PRINTED EDITIONS • VENICE • DANIEL BOMBERG

Felix Pratensis and the First Rabbinic Bible

The life of the Venice press and the later career of Jacob ben Hayyim are told on their own pages. This note is about the first of Bomberg’s Rabbinic Bibles, printed in four folio volumes in 1516–17 and edited by Felix Pratensis. Christian D. Ginsburg, who described the edition from copies in London, including one annotated by the editor himself, still treats it as a turning point in the printed Hebrew text, even where he finds the editor inconsistent.

Printer
Daniel Bomberg, Venice
Editor
Felix Pratensis
Dates
1516–17, in four folio volumes
Companion issue
a quarto Bible, the same year, without the editor’s name
Watercolour of a Venetian workshop in bright daylight, a wooden hand-press at the right with a completely blank cream sheet on its bed, a stack of large unbound blank sheets and a closed folio volume to the left. An unglazed stone arch opens onto bright water and pale sky, with no people, no crosses, no coats of arms, no type and no letters of any kind.
Illustration: a printer’s press and a stack of blank sheets, the setting in which Bomberg’s first Rabbinic Bible and its companion quarto were produced in Venice.
The edition at a glance
Felix Pratensis and the First Rabbinic Bible
Privilege: Leo X granted Pratensis and Bomberg a ten-year protection against piracy, from 1515
What was new: the official qere printed in the margin, though not in every case
Other margins: variant readings of vowels, accents and consonants, apart from the qere
Appendices: the Jerusalem Targum of the Pentateuch, printed for the first time, with other material

The Second Rabbinic Bible of 1524–25, with its printed Masorah, is a different book and is treated on the page devoted to Jacob ben Hayyim.

A Four-Volume Bible from Venice

Ginsburg calls the work the editio princeps of the Rabbinic Bible. The first volume is the Pentateuch, with the Targum of Onkelos in parallel columns, both pointed and accented, and with Rashi’s commentary in the lower part of the page. The title-page, in nineteen lines, also promises the Former and Latter Prophets with the Targum of Jonathan and the commentary of David Kimhi; the Writings with their Targums and commentaries where these were available; the Jerusalem Targum of the Pentateuch; the Second Targum of Esther; a treatise on the accents; and the differences between Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali on the Pentateuch. Daniel and Ezra–Nehemiah and Chronicles, Ginsburg notes, are without a Targum.[1]

The Latin dedication on the verso of the title-page is addressed to Leo X and is dated Venice, 1517. Immediately after the Hebrew epigraph, Ginsburg prints the injunction by which the same pope forbade anyone, under pain of excommunication and of the loss of the books in the territories of the Church, to print these books, with or without the Targum, for a period of ten years from 1515.[2] The Second Rabbinic Bible of 1524–25 appeared, as Ginsburg later observes, almost as that licence expired.[3]

Watercolour close view, bright daylight, of a stack of large unbound blank cream sheets, a closed folio volume in a plain brown cover, and, at the right edge, the wooden bed of a hand-press with one blank sheet. No type, no letters, no people, no window, no crosses.
Illustration: a close view of the unbound sheets, the closed folio and the bed of the press, without the water visible in the opening image.

What Pratensis Put in the Margin

The importance of the edition, Ginsburg writes, can hardly be over-rated. It is the first printed Bible in which the official variants, the qere readings, are given in the margin. Earlier pointed editions had placed the vowels of the qere on the consonants of the ketiv, and had left the reader to guess the intended form. Pratensis did not do this consistently. Ginsburg lists passages in the Pentateuch where the consonants of the qere are still missing from the margin, and a longer list where they have been restored, following the practice of the best manuscripts.[4]

A further feature, which Ginsburg thinks even more important, is that the editor also printed numerous variant readings in the margin apart from the official qere. These affect the vowel-points, the accents and the consonants. Ginsburg analyses their extent from the book of Joshua, and he traces the editor’s treatment of the official ketiv and qere, of the suspended and inverted letters, and of a rare dagesh in the phrase “son of Nun,” to manuscripts of the German and Franco-German schools.[5] He also notes that Pratensis was, so far as he could trace, the first editor to mark the Christian chapter numbers in Hebrew letters in the margin throughout the Bible, while retaining the Masoretic sections in the text itself. The editors of the Complutensian Polyglot, at almost the same dates, had put chapter numbers in the margin in Roman numerals, and had discarded the Masoretic sections.[6]

The Quarto without a Name

In the same year Bomberg issued a small quarto of 530 leaves, with the vowel-points and the accents, and with the same variant readings and glosses in the margins as the folio. Ginsburg’s explanation is practical. The folio, with its commentaries and appendices, was costly, and its circulation among Jewish buyers was limited by the fact that its editor had left Judaism and had dedicated the work to the pope. Bomberg therefore issued a cheaper Bible without Pratensis’s name and without the dedication. The columns of the folio were re-made into quarto pages as they came off the forms, which is why the two editions could appear together.[7]

Ginsburg is not an uncritical admirer. He regrets that, in seeking a papal privilege, Pratensis allowed Leo X and the reader to suppose that this was the first printed Hebrew Bible, and he points to earlier complete Bibles, including the Naples edition of 1491–93, which the editor had in fact used. The proper claim, in Ginsburg’s view, was the one the margins and the appendices could already support: the first printing of the official qere in the margin, a first apparatus of other variants, and the first printing of the Targum of the Prophets and the Hagiographa, together with the Jerusalem Targum of the Pentateuch.[8] Those are the reasons this edition still has a place beside, and not merely before, the Second Rabbinic Bible of Jacob ben Hayyim.

Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible Daniel Bomberg and the Venice Press The Complutensian Polyglot

Selected Bibliography

[1] Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction, ch. XIII
Christian D. Ginsburg, Introduction to the Massoretico-Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible (London: Trinitarian Bible Society, 1897), ch. XIII, pp. 925–36, describing the four folio volumes, the title-page list of contents, and the books printed without a Targum. *
[2] Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 936 and n. 1
Ginsburg, Introduction, p. 936 and n. 1, on the Latin dedication to Leo X, dated Venice 1517, and on the papal injunction forbidding reprinting for ten years from 1515. *
[3] Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 956–58
Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 956–58, noting that Jacob ben Hayyim’s Bible of 1524–25 appeared almost as the ten-year licence of 1515 expired. *
[4] Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 936–37
Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 936–37, on this being the first printed Bible to give the official qere in the margin, and on the editor’s inconsistency in the Pentateuch. *
[5] Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 937–44
Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 937–44, on the other marginal variants, on the analysis of Joshua, and on the use of German and Franco-German manuscripts. *
[6] Ginsburg, Introduction, ch. II
Ginsburg, Introduction, ch. II, pp. 25–26, on Pratensis as the first to indicate the Christian chapters in Hebrew letters in the margin, while retaining the Masoretic sections in the text, in contrast to the Complutensian Polyglot. *
[7] Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 948–49
Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 948–49, on the quarto of 530 leaves issued in the same year, without Pratensis’s name and without the dedication, by re-making the folio columns. *
[8] Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 946–48
Ginsburg, Introduction, pp. 946–48, criticising the claim that this was the first printed Hebrew Bible, and stating the edition’s real contributions in the margins and the appendices, including the first printing of the Jerusalem Targum of the Pentateuch. *
Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible · Daniel Bomberg and the Venice Press · The Complutensian Polyglot · The Biblia Hebraica of Rudolf Kittel · Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret
Companion notes on this site.

The description of the volumes, the privilege, the margins and the quarto follows Ginsburg’s Introduction, chapter XIII, with the chapter-numbering compared from his earlier chapter on the sectional divisions. The later history of the Second Rabbinic Bible is left to the existing page on Jacob ben Hayyim.