Rudolf Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (BHK)

Around 1901, the Old Testament scholar Rudolf Kittel (1853–1929) from Leipzig developed a plan for a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (BHK) was published in 1906 in two volumes by Verlagsbuchhandlung J. C. Hinrichs in Leipzig.

As its basis, Kittel chose the Hebrew so-called “Textus receptus”, edited by Jakob ben Chayim. This was a version of the Masoretic Text that Daniel Bomberg had published in Venice in 1524/1525. Through the centuries since its first publication, it had become universally recognized as the definitive text of the Hebrew Bible. Kittel printed this Hebrew text with its vowel and stress marks, but without the surrounding Masoretic commentaries and notes (the Masorah Magna and Masorah Parva). At the foot of the pages he included a concise critical apparatus with textual variants from other known Masoretic manuscripts and from the ancient translations (primarily the Greek Septuagint).

In 1921, the Württemberg Bible Society acquired the rights to Kittel's Biblia Hebraica from Hinrichs. In addition to reprinting the existing edition, a new edition of the work is tackled from 1925. The "Codex Leningradensis" from 1008, discovered by Paul Kahle and the oldest completely preserved manuscript of the Masoretic text, will in future serve as the basis for the text. The critical apparatus is divided into "mere variants and less important messages" and "the actual changes in the text and what is otherwise more significant", so that the reader can also see how the information is weighted. Above all, however, the small Masorah of the Codex Leningradensis is printed on the outer edge of the pages, although without further editing or explanation. The complete revision was published by the Württemberg Bible Society in 1937 as the 3rd edition of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica (BHK3). The BHK3 establishes the high international reputation of the Biblia Hebraica and paves the way for the BHS.

In 1947, the discovery of the Qumran scrolls opened up a new dimension in Old Testament textual research. For the first time Hebrew/Aramiac manuscripts some 1,000 years older than the Codex Leningradensis became available as reference texts. This discovery cast entirely new light on the history of the texts, and the textual variants of the Qumran manuscripts could, of course, not be omitted from the Biblia Hebraica. For technical reasons, however, the typesetting of the BHK3 could only be modified to a limited extent. Moreover, the Hebrew matrices used in printing the BHK3 had been lost or destroyed in the course of World War II. The variants from the two best-preserved Qumran texts, for example – the Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa) and the Habakkuk Commentary (1QpHab) – both of which were extremely important to research, could not be simply incorporated into the existing apparatus. As a compromise, these Qumran variants were added to the respective volumes starting with the 7th Edition of 1951 as a third section of the critical apparatus in the margin of the pages and in a different typeface. Reprints of the BHK appeared in this form up until the mid-1970s.