The Early Modern Debate over the Age of the Hebrew Vowel Points: Biblical Criticism and Hebrew Scholarship in the Confessional Republic of Letters

Post-Reformation biblical scholarship was marked by a series of disputes over the text, language, and history of the Bible. Scholars, theologians, and others at were at odds over subjects including the question of the canons of the Old and New Testaments, the determination of the original script of the Hebrew Bible, the nature of New Testament Greek, the interpretation of citations from the Old Testament in the New, and the problems presented by the chronology of the Old Testament, notably the divergences between the Masoretic Hebrew text and the Septuagint. These issues might be thought to offer a series of parallel threads through which the course of biblical scholarship in this period could be followed, showing moments of technical achievement or increasing conceptual sophistication, while also indicating how and why the problems scholars confronted related to their broader concerns, and especially their confessional views and preoccupations. © by Journal of the History of Ideas,.