and in that sense original, pristin...