VARIOUS READINGS

What we hoped for in the Preface (p. xxv), namely, that by collating the manuscripts existing in England the critical value of the Barhebraean text edited by us could be judged and the printer's errors corrected, this we have finally, God willing, been able to fully accomplish. For not only the Oxford or the Cambridge manuscript, but both were examined by us last year, and carefully collated partly against the pages already printed at that time, and partly against our London transcript. The custodians of the libraries of this and that University contributed no small amount of ease to this task through their very kind courtesy, to whom we therefore give our most willing thanks. We cannot, however, fail to publicly acknowledge the helpful intervention of the distinguished man G. Wright, whose merits toward us we have already praised previously, through which it happened that Lamy in Oxford, and Abbeloos in Cambridge, found the manuscripts ready and most freely available to them as soon as they had arrived.

Furthermore, almost all the various readings were extracted from those manuscripts; and most of these, although some may perhaps seem quite useless to some, we are printing here. Only, lest they grow into an excessive mass, we have omitted the diversities of the manuscripts in placing dots and other diacritical signs of orthography. This matter caused the less concern because the scribes themselves were guided by no constant law in appending them. We have likewise omitted the numerical notes, which were written down now with letters of the alphabet, now with whole words; sometimes also, the indication of the particle Vau at the beginning of a sentence, now included and now neglected, or even the addition of the particle d ܕ , or the letter Olaph ܐ , for example in ity ܐܝܬܝ instead of it ܐܝܬ , and other things of this kind. Lest