BIBLIA HEBRAICA STUTTGARTENSIA (BHS) is the latest edition of THE standard reference work on the text of the Hebrew Old Testament. There are other editions of the Hebrew Bible, including other reference editions, but BHS has the foothold and reputation. It should be available at seminary and bible and Bible Society bookstores (the latest edition I have seen is the 5th, issued in 1997).

I am surely out of my depth in discussing this book, but since nobody else has offered an opinion, I will try to fill the vacuum. The principal English language intro to the BHS is The Text of the Old Testament by Ernst Wurthwein, the second edition being available in paperback at the same bookstores and published by Eerdmans.

The very first edition in this series was produced in 1906 by Rudolph Kittel, for the Wurttemburg Bible Society. It used as its main text the Bible text of the Second Rabbinic Bible published in Venice in 1525 by Bomberg and edited by Jacob ben-Hayyim. This 1525 edition was commonly recognized as the most careful and authoritative edition yet produced, and it was rightly said that any variance from its text required strong supporting evidence (which definitely does not mean that there was nothing in that edition that could be corrected or improved). As with previous editors, including ben-Hayyim, Kittel's purpose was to produce a genuine Massoretic text, preserving all the spellings - and the vowel points and accents - of the authentic Hebrew Bible. The ben-Hayyim text was reproduced painstakingly and each page was provided with extensive footnotes - called an apparatus criticus - of the variant readings found in other leading printed editions, such as Baer and Ginsburg, and in ancient versions, such as the Septuagint, the Vulgate, and the Peshetta. A second edition was produced in 1912.

(At this point, I'd like to correct an erroneous and extremely unjust claim in some amateurish publications to the effect that the readings in the BHS or BHK apparatus are "suggestions" to translators for changing the Biblical text. They are not. They merely report variant readings that actually exist in, say, the Greek Septuagint, the Latin Vulgate, the Aramaic Targum, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other ancient versions. These variants sometimes help explain obscurities in the Hebrew text.)

In 1937 a third edition was published eight years after Kittel's death, under the supervision of his associate Paul Kahle - who had to flee the Nazis a year later. This one, now called BHK, replaced the ben-Hayyim text with that of the Leningrad Codex, now recognized as (probably) more authoritative (it is used, for example, by the Israeli Army for the pocket Bibles it gives its soldiers). Actually the differences between the ben-Hayyim text and the Leningrad text are very slight - almost all of them a matter of cantillation marks that make no difference in translation. The Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete and dated Hebrew Bible manuscript, having been worked up in the year 1008 and according to an end note it was copied in Cairo directly from a master copy worked up by Aaron ben Asher, one of the most famous (and last) of the Massoretic copyists. The manuscript was acquired somewhere in the Middle East by the Karaite leader Abraham Firkovich, who sold it to the Imperial Library in what was then (and now) St. Petersburg circa 1862. The Biblia Hebraica apparatus was also enlarged and many errors were corrected. It was this edition that was used as the basis for the Revised Standard Version of 1952 and for several other new translations. One distinct advantage of the Leningrad Codex over the ben-Hayyim edition was that the poetic portions were shown in their traditional brickwork layout in the Leningrad manuscript but this was simply not possible in the layout of the Rabbinic Bible where poetry was printed the same way as prose.

But there remained errors in the apparatus (Kittel, as a college professor, had his students work up the notes of variants, and apparently some of them were not above faking their homework). A fourth edition - published by the Stuttgart Bible Society - was published in 1977 with many corrections. This edition dropped the notes about variants in many 19th century (and earlier) printed editions. However, Kahle's 1937 edition had relied on a photo-facsimile of the Leningrad Codex done before the Russian Revolution, so the photographic quality was poor and some of the writing, especially vowels and accents, had to be guessed. Only after the fall of Communism was it possible to get permission to make an entirely new photo-facsimile, this time using high tech equipment from which the images were so clear that erasures and rewriting could be detected. The fifth edition was worked up from this improved photography (and the proofreading continues, a computerized version of the Leningrad text is still being fine tuned by experts). A complete Hebrew Bible has roughly three million "characters" - letters, vowels, and cantillation marks - so there's invariably a risk of a typesetter, transcriber, editor or copyists making at least one mistake. Each edition has been an improvement; for example, the fourth and fifth editions were able to add variants found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Again, this edition was used in making very recent translations.

A future edition* of the BHS will undoubtedly make use of the Aleppo Codex, which only recently became available in facsimile. That manuscript is believed to be a bit older and might be a bit more authoritative than the Leningrad Codex, but only about half of the manuscript survived an Arab firebomb in 1947 (up till then the Aleppo Synagogue refused to let it be photographed, afterward the surviving pages were smuggled into Israel); there is an elegant (unannotated) edition of it published in Israel under the title The Jerusalem Crown: The Bible of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, (I have committed an E-pinion of this edition: http://www.epinions.com/content_172657184388 ), filling in the missing portions by using the Leningrad Codex and some notes made by several scholars who saw the Aleppo Codex when it was complete. [see: www.jerusalem-crown.co.il/website-en/index.asp.] _Most (but not all) scholars consider the Aleppo Codex, in its surviving parts, superior to the Leningrad Codex, although the differences are almost microscopic. It's worth remembering that the peculiar characteristic of the work of the Masoretes was not merely transmitting the text but assuring the perpetuation of (apparent) errors -- counter-intuitive and irregular spellings, accents, and turns of phrase -- just as these appeared in the older manuscripts on which they relied.

There are a couple of other manuscripts of parts of the Bible purportedly written by, or copied directly from, one or another of the ben Asher family, and they all have variants, which indicates that copies of such a lengthy text made by hand, even by the best, most diligent, most conscientious, and most devout of copyists, will surely contain errors. The variants between the Aleppo and the Leningrad are nearly microscopic (mostly the accents and eccentric spellings), virtually none of them making a difference in translation.

In case you were wondering, the editing never comes to an end. Although the Leningrad Codex is very authoritative - ditto for the Aleppo Codex and for Ben-Hayyim's 1525 edition - there is no single text that can be called THE Definitive text, only a number of Defensible texts. The Jewish Publication Society's 1999 Bible edition started with the BHS, did its own additional proofreading and found and corrected a few errors in BHS, and then made some decisions contrary to the Leningrad Codex -- almost exclusively matters of vowel points and accents. The elegantly printed 1962 Koren Jerusalem Bible was scrupulously edited against several important editions including the Biblia Hebraica, and deliberately made some choices - also mostly vowels and accents - against the Leningrad text. Even the Hebrew University's Jerusalem Crown deliberately uses some vowel points differently than the Aleppo Codex, for the sake of modern pronunciation. You'd have to be an especially obsessive Hebrew grammarian to notice the differences among them.

Some insight into the editing difficulties and technology was given in the companion volume issued for the aforementioned Jerusalem Crown: The Hebrew typeface requires 138 characters (letters, vowel points, accents, and numerals) and the entire Hebrew Bible uses about three million such characters, meaning typesetters and proofreaders have three million different items to fret about. In a few places even the best photo-facsimile was not enough, and the original manuscript had to be consulted to settle a question. Finally, a computer compared the computer-typeset Hebrew text used in the 1999 Jewish Publication Society edition with the computer-typeset text intended for the Jerusalem Crown, and uncovered several errors that five expert human proofreaders had missed.

To make full use of the BHK you should be reasonably fluent in Biblical Hebrew and in a little Latin and Greek. A very good assist for English-speaking readers is A Simplified Guide to BHS by Wm.R. Scott, published by Bibal Press, in Berkeley, Cal.

Another reference Hebrew Bible readily available (mostly from Bible Society bookshops) is Ginsburg's edition of 1894, published (still) by the Trinitarian Bible Society in England. This used the 1525 ben-Hayyim text (with a very few alterations) as its main text and provides an apparatus - entirely in Hebrew! - of variants from the Greek, Latin and Syriac, as well as from about a dozen of the earliest Hebrew editions. It is enormously useful to someone who reads Hebrew, one characteristic being that the variants in the non-Hebrew versions, when back-translated into Hebrew sometimes are obviously based on only one changed letter in Hebrew. The British & Foreign Bible Society published a booklet back in 1928, providing an English explanation of the details and Ginsburg's terminology; it is now hard to obtain but well worth the effort. This was probably the text used for the English Revised Version of 1885 (Ginsburg was on the Old Testament Committee), and for parts of the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation. Ginsburg died while working on a multivolume revision for the British & Foreign Bible Society, but that now rare set only added some additional notes to show variants in about 20 manuscripts, most of them no longer considered important.

In case you're wondering, nobody knows what Hebrew editions were used by the King James translators. They did their work approximately two centuries after all the Jews left England, so they might have had very limited Hebrew resources. Contrary to at least one recent (and error-riddled) book, it was not the ben-Hayyim edition because the KJV includes verses that simply don't appear in ben-Hayyim; there were more than a hundred printed Hebrew editions published in Europe prior to the KJV - many without accents or Massoretic notes, many without vowels - and it would be very difficult now to narrow down this field of candidates.

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*PS: Since this review was originally worked up, the next edition of this work, to be titled BIBLIA HEBRAICA QUINTA is being prepped for publication. It's a complete revision of this work, a great improvement on the edition I review here. Already, in late 2004, a thin preliminary volume has appeared and the rest of the Bible will appear in thin volumes consisting of only one or two Biblical books, before a single large volume of the complete BIBLIA HEBRAICA QUINTA is churned out, sometime after 2010. A facsimile of one page is available at some websites. This late 2004 volume - consisting only of the general introduction of the whole work and the annotated text of the Five Scrolls - sells for $99. That's Ninety-Nine Dollars for such a small part of the Bible. At that rate the whole Bible will be priced at well above $500, possibly more than a thousand dollars. It may be the finest Hebrew Bible ever put on paper and a monument for the next half century, but I wouldn't pay that much for a Bible even if it were autographed!


Recommended: Yes