Rewriting the Sacred Text

Though most treatments of the historical development of the Hebrew Bible focus almost exclusively on Hebrew witnesses, Old Greek witnesses paint a picture of the growth of the Bible that is both fascinating and diverse. Four different patterns of development are examined and evaluated in this study: a rewritten Hebrew biblical text; a proto-Masoretic biblical text; a rewritten Greek biblical text; and a lost Hebrew Vorlage. Readers who think that the Bible was composed in Hebrew and then translated into Greek and other languages in a more or less linear fashion will be surprised to see the complex course that many biblical witnesses traveled between original composition and inclusion in the Jewish or Christian canons of Scripture. Paperback edition is available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org)