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Torah Scholars Seek Original Version of Bible — But Does It Exist?

(JTA) — According to Jewish tradition, the Torah is so sacred that even a single error made on a single letter renders the entire scroll unusable. And yet the Hebrew Bible — including the Torah, its first five books — is riddled with corruptions and alterations that have accrued and been passed down over the millennia. Now an international team of scholars is working to fix all that.
For the past 14 years, the team behind “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” has been laboring on a project to sift through the text and reverse the accumulated imperfections and changes, returning the books of the Hebrew Bible to something like their original versions. The first volume is due out later this year. “It is a little chutzpadik,” acknowledged Ronald Hendel, HBCE’s general editor and a professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s also a messy, painstaking and controversial endeavor that has been criticized by some of the world’s leading biblical scholars. The critics argue that what Hendel and his team are attempting to do is misleading, counterproductive or flat-out impossible.


Read complete article at -- http://forward.com/articles/198210/torah-scholars-seek-original-version-of-bible-bu/? 

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