I highly recommend acquiring the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia if you have an interest in the philology of the Hebrew Bible. One of the many interesting features of the BHS is its critical apparatus. For example, if you turn to Genesis 38:9 in the BHS (p. 62) and look at the apparatus at the bottom of the page, you will find the following: Gen 38:9a sic L, mlt Mss Edd לאֹ
Okay so let’s parse the shorthand notes above:
sic L = thus in L, indicating the reading of Codex Leningradensis
mlt = many Mss = manuscripts Edd = editions
So what? What does that mean?
First of all, this means that the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia diplomatically preserves the textual reading found in the Leningrad Codex. In other words, לאֹ is present in many Hebrew Bible manuscripts and modern editions, while the Leningrad Codex has a different pointing, namely לֹּ֥א. The niqqudot (vowel points) as well as the taʿamei (accents) in the Leningrad Codex apparently differ here from many other manuscripts and editions. It is then up to the reader to consider whether the Leningrad reading reflects an alternative tradition, a scribal feature, or another textual phenomenon. A similar form appears earlier in Genesis 19:2, although that parallel by itself neither proves nor disproves anything.
Gen 38:16a sic L, mlt Mss Edd ל sine dageš
Notice that the BHS and L have לִּ֔י, but many manuscripts and editions have the lamed sine dagesh (without the dagesh).
Gen 38:18a ut 16a || b ut 16a — ut = as in verse 16
This indicates that the issue in verse 18 is the same as the one noted in verse 16 with regard to the lamed and dagesh.
Thanks for bringing attention to these kinds of issues. Interesting to find 3 such issues in such close proximity. Just to clarify, when you say the following:
לאֹ [without a dagesh in its L] [in Gen 38:9] is present in many Hebrew Bible manuscripts and modern editions of the Hebrew Bible but, the Leningrad Codex has a different reading namely: לֹּ֥א. The nikuddot (vowel points) as wells the ta`amei (accents) in the Leningrad Codex apparently differ from the vast majority of manuscripts.
I assume that here you are not necessarily offering your own opinion on the issue, you are merely translating and expanding BHS’s terse “sic L, mlt Mss Edd לאֹ”.
A comment on your translation: I’m not sure “mlt Mss” implies a majority, much less a vast one.
A more substantive comment, on what BHS is saying:
Readers should be aware that notes like this in BHS reflect only the best that pre-modern European scholarship had to offer. Keep in mind that BHS was first completed in the decade of 1967 to 1977, and even at that time it probably lagged the latest scholarship. Publications usually can’t avoid lagging the latest scholarship, but I wonder whether particularly the BHS editors might not have been much engaged, at that time, with scholarship being done in Israel, and particularly done in Hebrew.
(As far as I know no one really knows what changed in the printings of BHS from 1977 up to the latest (1997), but I think we’re pretty sure that whatever the changes were, they were minimal.)
Pre-modern scholarship was characterized by the use of a large number of manuscripts of what today would be considered low quality. I.e. we have seen a shift towards quality rather than quantity from those days. Quality is hard to assess, but roughly by low quality we mean “not reflecting the early Masoretic witnesses.”
There is also an issue with regard to redundancy in pre-modern scholarship. There is a tricky judgment call to be made as to whether a manuscript offers “independent confirmation” of a reading or whether it is one of a bunch of related manuscripts that offer only a kind of “group think”.
An edition I work on called MAM, which, unlike BHS, reflects the best that modern scholarship has to offer, has a different comment on this dagesh.
לֹּ֥א =ל,ל1,ש,ק3,ו (למ״ד דגושה) וכמו כן בתיגאן; וכך אצל דותן, ברויאר ומג״ה (וקורן). אבל אין דגש ברוב הדפוסים. · הערת המקליד
This translates to (roughly):
לֹּ֥א appears with a lamed in these five manuscripts: ל,ל1,ש,ק3,ו and likewise in Yemenite manuscripts. It also appears with a dagesh in the printed editions of Dotan, Breuer and Miqraot Gedolot HaKeter (and Koren). But there is no dagesh in most other printed editions. This word is noted as exceptional [presumably because of its dagesh] in WLC.
See https://bdenckla.github.io/MAM-with-doc/A1-Genesis.html#c38v9.
Greetings bdenckla,
Your assumption is correct.
“mlt Mss” is rather vague. How many? What type of text? What age of text? and so on
This sounds very interesting! Thank you for introducing the MAM!