The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the "Editor" in Biblical Criticism.

• Author: Radine, Jason
• Position: Book review

The Edited Bible: The Curious History of the "Editor" in Biblical Criticism. By JOHN VAN SETERS. Winona Lake, Indiana: EISENBRAUNS, 2006. Pp. xvi + 428. $49.50.

In this book John Van Seters takes on major issues of both terminology and models of biblical composition throughout the history of biblical criticism. The thesis of the book is that the term "editor" has been expanded in biblical studies from the role of a conservative preserver of texts to include a wide variety of compositional and authorial roles, so that the term loses any consistent meaning. Van Seters reconstructs the history of the problem, tracing it back to eighteenth-century connections between the fields of classical and biblical studies.

As Van Seters presents it, early classical scholars such as F. A. Wolf viewed the final form of the Homeric epics as the product of the Alexandrian editors who made text-critical notations in their copies of Homer. In a similar way, early biblical scholars such as Richard Simon proposed that biblical texts such as the Pentateuch were produced by editors working in the royal archives in Jerusalem. However, scholars in classical studies eventually abandoned this way of thinking, as it was seen that the Alexandrian scholars did not alter their texts to fit their restorations, and that the commonly accepted or "vulgate" editions of Homer that eventually prevailed in Rome were virtually uninfluenced by the Alexandrians' notes. So, the Alexandrian editors were making notes for other interested scholars, with no intention of producing any authoritative version of the text. Since the eventual standard versions of Homer emerged simply through popular usage without any scholarly guidance, Van Seters demonstrates that in this case at least ancient editors had little or nothing to do with the production of a textual final form. The model of scholarly editors producing authoritative textual versions is therefore an anachronism from the early days of the printing press, retrojected into antiquity.

Yet, Van Seters argues, biblical studies parted company with classical studies before the latter abandoned this editorial model, so that biblical scholars continued to entertain the notion of editors as producers of the final forms of texts. While the Alexandrian editors were scrupulously conservative in their textual work, the postulated editors in biblical studies became much more, with their roles expanding into those of compilers, interpolators, and...