Excerpt from The Witness of the Vulgate, Peshitta and Septuagint to the Text of Zephaniah
Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible that it is accepted by most moderns. He himself does not accept it, but holds that the cus tom of consigning manuscripts that had been damaged by the tooth of time, by fire, or by water, or that were found to contain more than a certain number of mistakes, to the ao-called genizah, which was generally a room in the cellar of a synagogue, is suffi cient to explain all the phenomena. This thesis, whether true or not, offers striking proof that the present Hebrew text gives but scant aid in tracing its own history beyond a certain point, or in fixing its earliest form. Moreover, there are but few manuscripts, of which none are very old, and textual types - the chief material for the criticism of texts - are thus not to be found.' But it is a cardinal principle of criticism that to recover the true text of an ancient document it is first necessary to know its history; and that manuscripts, although the text which they contain is undated and unlocalized, generally furnish the primary data for reconstruct ing this history with the help of versions, which serve in a sec ondary capacity to fix the time and place of origin of the differ ent textual types that the manuscripts present. In the Old Tes tament, however, there are no types of text in regard to which versions can be made to indicate a choice, but they themselves become the principal data. Instead of being called on to show from which particular type of two or more existing types it was made, a version must surrender the text on which it was based, in order that it may then be decided whether that text agrees with or differs from the single Hebrew textual type. Because a version must thus itself yield the text from which it was made, Old Testament Criticism is complicated by all the variable factors necessarily connected with translation and translators.
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