The course intends to introduce the ancient textual witnesses of the Hebrew Bible, as well as the ways and critical tools that were developed in biblical research in order to exhaust their textual testimony. In addition to the Masoretic Text, i.e., the received Hebrew text that is known to us today via Jewish tradition, we will learn about other Hebrew texts (the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea scrolls) as well as textual traditions that underlie the ancient versions, i.e., translations of the Bible made already in Antiquity (e.g., the Greek Septuagint and the various Aramaic Targumim). These witnesses testify to the variety of textual forms that the biblical texts has assumed since they were first committed to writing, through their copying by successive generations of scribes, until the age of printing press. We will also learn about the range of textual phenomena that were operative in the production of these texts, phenomena that explain some of the many—and sometimes crucial—differences between them. Finally, we will learn to use various critical editions of the Hebrew Bible. Such editions present the reader with selections of variant readings, each in accordance with its peculiar methodology and with its editors’ approach to the fundamental problems of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible. All these issues will be discussed with the help of concrete textual specimens, taking into account linguistic, stylistic, thematic and contextual aspects, all of which affect the evaluation of the various variant readings.