168 H.G.M. Williamson Although they each have their own integrity, they also overlap in sufficient measure to conclude that one probably developed from the other or at the least from a common ancestor which closely resembled one version or the other. It is thus a reasonable question to ask which was the earlier. The answer of most scholars today would be that the version which underlies the Greek translation came first and that the version which became the Masoretic text developed from it or from something very like it (27). If this view were shared by the editor of Jeremiah in the Oxford Hebrew Bible (Eugene Ulrich), and if he were working strictly according to the ways in which a classical text is edited, he would then presumably have to base his critical edition on the Septuagint, for which only very slight fragments in Hebrew from Qumran have also survived. The result would be that for this book, at least, the Hebrew text would be almost entirely a retroversion from the Greek (unvocalized, of course, since the vowels had not been added when the translation was made). This would be an extremely interesting scholarly exercise, but whether it would be appropriate in an edition calling itself the Bible is something on which opinions could well differ. However secure the retroversion (and the fact that so much is parallel to MT gives the exercise a greater degree of plausibility than might otherwise be the case) it seems to me questionable to present the results of what is inevitably scholarly acumen in this manner. It is material for commentaries, monographs and articles rather than a Bible text. But what will in fact happen in this case? Fortunately, we have both Hendel’s answer as editor of the edition and also a sample of Ulrich’s work to examine. The answer is that “[a]nalysis of the Qumran texts in relation to the other major versions … has made it clear that numerous portions of the Hebrew Bible circulated in multiple editions in the Second Temple period. The OHB aims to produce critical texts of each ancient edition, which will be presented in parallel columns” (28). While (27) The recently presented view of Lundbom that some 64% (no less than 330 passages) of the material peculiar to MT was lost by haplography in the transmission of the text which the translator into Greek worked with seems inherently implausible; even a very careless scribe could hardly be expected to have made the same type of mechanical error so very frequently; cf. J. R. LUNDBOM, “Haplography in the Hebrew Vorlage of LXX Jeremiah”, HS 46 (2005) 301-320, and see too his three-volumed commentary in the Anchor Bible series (New York 1999-2004). (28) HENDEL, “Oxford Hebrew Bible”, 326.