Before Jerusalem Fell

202 BEFORE JERUSALEM FELL
copies of that text. The critic often is forced to do so on the basis of
various probability factors presented by the whole array of manuscript
evidence. Textual variants necessarily fall into two broad
groups: those that arise by accident and those that arise by intention.w
There are various ways by which aaidental uananti can mar the
text. There are errors of sight, caused by a confusion of similarly
drawn letters; errors of writing, where a scribe inadvertently writes
one letter for another; errors of hearing (especially when a text is
being dictated to copyists) due to the similarity of sounds between
certain letters, diphthongs, etc.; and errors of judgment, where, for
example, an abbreviated word might have been put into the wrong
unabbreviated form. Intentional uanants can occur for any number of
reasons and these reasons are more diflicult to discern But “for the
most part” they are derived “from attempts by scribes to improve the
text in various ways.”41
The two leading options before the textual critic 42
in the present
instance are 666 and 616. In the earlier extant manuscripts the
number is written out in words that are quite different: “six hundreds
and sixty-six” is written: t~amkzol 2~@ona & %x hundreds and
sixteen” is written: kfamhol &za .4~. Or, as in some of the later
manuscripts — and almost certainly in the original — the variant
numbers are written thus: 666 appears as ~$q and 616 appears as
w