Do We Need A New Bible? 163 considered and judgments should be made according to the usual text- critical criteria. Despite the differences between the nature of the evidence available for the Hebrew Bible from most other texts from antiquity, this principle is to be endorsed. Rhetorically, the point that is being made is that in this work there is no place for factors of religious or other such dogmatism to intrude. In evaluating the evidence, preference should not be afforded against better evidence to the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint or the Vulgate, for instance, each of which has paramount authority in one religious circle or another. That entirely acceptable adoption of the slogan that the text of the Hebrew Bible should be treated like any other should not be confused, however, with suggesting that the text of the Hebrew Bible is itself like any other, because it is not. The Masoretic Text we have and with which we work — the text which the Oxford Hebrew Bible will apparently print unchanged in cases where there is no reason to favour an alternative reading — is not in itself a unified entity in the way that in principle most other texts are. It has developed in the post- composition period in at least two major ways. In the first place the spelling of many words has changed over the centuries in ways that we can largely trace by comparing the Hebrew of the Biblical text with that of Hebrew inscriptions contemporary with the times when the Bible was first being written. This includes principally the addition of vowel letters, that is to say, to an originally purely consonantal text certain consonants could be added to serve also as vowels. Moreover, at least one of these vowel letters itself was changed on most of its occurrences, namely the replacement of an h at the end of a word with a w to serve as the vowel o; a final h in the Masoretic Text now usually serves only as a vowel a. (It only adds to the fun that there are some places, perhaps as many as fifty, where this alteration has not been carried out (15)). Moreover, it should be noted that the addition of the other vowel letters has not, for the most part, been undertaken consistently (16), and that interestingly some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, (15) For discussion and examples, see GK §§7c, 91e; JM §§ 7b, 94h; I. YOUNG, “Observations on the Third Person Masculine Singular Pronominal Suffix –H in Hebrew Biblical Texts”, HS 42 (2001) 225-242 (with further bibliography). My comments above refer only to the Masoretic understanding, of course, and are not intended to engage with the disputed question of the earlier pronunciation of the form. (16) See the detailed discussion of this complicated topic in J. BARR, The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible (Schweich Lectures; Oxford 1989).