Do We Need A New Bible? 173 result of which some scholars have tended to ignore or belittle it, but as tends to be the way of such matters some proposals have become part of the accepted fabric of our work. Here too, however, there remain wide differences of opinion in terms of degree. The importance of this for textual criticism should not be overlooked, however, especially in view of the fact that this is often evidence of a pertinent nature which may have already been forgotten by those responsible for our earliest additional evidence, such as the translators of the Septuagint. The result of these circumstances is that there remains to this day a considerable divide among scholars as to the relative weight to put on philological conjecture and textual alteration (34), a topic which again cannot be indicated in the production of a critical text alone. (iii) A final consideration is the new evidence, already mentioned previously, of the impact of the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of the many topics which could properly be mentioned under this heading, it must suffice to observe that here we now have Hebrew texts of parts of the Bible which pre-date our manuscripts of the Masoretic text by about a thousand years, that on the one hand we cannot but marvel at how similar the consonantal text is in many cases, but equally that there are important examples here of textual pluriformity which create both opportunities and challenges to the textual critic. This is probably the factor above all others which has stimulated scholars such as Hendel to believe that we now have the means at our disposal to prepare an eclectic critical text. At the same time, however, caution needs to be expressed about the way these texts are sometimes cited in such discussions. Many of the texts have survived in only an extremely fragmentary state, so that it is quite misleading to imply that we now have a fresh antique form of witness to the whole Bible; in many cases it applies to only a small fraction. Secondly, and partly in consequence of this, it is equally uncertain that all the fragments which are considered to be Biblical texts really were so. As already mentioned, Biblical text may be used in many different sorts of composition, including liturgy, anthology, study material, extracts, and so on. Indeed, voices have been raised even in regard to some of the more substantial scrolls, such as the Psalms Scroll, to question their (34) For an interesting personal reflection by a pupil on the difference in Oxford’s Oriental Institute in just this regard between Professor H. Danby and Professor G.R. Driver, see J.A. EMERTON, “Comparative Semitic Philology and Hebrew Lexicography”, Congress Volume, Cambridge 1995 (ed. J.A. EMERTON; VTS 66; Leiden 1997) 1-24.