Second is the difficulty of establishing the historical contexts. Third is the fact that the book is filled with linguistic peculiarities. The text is considered to be the most corrupt and poorly preserved of the Hebrew Bible. Various versions are garbled at key junctures, and it seems as well that the translators of the various versions had to struggle to understand the texts they were translating. Some of the linguistic peculiarities may be explained as dialectical idiosyncrasies rather than as errors or textual corruptions, and thus many of our problems with the text may be caused by our lack of familiarity with the N
...