Resources for Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible

I’ve just located a wonderful series of blog entries on Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible online through my own complete laziness and the hard work of someone else! (Hat Tip: Suzanne McCarthy at Better Bibles Blog in her entry Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible. Suzanne’s entry is worthwhile itself for its list of resources.)

This series covers textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible in much more detail than I have here and with excellent references. I’m sure I’ll go on popularizing the material, but Tyler Williams at Codex has now provided something to which I can refer those interested in spending a little more time. (I’ve found that the attention span of most church members on textual criticism is somewhere between a paragraph and a page, for which I don’t blame them, even though the topic fascinates me.

In any case, the series begins with Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible – An Introduction (TCHB 1), and the most recent entry is The History of the Biblical Text. I list them this way, because if you start with number six, you will find links to all the previous entries. If you’re just interested in the basics of what textual criticism is and why we need to do it, you can just read the first article. The interevening articles are excellent–just follow the links.