The Project

Despite the scathing critiques leveled against it, amongst others, by Moshe Goshen-Gottstein and Dominique Barthélemy, Kennicott’s is still the second largest attempt at a comprehensive collation of medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (second only to De Rossi’s). It records a wealth of data that open a window on Hebrew scribal practices and traditions in the Middle Ages as well as on the textual history of the Bible. These data have been virtually ignored in recent decades due to the traditional over-reliance of much biblical text-critical scholarship on a codex optimus (Ms L or Leningrad Codex for the greatest part of modern Hebrew Bible editions). Moreover, the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has functioned as a catalyst of sorts, leading scholars to focus most of their efforts on the earliest recovered witnesses to the very text(s) whose nature as “the Bible” was all the while being questioned for the turn of the Common Era. 

And yet, being able to readily access this data corpus would allow scholars to reconstruct a long-neglected, fundamental piece of the textual history of the Bible, as well as help explore the impact of local traditions of reading pronunciation onto the transmission of the text.

To this effect, The Digital Kennicott has some demonstrable advantages over its physical doppelganger with regard to ease of use and distribution: it can be accessed anywhere and is easier to navigate for scholars and enthusiasts alike. However, its most obvious advantage is being machine-actionable. The TEI encoding opens the text to different kinds of computational text analysis, providing a semantically annotated text and apparatus that can be further processed. 

The digital text of the Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum (VTH) was created by means of a digitization and text-processing pipeline developed by Luigi Bambaci consisting in:

1. image acquisition;

2. automatic segmentation and transcription (OCR);

3. parsing and XML encoding of the VTH’s apparatus.

Thanks to a collaboration with Prof. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra and Dr. Bambaci, (EPHE, PSL) from the ERC MiDRASH and the Biblissima+-funded Reverse Engineering Kennicott (REK) projects, both volumes of the VTH were digitized and XML-encoded. The text was subsequently converted into TEI-conformant markup. Lastly, the edition was prepared using TEI Publisher.

Benjamin Kennicott (1718-1783) was an English churchman and Hebrew scholar. He was born in Devonshire and educated at Wadham College, Oxford. In 1747, he was made a fellow of Exeter College, where he served as tutor and later became senior dean. 

Kennicott is best known for his critical edition of the Hebrew Bible titled Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (The Hebrew Old Testament with Variant Readings), published in two volumes in 1776 and 1780. This work took over 20 years of Kennicott’s life during which he collected numerous Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament and compared their texts, noting textual variants. His goal was to restore the original text of the Hebrew Bible. 

To support this project, Kennicott raised funds, acquired manuscripts, and assembled a team of scholars and collators. By 1760 he had collected over 15,000 variants, although in the final published work he focused on a selection, those he deemed important. His work was a landmark achievement both in Hebrew textual studies and in the application of scholarly techniques to the study of the Bible. 

Although Kennicott died before the full publication of his work, he is considered the founder of the scientific phase of Old Testament textual criticism and had a significant influence on later biblical scholarship. His findings at the time stirred discussions and debates about the authority and stability of the traditional Masoretic Text.

The digitization of the Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum was carried out in collaboration with Prof. Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra and Dr. Luigi Bambaci (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris Sciences & Lettres) from the ERC MiDRASH and the Biblissima+-funded Reverse Engineering Kennicott (REK) projects. 

Prof. Stökl Ben Ezra and Dr. Bambaci provided access to the Paris eScriptorium instance msIA and trained the segmentation and recognition models used to digitize Kennicott's collation. Dr. Bambaci developed and implemented the pipeline for the digitization and XML encoding of Kennicott's collation, and was responsible for the segmentation, recognition, and XML encoding of both volumes of the Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum, which were used in the creation of The Digital Kennicott. 

The witness list encoding was based on the work of Prof. Idan Dershowitz, who created a Kennicott Key of identified manuscripts.