Do We Need A New Bible? 169 accepting the hazardously hypothetical nature of aspects of this programme, Hendel maintains that it will be a valuable resource for scholars, who do not otherwise always have ready access to this material in one place. However much we may agree with aspects of this, the results as presented are astonishing, for we find that the column purporting to have the Hebrew Vorlage of the Greek text is printed, wherever it runs parallel with MT (which is mostly the case), as a fully vocalized and punctuated text. Only those words or phrases which are judged to differ from MT are printed unpointed (29). This policy seems to me to be grossly irresponsible. Not only does it fall foul of all the remarks already made above about the problems of confusing two historical levels within the text, but in this case it further compounds the problem by presenting a text which we know simply never existed. This cannot be explained away as a matter of accidentals since it is not preserving as a perhaps unfortunate necessity some inherited aspect of the text. It is deliberately to present to those who probably are not able to make the distinction (scholars, it may be hoped, will be exempt from this danger) a purported critical text which cannot have ever been in existence. A further problem concerns a number of the other texts which it seems will be treated in this same manner. Although for Jeremiah we at least have a complete Septuagint text, it seems from his remarks that Hendel intends that many other texts which happen to appear in variant forms at Qumran will be treated in the same way. But in these cases we have only very slight and partial evidence of what the texts were, so that the presentation is in danger of being misleading simply because so little of the material survives, and in addition it is far from clear whether we are in a position to judge whether these texts were really Biblical texts in the first place. The title is arguably anachronistic in any case, but it calls for fine judgment whether the material was regarded by any community as scriptural or whether it was rather liturgical, anthological, orientated towards study only, or whatever. Furthermore it is difficult to judge whether an addition made for whatever reason in a single manuscript can be said to constitute part of a Biblical archetype (though it remains to be seen how the editors will actually handle such cases) (30). In my opinion this policy of parallel (29) The same applies to the sample of 1 Kgs 11,1-8 as presented by Joosten, so this is clearly the policy of the project as a whole. (30) Cf. TOV, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, 305.