Review of:

Innocent Himbaza, Le Décalogue et l'histoire du texte: Etudes des formes textuelles du Décalogue et leur implications dans l'histoire du texte de l'Ancien Testament. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Fribourg: Academic Press, 2004 (Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis; 207). xiii + 354 pp. ISBN 3-525-53065-X / 3-7278-1496-9. Euro 76,00.

Dr Innocent Himbaza (b. 1965) comes from Rwanda, but lives in Fribourg, Switzerland. He is presently working for the Biblia Hebraica Quinta Project, which prepares a new scientific edition of the Hebrew Bible, eventually to replace the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia. In addition to articles in (mostly Western-based) scholarly journals, Dr Himbaza has previously published a monograph (his Fribourg doctoral thesis) on bible translation in Rwanda (cf. Bulletin for Old Testament Studies in Africa 11 (2001) 24). The present work, which is a Fribourg Habilitationsschrift, is an analysis of the textual history of the Decalogue. And let it be pointed out at once: this is the most detailed analysis ever published on the textual history of the Decalogue, and it is a work that will be a standard reference for decades. Although the Decalogue has indeed received its share of scholarly attention in recent years, also as far as textual criticism is concerned, Himbaza goes both broader and deeper into the material than what his predecessors have done. Broader, in the sense that he not only analyses the two Masoretic versions of the Decalogue (Exod 20:2-17 and Deut 5:6-22) and some more or less accidental examples from other sources, but includes a more or less complete spectre of non-Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts as well as ancient translations. And deeper, in the sense that he not only surveys these other sources – such as (1) the Qumran, Samaritan and Papyrus Nash Hebrew manuscripts, (2) the Greek, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin translations, and (3) the Jewish (Philo Alexandrinus, Josephus, Talmud, etc.) and Christian (New Testament, Church fathers) sources – but openmindedly draws them into the discussion.

It is obviously difficult to summarise a book whose raison d'etre is to provide the guild of textual critics and Decalogue interpreters with such a variety of details. Nevertheless, I would like to briefly mention three results from Dr Himbaza's research. First, he argues that it is possible to see a difference between Egyptian (Hebrew: Papyrus Nash, Greek: Septuagint) and Palestinian (Masoretic and Samaritan) sources; this is a difference that leads him to suggest that the Decalogue actually experienced cases of local textual evolutions. Secondly, he is critical to the various modern attempts at reconstructing a possible original Decalogue consisting of ten short prohibitions; this can hardly be more than quite vague speculations, he argues. And thirdly, he claims that it is impossible to explain the textual varieties of the Decalogue from the perspective of translation difficulties; rather, he holds that different versions of the Decalogue must have existed even before the first translation. This is obviously a book for specialists. Still, libraries that are able (and willing) to build up a pool of source literature for further research – e.g. in textual studies – should try to get hold of a copy.

Reviewed 2006-05-19 by Knut Holter, School of Mission and Theology, Misjonsvegen 34, N-4024 Stavanger, Norway. E-mail: knut.holter@mhs.no