Page 264 - History of The Quranic Text | Kalamullah.Com

244 THE HISTORY OF THE QUR'A:'-lIC TEXT

certain aberrations in old fragments, it is not at all unusual to find th
contemporary author invoking homoioteleuton (for example) to dispe
any notion that the error was deliberate on the scribe's part; this may be
proffered as a potential explanation even if the same omission is present
in other important manuscripts."

v. No Qualms Felt in Altering the Text when there
Appeared to be Adequate Doctrinal Reasons

We should be more concerned with intentional alterations however, as
they are naturally far more serious. Until the Middle Ages the text of the
OT was not yet established," and "before the text of the Old Testament
was officially established, it was not regarded as unalterable". 75Therefore
the scribes and transmitters would occasionally make deliberate alterations
which, regardless of their intentions, served in a very real sense to corrupt
the original text. Parallel manuscripts demonstrate that not even the Mas-
oretic text, intended to safeguard the OT [rom further changes, was immune
to this phenomenon."

Yet the restoration of the early traditional text, reconstructing and
preservingit even where it was open to criticism, is only one of the
marksof (rabbinic) occupationwith the [Masoretic] text.A second mark
reveals an opposite tendency. There is clear evidence thatno qualms were filt in
altering the textwhen there appeared to be adequate doctrinal reasons. 77

What were some of these pressing doctrinal reasons? Occasionally they
were merely linguistic,changing an esoteric word into a more common one.
Other times they involved the removal of religiously offensive wording, or
(most serious of all)the insertion of certain words to champion one possible
interpretation of a verse over all others.78Jewish tradition preserved a partial
record of these textual alterations in notes known as the Tiqqune sopherim and
the Itture sopherim,79 which must of course be relatively late works.

73 SeeWurthwein, p. 154.
74 Seethis work p. 246.
75 Wurthwein, p. Ill.
76 ibid, p. Ill.
77 ibid, p. 17. Italics added.
78 ibid, pp. 111-112.
79 ibid, p. 17.