Do We Need A New Bible? 165 presentation and are more susceptible to scribal revision in all ages”(19). Hendel uses this distinction to justify effective ignoring of issues of spelling, vocalization and punctuation. They become merely part of his “copy-text” which will be reproduced unless there is reason for change. And so what we find is that we effectively have a reprint of Leningradensis but that where for good reason a variant reading or emendation is preferred, the word or words appear in an unvocalized form. Apart from obvious possible objections that this results in a totally un-unified text, which seems contrary to the very notion of a critical edition, I believe that more fundamentally it glosses over serious issues which arise from the fact that the so-called copy-text is itself the combination of linguistic levels that are as much as a millennium apart. The two examples I shall now give to illustrate this may seem relatively minor for most purposes, but the ignoring of them is to reflect a deep failure to understand the nature of the texts we are dealing with and hence the very fundamentals of the text-critical enterprise. (i) There are instances where there is good reason to suppose that the vocalization is mistaken even though the consonantal text is sound. In some cases, at least, the mistake may have been deliberate, as a device to cover over what later orthodoxy found theologically difficult, but this is not always so. A nice example where precisely this explanation is possible but not certain, occurs at Isa 7,11. Inviting king Ahaz to ask for a sign from God in order to help him trust the divine promise, Isaiah says, according to an unidiomatic rendering of the Masoretic vocalization, “Ask a sign from the Lord your God; make a request deep or make (it) high upwards”. This just about makes sense, though one would at least have expected a suffix on “request” so as to read “your request”. This, at any rate, is how most of the main versions took it. Symmachus, Theodotion and Aquila, three important later Greek recensions (to which Hendel does not refer at all, so far as I can see), however, translated the word “request” by “to Hades” (eij" a{dhn), evidently presupposing an alternative vocalization: hl;aov] in place of hl;a;v]; the Vulgate is in agreement: in profundum inferni. In view of the much better parallel phrasing which results, this has for long been adopted by nearly all commentators and translations; cf. NRSV: “let it (19) HENDEL, “Oxford Hebrew Bible”, 343, with reference to W.W. GREG, “The Rationale of Copy-Text”, cited from a reprint edited by J. ROSENBLUM, Sir William Wilson Greg. A Collection of his Writings (Lanham 1998) 213-228