What are some of the problems confronting scholars attempting to reconstruct an accurate text of the Hebrew Bible?

Answer 1

One problem scholars faced in attempting to reconstruct an accurate text of the ancient Hebrew Bible is that the Hebrew language had fallen out of general use, after the introduction of Aramaic during the Persian period. The Scriptures were really the only Hebrew material extant, and scholars had to establish the meanings of many words by looking at each context in which the word was used, to arrive at the probable meaning of that word. Some words were used only once (known as a hapax legomenon) in the Hebrew Bible and, even today, scholars are uncertain as to their original maning.

Another problem is that early Hebrew did not have vowels or vowel indicators, so a word in The Bible could have different meanings, depending on which vowel the scholars believed to have been used in spoken Hebrew.