Do We Need A New Bible? 171 Samaritan Pentateuch that is precisely a subject which cannot be at all certain, for they were more or less bound to render as plural even if their Hebrew Vorlage was singular, so that the apparent battery of textual support is actually far weaker than might appear. Crawford then defends a Masoretic word-order against the unanimous contrary impression given by all the other witnesses to the text, and finally she conjecturally deletes a word even though she admits that its presence in the text is supported by every single textual witness. Now in presenting this summary, my purpose is not to discuss whether Crawford’s conclusions are correct but to give an indication of the several procedures necessary for textual criticism in relation to the Hebrew Bible which are simply incapable of being properly presented in a textual apparatus of the conventional sort. The length of time of scribal transmission before we arrive at complete texts in our possession, the fact that most of our other complete witnesses are translations, and the difficulties quite often of knowing whether the problems we face are textual or, in fact, philological (given our far from perfect knowledge of Classical Hebrew), together with the fact already stressed that the texts we have inherited combine forms of the language as much as a thousand years apart, conspire to make textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible a rather different exercise from that of most other extensive texts which have reached us at second hand from antiquity. Because of this, the processes involved certainly include the choices between separate textual witnesses of a conventional nature, but they do not, and I would say they cannot, stop there, so that any attempt to produce a critical text as though the exercise were the same as, say, for the text of the New Testament is seriously misleading. As we have seen, it shields from the view of the inexperienced reader precisely the judgments of the scholar which are most determinative in arriving at his or her conclusions. Hendel’s first argument in favour of his project thus seems to me to deconstruct itself in practice. This brings us secondly to an aspect of textual criticism which is usually rightly mentioned by commentators but whose force is perhaps not adequately understood at this particular juncture. Although textual criticism follows certain well-established guidelines and has various principles or rules which should always be considered, the fact is that there is an inevitable subjective element which means that scholars will almost always disagree with one another at this point or that. This affects the publication of all critical texts and is not by any means an