Give me more!

While we seek to master the plethora of manuscripts, we also savor their very unmanageability. The textual critic’s heart yearns for even more abundance and leaps at the discovery of new manuscripts. It doesn’t matter whether they were moldering in caves or a synagogue genizah or miscataloged in an air-conditioned library. We crave new texts, even as they drive us to distraction. The superabundance of texts is our joy and our burden.—Ron Hendel in teps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible, forthcoming from SBL Press