Emanuel Tov

Emanuel Tov, (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.

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.

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 returned to the Netherlands.

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.

Tov studied at Boerhaaveschool and then at Kohnstamm School, in South Amsterdam.

At the age of 12, Tov started studying Latin and Greek language at the Spinoza Lyceum, where he met 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 a Talmud Torah from his Bar Mitzvah.

In October 1961, Tov decided to return to Israel to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In 1964 he completed his 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), earned him a PhD from the Hebrew University.

Upon his return to Israel, he worked as an assistant at the University of Haifa and at the Hebrew University.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.