Page 263 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS CORRUPTION 243

to ;')D (m N)D), and of nineteen passages in Deuteronomy where
the choice of the holy place is set in the past and the reference to
Shechem is made clear.?"

One is certainly tempted to question how many of these 6000 discrep-
ancies are due to Samaritan alterations, and how many toJewish ones. As
we will see on p. 245, no single authoritative version of the OT existed prior
to at least the first century C.E., let alone an authoritative version that was
being transmitted with any appreciable degree of fidelity. Infer, at least in
the nineteen hundred instances of agreement between the Septuagint and
Samaritan against the Masoretic, that the Jews altered this last text. The
Septuagint came about in the 3rd century E.C.E. under the direction (according
to traditional sources) of six translators from each of the twelve tribes of
Israel. 71 So a minimum of three or four centuries separates the Septuagint
from the earliest possible date for an authoritative edition of the OT. Based
on the deep-rooted enmity betweenJews and Samaritans, and the latter's
insistence that they alone possessed the perfect recension, the probability
of a Samaritan effort aimed at changing their Pentateuch to conform with
theJewish Septuagint seems very remote indeed. Clearly the best conclusion
isone of corruption in the Masoretic text in those nineteen hundred instances,
after the 3rd century B.C.E., to say nothing of the corruptions prior to that
date which must have been incorporated into the Septuagint.

iv. Unintentional Corruptions of the Text

Errors can creep into a text from every conceivable avenue, as even the
most professional copyist will attest. Most are unintentional. In connection
with this OT scholars have devised their own vocabulary for the classi-
fication of these mental lapses. Delving into the most common categories
we find: confusion of similar characters (such as :I and :>, il and n); ditto-
graphy (accidental repetition); haplography (accidental omission when a
character is present as a doublet in a word); homoiote1euton (omission
when two words have identical endings and the scribe skips from the first
to the second, omitting everything in between); errors due to vowels, and
several others." When perusing contemporary research for details regarding

70 ibid, p. 46. Version symbols have been translated and are placed inside square
brackets.
71 For a total of 72 translators. 'Septuagint' translates to 'The Version of the Seventy'
and is commonly denoted as LXX. [Dictiona~y ofthe Bible, p. 347J.
72 Wtirthwein, pp. 108-110.