The Lucianic Manuscripts of 1 Reigns, 2 vols.

• Author: Tov, Emanuel

The first volume of this two-volume monograph contains a text edition of what the author names "the Lucianic manuscripts" of the first book of Reigns (1 Samuel) of the LXX, and as such it provides an important service to scholarship. The reader can now easily make use of this important textual evidence, which is presented in this monograph in a special way, namely, as representing the "majority text" of the Lucianic manuscripts. It is now common knowledge that the Lucianic tradition is known mainly from four manuscripts which are best known by their sigla in the Brooke-McLean edition as b, o, [c.sub.2], [e.sub.2]. When studying the evidence for the Lucianic text, scholars are used to collecting the data from the apparatus of the Brooke-McLean edition, where they appear in the midst of a multitude of variant readings. On the other hand, in the books covered by the Gottingen Septuagint edition the same evidence is grouped into the group of "L" as well as in various subgroups of "L," but in these biblical books there is no justification for producing a separate text edition of L. [For further details on the Brooke-McLean and Gottingen Septuagint editions, see Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 140-41 (ed. note).] In the text editions of these books the Lucianic data should remain part of the general LXX apparatus, since most of the Lucianic readings probably are subsequent to those included in the reconstructed Old Greek translations which form the base text of the editions. In 1-4 Reigns, on the other hand, there is much justification for the separation of the Lucianic evidence from that of the other sources, since it serves as a witness to a completely different text, possibly even representing more original textual traditions than those included in the other manuscripts, including the reconstructed original text of the "Septuagint."

For this reason B. Taylor decided to cull the evidence from the apparatus of the Brooke-McLean edition relating to the Lucianic text, first in his dissertation, written at the University of Pennsylvania under Prof. R. A. Kraft, and now in the first part of the monograph under review. He explains to the readers (pp. xii-xiii) that he chose a system of presentation different from previous ones. Previous systems of text editions are limited to the system of either a diplomatic or eclectic presentation of the evidence, but the author preferred to present the evidence in a third system, named by him "the majority text." In his own words, "the running text primarily consists of all the readings supported by a majority of the family, while the critical apparatus...