It was the way the text pasted into wordpress. I tried to catch them all — there were dozens. Not surprised i missed one.

Ok, read your post now. Very thorough. You hit a lot of the same points I did when I started writing a review. But the review became too technical and i decided the issue itself was too interesting to waste by reviewing a book. So now I have both a streamlined popular version appearing in Bible and Interpretation in a couple weeks and a beefed up version hopefully coming out in a few months in a journal. Fun stuff.

Thanks for the link to Wilson-Wright’s review. I hadn’t seen that. I will check out your post; sounds like it confirms what Ron Leprohon told me as well as what Stephen Quirk told him (for me).

For anybody reading the comments: Aren Wilson-Wright has a review at BibleInterp that can be accessed here:

Click to access Petrovich%20for%20BI.pdf

I also responded to some of the fatal phonological problems DP’s book suffers from (as well as his highly problematic reliance on old photographs) on my own blog a while back.

Mr. Oudenampsen,
Interestingly, I just met Stan Porter at a conference. He was chairing a season at which I read most of my eclecticism essay. I was surprised to find his response to positive, since I wasn’t aware of the work you mentioned.

Dear Mr. Maignial,

Yes, I understand your concern. This particularly conversation is about use at higher levels of learning, i.e., in seminary or graduate level text courses. For the level of student you’re talking about, I am similarly disturbed. And I readily admit that in the introductory BH textbook we’ve published, we rewrite BH texts to suit the level of learning for each lesson. That is, I believe, the same impulse that has motivated your text. You remove issues that will prohibit the smooth reading of the text. But I confess that I find this problematic for something that is categorized as a text edition — whereas in our communicative learning oriented textbook, we have very specific grammatical and vocabulary constraints (dictated by what has been learned up to that point in the textbook) for each time we rewrite the biblical text, what goal did you set for your text? And even apart from scribal errors or even places where you’ve judged a non-Hebrew version to preserve a better form and so swapped into your text a different Hebrew verb, the resulting text in many places will remain to difficult for 99% of the users (e.g., I just finished reading Isaiah 41 with a friend and it can slow down the most competent scholar). All this to say, unless you dumb down the Hebrew to say, a second year BH reading level, you will never be able to produce something that will work for “pedagogical or/and devotional purposes”. Let’s face it: outside of Genesis and Ruth, the Hebrew Bible wasn’t written for kids. That is to say, in the majority of texts, whether Isaiah, Job, Leviticus, or even 1 Samuel, it will always be the domain of “ultra-competent” readers, who hopefully by the time they reach that level will not want anything to do with a modified text. So though I sympathize with your reasons and pedagogical concerns, I still don’t see the point of an eclectic text edition.

Kindly, RDH

Dear Mr Holmstedt,

I am Pierre Maignial, the editor of biblia-mirecurensia.com/en. The reason why I have dedicated « a heck of a lot to work », to the development of Biblia Mirecurensia (to quote your kind assessment of my endeavours) is that I feel a deep concern for the future of Bible reading in the original languages. In that spirit, I designed Biblia Mirecurensia as nothing more than a reading tool, which features an eclectic text meant to boost internalization and motivation, both for students that must progress in their acquisition and for seasoned readers who want to focus on devotional reading.

In the course of my 40-year long teaching career, I have witnessed a dramatic downturn in the students’ (and even the adults’) ability to approach and analyse any kind of written text (even in their own language!) – although the texts they were confronted with were formatted in a reasonably attractive manner, with some sort of meaning-oriented page layout, no mistakes in spelling, few obscurities of expression, and so on. Now the problem as I see it is that, once they have overcome the initial morphological and lexical hurdles of biblical Hebrew, the students will have to face the tediousness of diplomatic editions that are not in the least conducive to reading. Submitted to the pressures and constraints of a busy pastor’s ministry or other demanding commitments, the would-be hebraists will soon have neither the time, nor the motivation to delve into the Masoretic text as it stands – just clicking over a word in some sort of software will provide the comfortable delusion of approaching the ancient text without actually reading it in depth. This unwillingness/inability to use the scholarly editions of the Masoretic text can only grow as more and more students have begun their learning process with (at last !!) living language approaches : the felt situation will then be something like having to revert to candlelight whereas you were trained to read in the glorious sunshine of halogen lamps …

I shall not engage into a debate over the « uselessness for linguistic or historical work » of an eclectic text within the framework of academic research. My contention, however, is that an eclectic text is legitimate for pedagogical or/and devotional purposes, just as music teachers or students are familiar with what they call « arrangements » of major pieces of music – not replacing the great masters’ original works of art but allowing appropriation of their music thanks to a reasoned erasing of the technicalities. The main objection to what I am championing here is the argument of « facility », but I think that this argument should be used with extreme care as it cuts both ways …
My great fear, in view of the dwindling numbers of students of biblical languages, is that we might end up one day with ultra-competent scholars in the field of Masoretic studies at the top of the pyramid, with nobody to constitute the base of it. Or, to apply to biblical scholarship the cruel assessment that was made by the famous French poet Charles Péguy (referring to Kant’s philosophical system) : « Indeed its hands are pure – but it has no hands! » …

Thank you very much for this interesting ‘excurs’. As a theology and semitic languages student myself, I really enjoyed it. ;) It might be good to point out that the principle of an “eclectic” text is nowadays more discussed by scholars in New Testament studies too. To take Stanley E. Porter’s recent book “How we Got the New Testament” (2013) as an example, he has a written a paragraph on this question (“Eclectic or Single Manuscript?”, pp. 72-75). He writes: If [it is correct that] the [text of the NA27] is 99.5 percent the same [as the two major codexes] – that is, with all of the other evidence that has been brought to bear, including papyri and all else, only 0.5 percent different – it seems as if we are already in essence using the text of the two major codexes.” (p. 75). He then proposes to start our research from these original autographs instead of a reconstructed 21st century text. So this whole principle of an “eclectic” text is more widely debated in other fields as well; and for good reasons too, just like the ones you mentioned in this article. Thanks for that!