ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are both grateful for the opportunity to update and expand this book in a second edition. Our thanks to our editor, Jim Kinney, and the other members of the Baker team for their assistance and guidance in initial discussions and throughout our work together.

We are grateful to Dennis Magary, who provided excellent advice from his many years of teaching Hebrew and Old Testament textual criticism at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Dennis is a perceptive and creative teacher, and we are grateful for his willingness to dialogue about not only certain concepts in textual criticism but also how they might be clearly presented. Also, our appreciation goes to Jim Hoffmeier, Richard Averbeck, and Lawson Younger, also at Trinity, for their advice on a few technical matters. We offer our thanks as well to Anthony Lipscomb, who solved many different kinds of problems from fonts to bibliography.

Finally, we give thanks to God for our wives. Their loving support and advice make everything that we do better than it would have been otherwise. Thank you.