The Hebrew text is not corrupt.
The Hebrew text is not corrupt.
§ 318. Among the arguments with which the Papists labor to carry their point that the Hebrew text of the Old Testament is not the authentic version, this one leads the crowd: that the Hebrew text has been corrupted in many places by the wickedness or carelessness of men. Bellarmine writes: “We must place the sources ahead of the streams only when it is certain that the sources have not been muddied; but now, the sources in many places flow with muddy waters” (De verbo Dei, bk. 2, c. 11). Against these Scripture-haters, therefore, we must demonstrate the purity and integrity of the sources, which we prove with a disjunctive syllogism of this kind: If the Hebrew sources in the Old Testament were corrupted, we would have to attribute this either to the malice of the Jews or to the carelessness of the scribes. But the sources have been corrupted neither by the malice of the Jews nor by the carelessness of scribes. Therefore they have not been corrupted in any way. The major premise contains a sufficient list of causes from which that corruption could have arisen. The minor has two parts, namely, that the sources were corrupted by neither the malice of the Jews nor the carelessness of scribes. Each must be proved in order.