A. Piquer Otero and P. A. Torijano Morales (eds.), Textual Criticism and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Studies in Honour of Julio Trebolle Barrera. Florilegium Complutense

This volume is a tribute to the work of Julio Trebolle Barrera.The essay topics vary widely but all deal with Textual Criticism and/or the Dead Sea Scrolls.Some articles are highly technical, some are thematic, and several offer reflections on important problems or concepts.Two significant threads can be traced throughout the volume.The first thread is the collection of books typically organized under the rubric "Deuteronomistic History."Almost half of the essays in the volume deal with one or more books from the DtrH.The second thread is a methodological/theoretical one.Julio Trebolle Barrera has long been part of a vanguard that questioned the strict distinction between textual (lower) criticism and literary (higher) criticism.He did so because the data he encountered in his work with manuscripts, especially those from Qumran, demanded a new approach.The roles of author/editor and scribe/copyist had been previously imagined to be distinct roles.But the Qumran material shattered that assumption and Barrera was one of the first and most articulate voices to call attention to the need for a paradigm shift.The majority of the articles in this volume explore Barrera's new methodological paradigms in innovative ways.Since it is relatively clear from the organization of the volume that these two threads were not artificially set by the editors, both serve as testaments to the ongoing significance of Barrera's work within cutting-edge scholarship in fourteen different countries and within several different schools of thought.The articles in this volume are of high quality from beginning to end and this quality represents yet another tribute to Barrera.It was a pleasure to read the volume and it is a pleasure to recommend it.All students of the Dead Sea Scrolls and textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible will benefit.The significance of the articles certainly extends further, but the technical nature of many of the articles may limit their accessibility beyond specialists in these two fields.2 Florentino Garca Martnez opens the volume with a series of personal reflections about Barrera.I found it especially refreshing that Garca Martnez chose to highlight Barrera's deep engagements with music and literature.It would be easy to imagine, given the quality and quantity of Barrera's work in textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible, that he focused on this endeavor singularly.The depth of his engagement with literature outside of the Hebrew Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls is impressive and inspiring.3 In the first proper article in the volume, Anneli Aejmelaeus investigates textual development in the MT of 1 Sam 1.She uses her study as an opportunity to highlight that, "the borderline between textual criticism and literary criticism cannot be drawn that sharply, and in fact needs to be defined anew" (3).In offering a view of what this new definition should be, she suggests that the aims of textual criticism cannot be to determine the original or correct readings of a given passage, but to accurately tell the histories of the texts.In order to illustrate this point she shows that while the textual variants of MT 1 Sam 1 might suggest a corrupt text when taken individually, they reveal a sophisticated network of editorial corrections when taken in the aggregate.Thus,