Two Books of Ezekiel—Papyrus 967 and the Masoretic Text As Variant Literary Editions

A practitioner of textual criticism, Lilly (religious studies, Western Kentucky U.) examines the Greek manuscript of Ezekiel, first published in the late 1930s and now known as p967, as a functioning version of the Old Testament book. It is dated to the late second or early third century CE, she says, making it the earliest copy of any Septuagintal codex known at the time. She argues that it is a mechanically transmitted witness to an earlier Old Greek text of Ezekiel, is a variant literary edition from the Hebrew Masoretic version with unique features that can shed crucial light on Ezekiel's editorial history, and represents a text produced under specific conditions that might interest historians of the period. The study served as her 2010 doctoral dissertation in the Hebrew Bible at Emory University. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Ingrid Lilly, Ph.D. (2010) in Hebrew Bible, Emory University, is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Western Kentucky University. She is an Assistant Editor for the journal TC: A Journal for Biblical Textual Criticism and co-chairs the Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible unit at the Society of Biblical Literature's annual conference.