Emanuel Tov facts for kids
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Emanuel Tov
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| Born | 15 September 1941 Amsterdam, the Netherlands
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| Nationality | Dutch, Israeli |
| Alma mater | Harvard University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Occupation | Biblical scholar |
| Spouse(s) | Lika (née Aa) |
| Children | three children |
| Awards | Honorary doctorates from the University of Vienna, the University of Salzburg, and the University of Copenhagen Israel Prize in biblical studies |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| Thesis | "The Septuagint Translation of Jeremiah and Baruch" (1973) |
| Doctoral advisor | Shemaryahu Talmon, Frank Moore Cross |
Emanuel Tov, FBA (Hebrew: עמנואל טוב; born 15 September 1941, Amsterdam, the Netherlands as Menno Toff) is a Dutch–Israeli biblical scholar and linguist, emeritus J. L. Magnes Professor of Bible Studies in the Department of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been intimately involved with the Dead Sea Scrolls for many decades, and from 1991, he was appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project.
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Biography
Emanuel Tov was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands on 15 September 1941, during the Nazi German occupation. During the Holocaust, when Tov was one year old, his parents Juda (Jo) Toff and Toos Neeter were deported to concentration camps, and they entrusted him to the care of a Christian family, and following the war he grew up with his uncle Juda Koekoek and aunt Elisabeth Koekoek-Toff as one of their children.
From age 14, he was active in the Zionistic youth movement Habonim and served as one of its leaders. At age 18, the movement motivated him to go to Israel for training as a leader and in 1960 he became the general secretary of that movement in the Netherlands. In 1961, he immigrated to Israel.
Emanuel Tov is married to Lika (née Aa). Tov and Lika have three children (a daughter Ophira, and two sons, Ariel and Amitai) and four granddaughters.
Education
Tov earned his primary studies at Boerhaaveschool and continued at Kohnstamm School, in South Amsterdam. At the age of 12, Tov started studying Latin and Greek language at Spinoza Lyceum, where he knew his future wife Lika Aa. At the age of 18, he finished his studies at a "gymnasium", where he learned classical and modern European languages, and at the same time learned Hebrew at Talmud Torah from his Bar Mitzvah.
Tov spent a year in Israel (from 1959 to 1960) at Machon L'Madrichei Chutz La'Aretz, studying for leadership in the youth movement Habonim. He sang in the choir and learned to play the flute. Tov then returns to the Netherlands.
Tov decides to return to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in October 1961. In 1964 he completed B.A. in Bible and Greek literature, and in 1967 he received his M.A. in Hebrew Bible, while serving also as an assistant in the Bible Dept. and at the Hebrew University Bible Project. In 1967–1969, he continued his studies at the Dept. for Near Eastern Studies and Languages at Harvard University. His dissertation, written under the guidance of Professors Shemaryahu Talmon of the Hebrew University and Frank Moore Cross of Harvard University, was submitted to the Hebrew University in 1973 as "The Septuagint Translation of Jeremiah and Baruch" (summa cum laude), awarded him the degree of PhD at the Hebrew University.
Upon his return to Israel, he served as an "assistant" at the University of Haifa and at the Hebrew University.
Teaching
In 1986, he was appointed professor at the Hebrew University, and in 1990 he became the J. L. Magnes Professor of Bible Studies. Served as visiting professor at the Universities of Oxford, Uppsala, Doshisha (Kyoto), Macquarie and Sydney, Stellenbosch, Vrije Universiteit, University of Pennsylvania, the Pontifical Gregorian University, Halle in Germany, the Protestants Theologische Universiteit and the Pontificial Biblical University. He stayed at Institutes for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, NIAS, Annenberg in the US, Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies and the Lichtenberg Kolleg in Germany.
Academic work
He was one of the editors of the Hebrew University Bible Project. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Dead Sea Discoveries and the Journal of Jewish Studies, and served on the Academic committee of the Magnes Press. He is the co-founder and chairman (1991–2000) of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, a Member of the Academic Committee of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and Senior Associate Fellow and an Honorary Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew Studies.
From 1990 to 2009 he was the Editor-in-Chief of the international Dead Sea Scrolls Publication Project, which during those years produced 33 volumes of the series Discoveries in the Judean Desert as well as two concordances.
He also published an electronic edition of all the extra-biblical Qumran scrolls and a six-volume printed edition of the scrolls meant for the general public. He also created electronic editions of the Hebrew and Greek Bible.
Prizes and honorary titles
- 1999 – 2004 – Humboldt Research Prize, Germany
- 2003 – Ubbo Emmius medal, University of Groningen
- 2004 – Emet Prize for Biblical Research, Israel
- 2006 – Appointed Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy
- 2008 – Honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna
- 2009 – Israel Prize in biblical studies
- 2010 – Samaritan Medal for Humanitarian Achievement
- 2012 – Appointed Member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities
- 2017 – Appointed Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 2019 – Honorary doctorate from the University of Salzburg
- 2021 – Honorary doctorate from the University of Copenhagen
- 2023 - The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Award for Scholarly Excellence in Research of the Jewish Experience
Research
Septuagint
Emanuel Tov's studies on the Septuagint focused first on inner-translational developments and gradually moved to the importance of this translation for the study of the Bible: the early revisions of the Septuagint, translation technique, the reconstruction of the Hebrew parent text of the Greek translation, the value of the Septuagint for the textual study of the Hebrew Bible, the importance of certain Septuagint books for the exegesis of the Hebrew books and the understanding of their literary development, the place of the Hebrew source of the Septuagint in the development of the text of the Bible.
Tov's initial publications on the Septuagint deal with that translation's early revisions that were intended to approximate the Greek text to the Hebrew text current in Israel from the 1st century BCE until the 2nd century CE. For that research, he established sound principles by determining the criteria for defining and characterizing the revisions. His preoccupation with matters of translation technique and the reconstruction of the Hebrew parent text of the Septuagint was influenced by his practical work in the HUBP (Hebrew University Bible Project). In that research, he combined the field work in that project with the formulation of abstract rules for the evaluation of details in the Septuagint, constantly cross-fertilizing both areas. These rules were formulated in his theoretical book on the Septuagint that grew out of his courses at the Hebrew University, each year on a different Bible book
Subsequently, the focus of Tov's interest moved to the importance of the Septuagint for biblical scholarship, both for textual and literary criticism. In several books, the Septuagint reflects a Hebrew basis that needs to be taken into consideration in the exegesis of those books beyond small details, both when, according to Tov, the Hebrew parent text of the Septuagint preceded the Masoretic Text (Joshua, 1 Samuel 16–18, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc.) and when it serves as an exegetical layer reacting to the forerunner of the Masoretic Text (1 Kings, Esther, and Daniel). According to Tov, in all these books the exegete of the Hebrew books must take the Greek translation into consideration. A precondition for this procedure is that the analysis of the translation technique as described in the previous paragraph will have established that the Septuagint is a good source for analyzing the text that lay in front of him. From among all the early witnesses of the biblical text, the best ones for analyzing the stages of its literary development are the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint, several Qumran texts and the Samaritan Pentateuch. Tov believes that the analysis of early witnesses such as the Septuagint enriches our exegesis and helps us in understanding the last stages of the development of the biblical literature in specific books. In his more recent work, Tov characterizes the source of LXX-Pentateuch as displaying harmonizing features shared with the Samaritan Pentateuch and related texts.
Development of the Bible text
Emanuel Tov does not describe the development of the biblical text based on abstract theories, but tries to take the evidence of the ancient manuscripts and versions as his point of departure. It is clear that in antiquity many versions of the Bible were circulating, as is evident from the textual plurality at Qumran. All the manuscripts differed from one another, but within that plurality one may recognize some groups (families). Tov qualified this plurality by providing the internal statistics of the different types of the Qumran scrolls. He also described the socio-religious background of some groups of the Judean Desert scrolls.
An important link in this argumentation is the group of the so-called 4QReworked Pentateuch texts. Ten years after Tov published this group of documents, he realized that these texts do not reflect a single non-biblical rewritten Pentateuch composition, but a cluster of biblical texts that included many exegetical elements. These texts reflect a link in the series of developing biblical texts.
Tov's studies on the Septuagint and 4QReworked Pentateuch led him to new thoughts regarding the development of the last stages of the biblical books and the original text of these books. In his view, the early stages of the biblical books such as reflected in the Septuagint of 1 Samuel, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, show that the formulations of these books developed stage by stage. This reconstructed development makes it difficult to posit an original text of the biblical books in the usual sense of the word. In Tov's view, there was not one original text, but a series of "original texts." This view developed after the appearance of the second edition of his Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible (2001) and was emphasized more in the third edition (2012).
The development of the text of the Torah
In studies primarily carried out in the 2010s, Tov focused on the special textual status of the Torah.
In his view, the textual development of the Torah differed from that of all other Scripture books. Quite unusually its textual witnesses may be divided into two text blocks. "Block I" contains the Masoretic Text group consisting of proto-MT scrolls and the followers of MT, among them a group of tefillin. "Block II" consists of a large group consisting of the source of LXX, the SP group, the Qumran tefillin, and more. The latter block usually contains a popularizing text featuring harmonizing and facilitating readings, while block I contains a more original text.
Dead Sea Scrolls and the Qumran scribes
Emanuel Tov dealt with various aspects of the Qumran scrolls, but his most central publications pertain to the Qumran scribes. In 2004, he published a detailed monograph on the scribal practices reflected in the Qumran scrolls, suggesting that the information about these scribal practices allows us to obtain a better understanding of the Qumran scrolls.
This monograph describes the technical aspects of all the Judean Desert texts, such as the measurements of the columns and sheets, the beginnings and ends of scrolls, systems of correcting mistakes, orthography systems, and a classification of the scrolls according to these parameters.
An important part of this description is Tov's theory on the Qumran scribes. Since 1986, Tov has suggested the division of the Qumran scrolls into two groups distinguished by external features. Group 1 is written in a special spelling (forms like ki’ כיא for כי everywhere), specials linguistic forms (like אביכמה in 1QIsa-a for אֲבִיכֶם MT in Isa 51:2 and מואדה in the same scroll for MT מְאֹד in Isa 47:6), and special scribal habits (writing the divine name in the old Hebrew script, erasing elements with lines and writing cancellation dots above and below words and letters, writing dots in the margins guiding the drawing of the lines, etc.). The great majority of the Qumran sectarian scrolls belong to this group; hence Tov's suggestion that these scrolls were written by sectarian scribes, possibly at Qumran. These scribes copied biblical as well as extra-biblical scrolls, altogether one-third of the Qumran scrolls, while the other scrolls (group 2) were brought to Qumran from outside, from one or more localities. Several tefillin found at Qumran were also written in the Qumran Scribal Practice, thus adding a social dimension to this practice as the contents of these tefillin differed from the "rabbinic" tefillin found elsewhere in the Judean Desert. An independent C-14 examination of the material on which some of the scrolls written in the Qumran Scribal Practice were written indicated in 2020 that they differed from the other scrolls.
Computer-assisted research of the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls
Emanuel Tov believes that the examination of the Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls needs to be aided by computer-assisted research and that therefore databases and computer programs need to be developed. He supervised the electronic encoding of the Leningrad Codex in the 1980s.
At that time, he also embarked upon a research project together with Prof. Robert A. Kraft of the University of Pennsylvania (CATSS = Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies). That project, based in Philadelphia and Jerusalem, created a comparative database of all the words in the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. It was published as a module within the Accordance program (subsequently also within Bible Works and Logos). With the aid of that program, which allows for advanced searches and statistical research, several such investigations have been carried out by Tov and others.
Another database edited by Tov contains all the texts and images of the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, in the original languages and in translation, with morphological analysis and search programs. All these programs serve the international community.
Honorary volumes
- Dead Sea Discoveries, Vol. 8, 1. 2001 (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Qumran Studies, Presented to Emanuel Tov on His Sixtieth Birthday.
- Emanuel, Studies in Hebrew Bible, Septuagint, and Dead Sea Scrolls in Honor of Emanuel Tov (ed. S. M. Paul, R. A. Kraft, L. H. Schiffman, and W. W. Fields, with the assistance of E. Ben-David; VTSup 94; Leiden/Boston: E.J. Brill, 2003).
- From Qumran to Aleppo: A Discussion with Emanuel Tov about the Textual History of Jewish Scriptures in Honor of his 65th Birthday (ed. A. Lange et al.; FRLANT 230; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009)
See also
In Spanish: Emanuel Tov para niños
- List of Israel Prize recipients
