© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004407657_010 Chapter 9 The Textual Value of the Septuagint Version of the Minor Prophets Emanuel Tov 1 The Text-Critical Status of the Books of the Minor Prophets* When dealing with textual criticism, we ought to remember that the main task of that discipline is to serve as an auxiliary discipline to the exegesis of Hebrew Scripture. Primary and secondary readings are investigated, but in this study we are focusing on primary readings. Certain Scripture books cannot be understood well without referring to ancient textual sources. This analysis in- volves the taking of a position with regard to the number of textual branches in a given Scripture book. Sometimes we are faced with a single textual branch when there are but few differences between the MT, the LXX, and the Judean Desert texts. This pertains, for example, to the books of Judges, Job, Ruth, Qohelet, and Lamentations.1 On the other hand, in the Torah, we are faced with 10–12 different branches,2 while in Samuel we witness three textual tradi- tions. However, in most books, we meet two textual traditions, MT and the Vorlage of the LXX. There is no easy answer to the question regarding the situation in the Minor Prophets since the MP is not a single book but rather a collection of books that were written at different times. Nevertheless, I believe that all these books reflect the same textual situation. The MT of a few books is more difficult than that of most other books and the LXX of some books seemingly provides more variants than in other books. In my view, in most cases in the MP the textual witnesses reflect a single tradition, in which the MT and the LXX go hand in * The author is grateful for permission to use the HUBP database of the forthcoming edition of the Minor Prophets from which he culled a few helpful references. Thanks are due to the director of the HUBP and the editor of that volume, Michael Segal, for this permission and to David Knoll for practical help. 1  One could also say that these books had a rather stable transmission, since we are not aware of many readings that deviate from MT. However, there could have been textual develop- ments prior to the textual evidence known to us. 2  See my study “The Development of the Text of the Torah in Two Major Text Blocks,” Text 26 (2016): 1–27. http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/units.php?cat=5020andincat=4972. 129-148_Dogniez_09-Tov.indd 129 25 Apr 2019 19:51:35