172 H.G.M. Williamson argument against them. In the case of the Hebrew Bible, however, the history of scholarship is sufficient to demonstrate that the differences between scholars on this ground both over time and within any single period of time are far more extensive than in other fields. Several factors help account for this, and they can only be briefly mentioned, since in principle each requires a full study to itself. (i) In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, critical scholars had little more fresh primary data available to them than had been known for many centuries. The versions were effectively the same as had been available previously, and the riches of Arabic as well as post- Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic had long since been exploited by medieval Jewish scholars from whom, at several removes, the Christian community relearned its Hebrew in later centuries (32). Therefore when a difficulty was encountered in the text which modern thinking did not allow to be solved by traditional methods, the only alternative in most cases was to emend the text, either with reference to the versions, or, as often as not, conjecturally. Many commentaries from that period thus favour emendation to a much greater degree than is common nowadays, though some suggestions made then have in fact been vindicated by more recent discovery and others have been widely adopted as representing the most reasonable solution to the problem. At the same time, however, other commentators, perhaps more cautious or conservative than their colleagues, were far more reluctant to go down this route and still preferred — and indeed added to — explanations by way of internal grammatical, semantic or comparative methods, even though these often seemed rather exceptional. (ii) During the twentieth century the knowledge of previously “lost” Semitic languages was recovered — principally Akkadian and Ugaritic. While work on these languages may have originally been inevitably somewhat uncertain, it has now reached an element of maturity where it may be used sometimes to illuminate passages in the Hebrew Bible that were previously obscure and so had to be emended. This method too, however, has been used sometimes to excess (33), as a (32) There were exceptions to this generalization, of course. Scholars such as J. D. Michaelis and W. Gesenius certainly sought to bring new light to bear on Hebrew lexicography from the other Semitic languages then known to them, but their approach was not standard at the time. (33) An important contribution, which (contrary to some scholars’ statements) was not opposed to the philological approach in principle but which sought to bring some degree of order and balance to the research in question, was J. BARR, Comparative Philology and the Text of the Old Testament (Oxford 1968).