Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia
Example of Textual Transmission
The tree below shows a proposed 'genealogy' of different copies of the Dante's Divine Comedy (completed c. 1321 AD). This genealogy was proposed by a scholar named Petrocchi in 1965. This gives you a sense of how complicated the process of passing a text down through time can be -- even when it's much more 'recent' than our biblical texts!
Tiago Tresoldi, Petrocchi's partial stemma for the Divine Comedy, presented in the introduction to his critical edition (1965). Reproduced in "On Stemmatics and Phylogenetic Methods," The Genealogical World of Phylogenetic Networks (blog), 3 May 2017, accessed 11 Oct 2024, https://phylonetworks.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-stemmatics-and-phylogenetic-methods.html.
Understanding Editions
Understanding Editions
Have you ever wondered why a library might have so many different translations of the same ancient text?
None of the texts we examine as students of the ancient world originate in English (and since we don't really have the single, original copies of any one of them). So we rely on editors and translators to compile the versions of the texts that we read today. From your language studies (whether in Hebrew or elsewhere), you know that there's often more than one way to translate a word or phrase into English! Each edition of a text represents a particular scholar's idea of the best way to convey the text's original meaning into English.
Textual Criticism
Textual criticism is one word for a kind of scholarship that involves tracing the history of a particular version of a text. For example, say you are a scholar working with the Venetus A, one of the most famous copies of Homer's Iliad. Records tell us that a scribe created the Venetus A sometime in the 900s AD, but most scholars think the story we know as the Iliad was created in the 800s BC -- so that's not the original copy!
One way to study the Iliad, then, is to try to figure out -- based on notes on the copy, based on the way the language is used, based on other copies we have of pieces of the Iliad -- when different parts of this version of the Iliad were actually written, and which ones we think might be original. Think of it like a textual multiverse!
Critical Editions
Scholars in many fields often use what are called critical editions --a version of a text like the Iliad or even the Bible that is based on a carefully-chosen combination of sources. Usually, these editions are accompanied by information designed to help us understand (1) which sources were used and (2) why the scholar chose the combination of sources they did -- a commentary, notes, or even a critical apparatus:
To learn more about critical editions, check out the following resources: