Farewell to Textual Criticism?

Instead of abandoning textual criticism, scholars should embrace the productive tension between composition and transmission as a source of deeper insight into the Hebrew Bible’s textual history.

By Ronald Hendel
Norma and Sam Dabby Professor Emeritus of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies 
University of California, Berkeley
November 2025

In his inimitable style, Thomas Lambdin once said in class, “If it’s a long evening and the television is bad, why don’t we do some text criticism?” This is a layered criticism, parodying textual criticism as a learned drudgery, poking fun at a colleague, and teaching the students to be critical of text criticism’s assumptions and claims. I don’t think he was ready to bury textual criticism, but to deflate its self-importance. To my surprise, my colleague Molly Zahn is now ready to bury it. She announces “a new paradigm for the study of textual history” to replace textual criticism, which she finds to be intellectually indefensible in the post-Qumran era.[1]

         The reason for her abandonment of the current practice of textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible is that, as she writes, “in the ancient Jewish literary context composition and transmission were indistinguishable,” and hence the focus of textual criticism on a book’s scribal transmission is vacuous. She proposes in its place a “holistic” approach to textual history, in which there is no distinction between composition and transmission. Although she doesn’t give a clear example of this new paradigm, it rejects the production of critical editions and the adjudication of variants in favor of something like a biblical and parabiblical polyglot, accompanied by a commentary that attends to “the origins and significance of the various readings” without attention to their textual relationships. The new paradigm can begin to be constructed, she suggests, with the Accordance program and lots of text modules.

         Her underlying rationale, she writes, is that “each stage of the text contributes to its meaning and significance.” This is unobjectionable, if somewhat vague (significance to whom and when?). Her primary innovation is to exclude the study of the earliest inferable textual state of a given book, because it straddles the impossible distinction between composition and transmission. She even suggests that engaging in this study is unethical, since it “undercuts” the book’s pluriformity. This seems to me an unwarranted exclusion and judgment. Let me explain, at least in part,[2] by going back to Julius Wellhausen, who perceived this impossible boundary and found it to be generative.

         In his early monograph on the text of Samuel, which established a new standard for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, Wellhausen commented:

Modifications of the original core and reworking of small passages, changes of individual words, and minor insertions … are inextricably linked to the genesis of the historical books, and it is difficult to find the boundary where literary criticism ends and textual criticism begins.[3]

(Notably, this is the earliest use of the term Literarkritik, which Wellhausen formed by analogy with Textkritik.) This fuzzy boundary provides the rationale for Zahn rejecting both Literarkritik and Textkritik in favor of her proposed paradigm. Interestingly, it makes Wellhausen turn from Textkritik to Literarkritik, in the process creating a more expansive version of both. He later writes: “I was led from textual criticism to literary criticism because it sometimes was impossible to find the boundary where the work of the glossator ended and that of the writer began.”[4] Having encountered this impossible boundary, he doesn’t dispense with Textkritik or Literarkritik, but creates a dialogue between them as complementary ways to navigate the history of biblical books.

         Wellhausen’s creative approach to this conundrum has obviously been forgotten, as scholars since have tended to specialize in Textkritik, Literarkritik, or one or another subfield, often proceeding as if they were hermetically sealed. But Wellhausen knew better. I suggest that instead of dispensing with critical editions and source- and redaction-criticism (we may call the latter’s focus the avant-texte, with French textual critics),[5] we pay attention to their overlaps and complementarity. Impossible boundaries can be a stimulus for innovative scholarship without abandoning the nexus of well-warranted scholarship that abuts them.