160 H.G.M. Williamson This major new development in the publication of the text of the Hebrew Bible deserves careful consideration and evaluation. And in view of the fact that later on I shall venture to offer some criticisms, it may be instructive to begin by underlining the extent to which I agree with many of the fundamental principles and procedures. In the first place, and perhaps at the lowest level of engagement, it may be readily accepted that an eclectic edition of the Masoretic Text as known to us from the medieval manuscripts is conceivable. No manuscript is perfect, but it has to be said that very little of practical worth would be gained by the exercise. For example, Leningradensis has a habit of omitting a mappiq, the dot which is used to distinguish the letter he at the end of a word when it is used as a consonant rather than as a vowel letter, at the end of the word H"boG:; see, for instance, Isa 2,15; 30,25; 40,9; Ezek 17,22.24; 21,31 (and cf. Isa 5,16). Why this should be so is unknown; it is not done consistently (see, e.g., Isa 57,7), so that either the scribe tried unsuccessfully to introduce what he considered to be a necessary correction to standard spelling or, more probably, he just frequently made a mistake in the copying of this particular word for some obscure reason. Either way, it would be possible, in an eclectic text, to correct this on the basis of most other masoretic manuscripts. Again, slightly more significantly, there are a few examples of places where the masoretic tradition more generally has failed to recognize reduplicated forms of nouns and so has written them as two words (e.g. Isa 2,20; 61,1; Jer 46,20); these sometimes caused confusion to commentators in antiquity, but they trouble no one today. Thus while such minutiae are of interest to specialists in masoretic studies, they make not a shred of difference to understanding what the text is, so that there remain certain aesthetic attractions in the maintenance of a diplomatic edition even at this level. The general lack of importance of masoretic variations for textual criticism in the sense that we are considering it here was long ago conceded, one senses reluctantly, in a famous article in Biblica by Goshen Gottstein (14), the driving force behind the establishment of the Hebrew University Bible Project. Secondly and far more significantly, we may also readily agree with Hendel that there can now be no doubt that copies of books of the Hebrew Bible varied from one another in innumerable different ways (14) M.H. GOSHEN GOTTSTEIN, “Hebrew Biblical Manuscripts: Their History and Their Place in the HUBP Edition”, Bib 48 (1967) 243-290.