Do We Need A New Bible? 157 Although the two editions thus differ, their underlying policy is comparable, namely to reproduce the text of an important medieval manuscript of the Hebrew text and to relegate to the apparatus all reporting and evaluation of variants from whatever period, as well as conjectures for emendation or the adoption of what may be considered a superior reading from antiquity. In this regard the presentation of the Hebrew Bible differs from the scholarly editions of other texts from antiquity, whether biblical, such as the Greek text of the New Testament and, indeed, of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible known as the Septuagint, or other, such as the Greek and Latin classics. In these cases it has long been standard practice for the editor to gather all the evidence available to him or her, such as different manuscripts, citations in other works and so on, and then to produce what he or she regards as the probable original form of the text — a process which may well also include some conjectural emendation of passages which are deemed to be corrupt but for which no reading has survived that seems to give a satisfactory solution. The apparatus in such an edition documents the evidence from all the available sources while the printed text does not represent any one of those sources in its entirety. What is more, in the case of classical texts it is far from unknown for the editor to incorporate decisions about later editorial activity and so to omit sections which are deemed not to derive from the original author. The result is known as an eclectic text, whereas in the case of the standard Hebrew Bible editions it is known as a diplomatic text. In recent decades the oddity of the different ways in which these texts are being edited has become more apparent, not least since the discovery and now complete publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These scrolls date from about a thousand years prior to the manuscripts which I have mentioned so far, and so take us back well over half way to the time of original composition of the biblical books. Included among the scrolls are many manuscripts of biblical books, admittedly not complete by any means (with the exception of one almost complete scroll of Isaiah) and indeed in many cases fragmentary in the extreme. But they are of vital importance to the textual critic in demonstrating on the one hand that these works have not been changed or suffered damage in the intervening centuries to such an extent as to make the work of textual criticism worthless in the first place, and on the other that there are innumerable larger or smaller differences which call for careful evaluation. While many are matters of spelling and the like and