164 H.G.M. Williamson which as physical objects are far earlier in date than the Masoretic manuscripts, are more liberal in their use of such vowel letters, so suggesting that they reflect a later phase of the textual development at that point. In the second place, however, the Masoretic Text has also been provided with vowel points and punctuation marks, which will mostly be retained in the proposed edition, even though they were added to the text many hundreds of years, and in some cases perhaps even as much as a thousand years, after the initial composition. In other words, even at this very basic level, the text of the Hebrew Bible is a composite, and this inevitably complicates the work of textual criticism in ways which it seems to me Hendel has not adequately addressed. We need to look at this a little more closely, therefore. Hendel’s stated aim in this new edition is to “approximate in its critical text the textual ‘archetype,’ by which I mean the ‘earliest inferable textual state’” (17). Later he speaks similarly about recon- structing “the earliest or more original readings, approximating the archetype … that generated the extant textual evidence” (p. 331) and about the point at which “the process of textual production became the process of textual transmission” (p. 332). Without going into detail about matters which he admits are unattainable, this clearly means that he is aiming for a form of the text that at least predates the Septuagint; there is no suggestion, as has occasionally been mooted elsewhere, of a text as it might have been at the time when the New Testament was written, which certainly approximates far more closely to the stabilized text which became the Masoretic Text (18). Given that aim, which of course is quite uncontroversial, one would suppose that the Oxford Hebrew Bible would be an unvocalized text with as near as can be approximated archaic spellings. But in fact this is far from the case. Hendel here appeals to the work of Greg, a textual critic of English Renaissance literature, to introduce a distinction between “the ‘substantive’ readings, i.e. the sequence of words, which are the focus for the textual critic, and the ‘accidentals’, matters such as spelling and punctuation, which pertain to form or (17) HENDEL, “Oxford Hebrew Bible”, 329; the words he cites are from E. J. KENNEY, “Textual Criticism”, Encyclopaedia Britannica (15th edn; Chicago, IL 1984) XVIII, 191. (18) See, for instance, B.S. CHILDS, Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture (Philadelphia, PA 1979) 84-106.