ATLA Abstract

This article reports on recent developments in the fields of OT textual criticism and canonical criticism and how
they relate. Based upon the author's continuing work for ten years on the United Bible Societies' Old Testament
Text Critical Project, comparison of its work and that of the Hebrew University Bible Project indicates
considerable changes in the field in the past twenty-five years, especially the last ten. A history of those changes
and the reasons for them is followed by a critical re-evaluation of the massoretic phenomenon as the fourth stage in
the recently reconstructed history of text transmission of the Hebrew Bible, and finally by a critical review of the
presuppositions which lie behind the modern phenomenon called biblical historical criticism.