I highly recommend acquiring the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia If you have an interest in the philology of the Hebrew Bible, and let’s be honest who doesn’t? Then you need to aquire a Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS)! Why you ask? Good question! Well, one of the many interesting features of the BHS is its apparatus. For example, if you turn to Genesis 38:9 in the BHS (or page 62) you and you look at the apparatus on 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 =(underscores the reading in the Leningrad codex)
mlt ＝multi / many Mss＝Manuscripts Edd ＝Editions
So what? What does that mean?
First of all, this means that Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia diplomatically perseveres the textual reading found in the Leningrad Codex. In other words, לאֹ 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 Codes apparently differ from the vast majority of manuscripts. And, it is up to the reader to decide if the Leningrad’s reading represents an alternative tradition, an original reading, a scribal mistake, or a correction. The Leningrad’s reading is similar to one found early in Gen 19:2 but this neither proves nor disproves anything it simply shows that the scribe used this form.
Gen 38:16a sic L, mlt Mss Edd ל sine dageš
Notice, the BHS and L have לִּ֔י
but, many manuscripts and edition have the lamed ‘sine'(without) the Dagesh
Gen 38:18a ut 16a || b ut 16aut= as verse 16
(this probably means that the issue in verse 16 in regards to the Lamed and dagesh is similar to the issue in verse 18)
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!