page_title: Textual criticism
section_title: Hebrew Bible
hierarchical_section_title: Textual criticism / Application to religious documents / Hebrew Bible
context_page_description: Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in dates from the earliest writing in cuneiform, impressed on clay, for example, to multiple unpublished versions of a 21st-century author's work. Historically, scribes who were paid to copy documents may have been literate, but many were simply copyists, mimicking the shapes of letters without necessarily understanding what they meant. This means that unintentional alterations were common when copying manuscripts by hand. Intentional alterations may have been made as well, for example the censoring of printed work for political, religious or cultural reasons.
  The objective of the textual critic's work is to provide a better understanding of the creation and historical transmission of the text and its variants. This understanding may lead to the production of a "critical edition" containing a scholarly curated text.
context_section_description: Textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible compares manuscript versions of the following sources (dates refer to the oldest extant manuscripts in each family):
  As in the New Testament, changes, corruptions, and erasures have been found, particularly in the Masoretic texts. This is ascribed to the fact that early soferim (scribes) did not treat copy errors in the same manner later on.
  There are three separate new editions of the Hebrew Bible currently in development: Biblia Hebraica Quinta, the Hebrew University Bible, and the Oxford Hebrew Bible.  Biblia Hebraica Quinta is a diplomatic edition based on the Leningrad Codex.  The Hebrew University Bible is also diplomatic, but based on the Aleppo Codex.  The Oxford Hebrew Bible is an eclectic edition.
caption: 11th-century manuscript of the Hebrew Bible with Targum
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