This review was published by RBL 2003 by the Society of Biblical Literature. For more information on obtaining a subscription to RBL, please visit http://www.bookreviews.org/subscribe.asp. RBL 11/2003 Chiesa, Bruno Filologia storica della Bibbia ebraica Studi biblici 125, 135 Brescia: Paideia Editrice, 20002002. 2 vols. Pp. 512. Paper. EUR 20,00 each. ISBN 8839405968, 8839406441. Paul Sanders The Hague The Netherlands 2726 CW The discipline of philology focuses on the text of ancient documents. It includes several fields: language (including etymology and grammar), textual criticism, the desirability of emendations, the establishment of age and authenticity, and the interpretation of the document in question. In the case of the Old Testament, this discipline goes back to a very early age. In the two volumes of his study, Bruno Chiesa aims to describe the main historical developments in this field, without making a claim to completeness. Chiesa demonstrates that many Old Testament scholars are inclined to underestimate the relevance of the philological research into the Hebrew Bible that was undertaken by Jews and Christians before the past two centuries. In the first volume, Chiesa discusses the development of the philology of the Hebrew Bible from Origen of Alexandria until the end of the Middle Ages. In chapter 1, he shows that Origen (ca. 185253) and other early church fathers recognized the existence of textual variants in the Septuagint, their Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. They also realized that the Greek of this translation was often ungrammatical, as was the language of the Greek New Testament. However, they were not willing to emend the Greek text, assuming that the grammatical errors by the original authors do not affect the authority of the Scriptures. As early as in the patristic era, some exegetes showed a preference for less