Kristin De Troyer

This might have been a great book -- if it were three times as long and written by somebody else.

Part of the problem is that author Kristin De Troyer is Flemish but writing in English. It does at times affect how she writes. But the real problem is not her English; it's the way she organizes her thoughts.

First things first: The Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament") as we now have it was copied by Jewish scribes for two thousand or so years in manuscript. Starting in the Roman period, they exerted strict control, and the text never changed at all. But in the centuries before that, that control was not exerted, and there is every reason to believe that the text was edited, rewritten, corrupted. How do we know? Because the "Old Greek" text (commonly known as the Septuagint, but in this book usually OG) often translates a text other than this late Hebrew text (hereafter MT, after the title of the scribes who copied it).

But which is closer to the original, MT or OG? Or is it somewhere in between?

This is the key question of Hebrew Bible criticism (at least if you care about the text of the Hebrew Bible; mainstream Judaism has decided to follow MT whether it's original or not). And De Troyer is willing to tackle the issue head on -- but she never really explains textual criticism. She just plows into four cases where there are questions about the relationship between MT, OG, and the original text -- in Joshua, two instances of Esther (which was translated twice), and in Ezra (which again was translated twice in the OG, once as "Ezra" and once as "I Esdras"). Her conclusions are diverse: In Joshua, the OG represents an earlier phase of the Hebrew text than found in MT. In I Esdras, the extant Hebrew text differs recensionally from I Esdras (that is, there was a rewrite in the Hebrew). In Esther, the situation is too complicated to cover in a short review, but De Troyer's suggestions are interesting and provocative.

That doesn't mean they're right. For example, most of her whole rigamarole about Ezra/I Esdras goes away if one makes one simple change: If one assumes that the "Artaxerxes" of Ezra is in fact Cambyses (the king who preceded Darius I in actual history) rather than Artaxerxes I (the grandson of Darius I), then almost all the problems go away. The order of chapters in I Esdras is still better than in Ezra, but all the other changes could simply have been made by a smart translator. So De Troyer is assuming a large-scale change to solve a very local problem -- generally not a good procedure.

And there is so much that she doesn't address. Where are the differences between OG and MT biggest? In 1-2 Samuel, Jeremiah, and Job. In the first two cases -- certainly in the first case! -- OG represents a better text; MT of Samuel is badly corrupt, and MT of Jeremiah has been padded out by about 15%. So the biggest use of OG is to repair these two corrupted books. (Job appears to have been corrupt before MT or OG came along; it's beyond repair.) Yet De Troyer never addresses these major problems. She presents a series of interesting cases (MT more original, OG more original, and "it's complicated") -- but, since she doesn't really explain textual criticism, one has to be an expert to figure out what she's talking about. And, to make matters worse, she presents her arguments in a very fragmented order, making them almost impossible to understand. In the case of Joshua, I think she's right. In the case of I Esdras, I think she's right about the problem but wrong about the solution. As regards Esther, I threw up my hands. Her presentation was too complicated to offer a coherent case.

I hope someone will someday come along and turn these ideas into a bigger book that explains more clearly -- and also hauls in Samuel, and Jeremiah, and the whole issue of fixing MT based on OG. To create an English edition on this basis would be a great gift to those interested in Bible history.… (meer)