Textual Criticism of the Old Testament: Development

Differences between Manuscripts

When textual criticism as a discipline first began, research was mainly focused on the differences between Hebrew manuscripts and translations. If there was a discrepancy between two manuscripts, or between manuscripts and translations, research was done into which variant was likely to be the original. In this way, scholars tried to discover which variants had developed later.

Problematic Words and Expressions

In the latter half of the 19th century, the focus expanded to problems in the Hebrew text for which there were no variants. From the context, it was thought that certain words or phrases could not be original. For example:

difficult or incomprehensible words;
unusual sentence constructions;
style and meter;
words or phrases that should, from the context, be considered to be later additions.

However, there was a lot of discussion about the proposed changes. There were many amendments that scholars could not agree on. Not all scholars had such a critical attitude to the Masoretic text and there have always been those who were more reticent about amending the Hebrew text.