Bible Review

Josephus’s canon of 22 books no doubt was the same as the traditional Hebrew canon that has been transmitted to us. For the reckoning, see endnote 17.

Hermeneutical rules are the logical principles that may be used to interpret a text—guides to exegesis.

The Palaeo-Hebrew script survives to the present day in manuscripts of the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Jewish character of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the ancestor of the modern Hebrew bookhand, is a derivative of the Aramaic script of the Persian chancelleries.

A gloss is a brief explanatory note or reading either in the margin or between the lines of a manuscript. Often glosses were introduced into the text itself by a scribe who supposed the gloss a correction of the manuscript.

Conflation is the technical term used when two variant readings are combined into one reading in the course of scribal transmission. The scribe thus conflates the manuscripts available to him.

The term “Masoretic” refers to the schools of Masoretes, Jewish biblical scholars of the late Middle Ages, who handled and standardized traditions of the punctuation (including vocalization), accentuation, divisions, etc. of the consonantal (unpointed) text of the medieval Hebrew Bible.

The Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets included (in traditional order) Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. The Murabba‘aÆt Minor Prophets extends from the middle of Joel to the beginning of Zechariah.

That is, the received or traditional text.

By secondary, I refer to errors creeping into the text after the fixation of the text.