index-topical-hb 2023-10-21
One of the more extraordinary works in the scholarship of the Hebrew Bible is Benjamin Kennicott's Vetus Testamentum hebraicum cum variis lectionibus. Published between 1776 and 1780, this edition of the Hebrew Bible contains a running text, and then in notes below the variants found in collating over six hundred (Masoretic) manuscripts.
You may find it here.
For the Pentateuch, it also contains a collation of the Samaritan Pentateuch against the Masoretic Text, which is interesting. However, the great mass of the notes are, taken one by one, incredibly uninteresting -- they all appear to show trivial issues of spelling and such which have arisen within the Masoretic Tradition after the production of the great Masoretic codices.
Therefore, from the standpoint of the text-critic interested in reconstructing the earliest form of the Hebrew text, Kennicott's work may be seen as something of a disappointment. Armed with Kennicott's massive apparatus -- except for his Samaritan readings -- the would-be critic will not be able to improve upon the best printed editions of the Masoretic Text in any way.
On the other hand, Kennicott's work is extremely valuable, because it does conclusively prove that the available manuscripts that have survived to the present (with the exception of some very old MSS discovered after Kennicott's time) are all copies of the standard Masoretic Text, with no interesting survivals from earlier times.
While the work of Kennicott does affirm the essential unity of all the post-Masoretic manuscripts, it also undermines a common bit of apologetic propaganda -- the mistaken notion that Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible all agree with letter-by-letter precision.[1]
For those who would like to read about the ups and downs of Kennicott's project, I recommend a look at pages 36-47 of Dominique Barthélemy, Studies in the Text of the Old Testament.
Kennicott's first volume was published in 1776, followed by the second in 1780. Kennicott himself died in 1784, by which time a continuation and expansion of his work had already been taken up by Giovanni Bernardo de Rossi, who -- for a large selection of passages -- collated even more manuscripts. Here is Barthélemy, p. 50:
The four promised volumes were published at Parta in 1784, 1785, 1786, and 1788, followed by an important supplement in 1798 entitled Scholia critica in Veteris Testamenti libros seu Supplementa ad varias Sacri Textus lectiones. In this supplement he provided the totals for the witnesses that he had collated: 1,418 manuscripts (of which 577 were known from Kennicott's collection, 691 belonged to De Rossi's own library, 134 were foreign, and 16 Samaritan), 375 editions (of which 333 were in De Rossi's library and 42 were from foreign libraries) giving a total of 1,793 "codices".
The result of De Rossi's study may be found below:
To the best of my knowledge, nothing like the work of Kennicott or De Rossi has been done since. They essentially completed the job.
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