The most fundamental question that any translation project has to face is which Hebrew and Greek texts should be used as a base for translating in the first place. When ancient manuscripts differ, as they always do, how should these hundreds of variant readings be handled? The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has opened an entirely new chapter in this debate, since we now have copies of portions of the Hebrew Bible that even predate the Christian era. There are places where the Scrolls support the Septuagint (Greek translation from 2nd century BCE), over against the traditional Hebrew text.

Some years ago  Bible Review (16:04, August 2000) published a spirited debate on this question titled “The Most Orioginal Bible Text: How to Get there.”  Ronald Hendel of University of California-Berkeley and James Sanders, president of the Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center of Claremont Graduate School took up the question. At issue is whether new scholarly editions of the Hebrew Bible should be based on an eclectic text (a composite scholarly creation made up of all the various manuscript traditions), or the Masoretic (Traditional) text, with variants noted in footnotes. As many of you know, I have opted for the Masoretic text, and indeed, the Leningrad Codex, which is the oldest complete edition thereof, as my base text for the Hebrew Bible. I was most pleased to see that Prof. Sanders has mounted a most convincing and eloquent defense of the very method that I had chosen. This is not to say that Prof. Hendel’s arguments are without merit. After all, what he suggests is almost universally accepted by scholars as the basis of our critical New Testament texts. Both methods have strengths as well as liabilities, but I was pleased to see that Prof. Sanders presented such a strong case for his view, one that tends to be a minority opinion these days. Although the magazine Bible Revie The article contains many illustrations, some wonderful photos and graphics, and is an absolutely first-rate presentation of this whole debate.

Where the Original Bible Project differs from most translations is that I will incorporate variants to the Leningrad Codex only in the footnotes, not in the English translation itself, so that the reader will always know just which text he or she is reading at any given point. Most modern English translations (the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh is an exception here) mix all the readings of the various manuscripts into a single English text—which in effect “creates” a modern text that actually does not exist. That is why some have called the Original Bible Project a manuscript edition of the Bible. It allows the reader to “see through” the English text at every level, back to the original manuscripts.