I sure hope this made more sense in the original German.

Reading a critical apparatus -- that is, a collection of the various readings and divergences shown by the various manuscripts of an ancient document -- is rarely easy. The goal of the apparatus is to convey as much information as possible in as small a space as possible. As a result, most apparatus use a wide variety of obscure symbols and abbreviations -- often abbreviations of Latin terms, because Latin was the scholarly language at the time the earliest apparatus were assembled.

This problem is particularly acute for the readers of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensis, because the book was assembled by many scholars, who didn't always use exactly the same symbols, and the introduction required to explain them is incomplete. Hence the existence of at least two books (this one and one by William R. Scott) to explain it. This one originated in German and was translated -- and, if it weren't so old, I'd be tempted to label it the product of mechanical translation. Much of it makes no more sense than the BHS apparatus itself. The grammar is mangled, the vocabulary peculiar, and the meanings never clear. And there are almost no examples -- most of it consists of an explanation of a single variant, and even that done in a way that doesn't look quite like the text of BHS!

There is useful information here, about the organization and defects of BHS. But, frankly, I'm still just about as confused as I was before -- and I know critical apparatus as they occur in other books, and I've read other volumes about BHS! I really don't see any reason for an ordinary user to bother with this book; it won't help. ( )