Many people who are not specialists assume that there is one text of the Bible and that all we need to do is make translations. This is far from the case. We have multiple texts for the Old Testament, most of which come from quite a while after the original manuscripts.

For those who are interested — and all my students should be interested — Tyler F. Williams at Codex has just finished a series on textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Textual criticism is the process by which we compare and group manuscripts in order to decide which textual variations are the earliest. In other words, it is how we decide what the Bible said (or get as close as we can). It is a three part series and I encourage you to read it all. I especially want to draw your attention to the third entry, which discusses the actual manuscripts of the Old Testament that we have.

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