The Project
DiKe focuses on digitizing Benjamin Kennicott's work Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (Oxford, 1776-1780), a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible detailing textual variants from medieval manuscripts and early print editions. Kennicott's work represents the earliest and most extensive collection of Hebrew Bible variants and is a vital resource for understanding medieval transmission of the biblical text.
The project has three main goals:
to produce a digitally encoded scholarly edition of Kennicott's work to facilitate navigation and analysis;
to collate and digitize additional unpublished medieval Hebrew Bible manuscripts;
to create a linguistically annotated corpus of variants to enable complex textual queries.
Outcomes of the project will include an updated digital Kennicott edition with integrated manuscript images and metadata, as well as new data on textual variants for historical and linguistic research. The corpus of annotated variants will allow unprecedented data mining of Hebrew philological and grammatical features.
These are the key points of the project:
parsing and XML encoding of the two volumes of Vetus Testamentum (ANTLR4)
transcription and collation of a number of biblical manuscripts (eScriptorium);
linguistic (dicta) and philological annotation of variants (variants due to homoeoteleuton, dittography, etc.);
digital edition with TEI Publisher of Vetus Testamentum and images of collated manuscripts.
Ultimately, the project aims at enriching, preserving and increasing access to Kennicott's pioneering scholarship on the Hebrew Bible through the application of digital humanities techniques, while also opening new avenues of research into biblical textual traditions of the Middle Ages.
Portrait of Benjamin Kennicott (1718-1783) by unknown artist; Exeter College, University of Oxford (CC BY-NC-ND)
Benjamin Kennicott and His Work
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 Various Readings), published in two volumes in 1776 and 1780. This work represented over 20 years of research in which Kennicott 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 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 stirred discussion and debate at the time about the authority and stability of the traditional Masoretic Text.
State of the Art
The study of medieval manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible experienced a resurgence in the late 18th century due to the publication of the collations of Benjamin Kennicott and Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi in 1784 and 1798. These collations represented over 30 years of research and contained thousands of textual variants from comparisons of hundreds of manuscripts and printed editions — around 600 for Kennicott and 700 for De Rossi. The number of variants collected was remarkable, with estimates suggesting Kennicott's collation alone contained 1.5 million pieces of textual information.
Kennicott and De Rossi's collections constitute the only large-scale collation projects of Hebrew biblical witnesses. Later works by scholars like Ginsburg, Döderlein and Meisner dealt with fewer witnesses and variants, acting more as supplements. More recent initiatives like Manuscripta Bibliae Hebraicae have focused on bibliography and codicology rather than textual criticism.
Traditionally, these monumental 18th century collations have been used as key reference works for critical editions and commentaries. More rarely have they served as direct data sources for investigations into the textual history of the Bible or its language due to the difficulty of managing such a vast amount of material without computational assistance. Recent efforts have begun to apply automated parsing and XML encoding to portions of Kennicott's collation to enable computer-aided analysis, such as suggesting textual groupings through phylogenetics.
The Variants Database
Creating a database of the variants attested in the Hebrew text of the Bible will be an invaluable resource for studying Hebrew and advancing biblical scholarship.
From a textual analysis perspective, these variants provide precious insights into how scribes copied manuscripts over time. Kennicott and his colleagues recorded all kinds of differences between individual manuscripts and the reference text, including scribal errors, providing extensive evidence of how copying affected the biblical text in the medieval period. The alignment of variants with the manuscripts that attest them can also enable reconstruction of relationships between manuscript families — a crucial step for textual history and criticism that is still lacking in Hebrew Bible studies compared to Septuagint and New Testament scholarship.
From a linguistic perspective, these medieval variants reflect the scribal conventions and Hebrew pronunciation of various ethno-geographical communities over centuries. Analysis of the variants can thus elucidate the types of texts transmitted in different areas over time — a line of research initiated by earlier biblical scholars and currently experiencing renewed interest.
Digitizing Kennicott's apparatus in an encoded, machine-actionable form would enormously enhance efficiency in managing, analyzing, and exchanging these valuable data for scholars across disciplines.
Funding and Aknowledgments
DiKe is a research project funded by the European Union (NextGenerationEU).
The project is devoloped by The Department of Humanities at the University of Turin and the Department of Education, Languages, Interculture, Literature and Psychology at the University of Florence. The research units are led by Corrado Martone and Romina Vergari, respectively.