The Hebrew University Bible as an Edition

A Diplomatic Editio Maior

Michael Segal, the project’s present editor-in-chief, describes its aim as a diplomatic editio maior of the Hebrew Bible, based on the Aleppo Codex, “with textual variants recorded from as broad a range of sources as possible.” The witnesses include the Dead Sea scrolls, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Greek, Latin, Syriac and Aramaic versions, biblical quotations in rabbinic literature, Genizah fragments, medieval Tiberian and Eastern manuscripts, and the Venice Rabbinic Bible of 1525.^[1] The edition does not try to reconstruct an original text, or to promote a single theory of how the text developed. It prints one manuscript and sets the evidence beside it, with notes, so that readers can weigh the readings for themselves.

That choice of base is the first thing that separates the Hebrew University Bible from the Biblia Hebraica series. Segal notes that it is the only critical edition built on the Aleppo Codex, whereas BHQ and the earlier Biblia Hebraica editions follow the Leningrad Codex. He also points to the project’s own fresh research on rabbinic quotations and on the versions, rather than reliance on older collations.^[2] The price of that ambition has been speed. A review of the field in the Tyndale Bulletin describes the Jerusalem work as a long-term undertaking aimed at using “the entire range of evidence available.”^[3]

Four Volumes and Their Editors

The project was founded by Moshe Goshen-Gottstein together with Chaim Rabin and Shemaryahu Talmon, all members of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University. Goshen-Gottstein was editor-in-chief until his death in 1991; Rabin and Talmon served as editors from the beginning, and Emanuel Tov from 1977 to 2004. Talmon then led the project until his death in 2010, when Segal succeeded him.^[2] The first published volume, Isaiah, was Goshen-Gottstein’s own. Jeremiah was edited by Rabin, Talmon and Tov.^[4]

Ezekiel, edited by Goshen-Gottstein and Talmon and published by Magnes Press in 2004, was reviewed in the Journal of Theological Studies as the third volume of the project, after Isaiah and Jeremiah.^[5] The fourth, the Twelve Prophets, edited by Segal and Talmon, appeared from Magnes Press in 2024.^[6] All four volumes are in the Latter Prophets. Later volumes carry the names of editors who did not live to see them printed, as well as those who completed the work. That is a mark of how long a full apparatus of this kind takes to build.

What the Page Offers

Segal describes a diplomatic page that prints the Aleppo text, with its vowels, accents and Masorah, and then records the evidence of the versions, the Qumran scrolls, rabbinic quotations and the medieval manuscripts in a set of apparatuses, with notes in Hebrew and English.^[1] The layered presentation is meant to show the history of a reading, not just its existence. A variant in the Septuagint, a quotation in the Talmud and a difference in a Genizah fragment are different kinds of evidence and have to be judged differently.

For a reader of this site, the Hebrew University Bible is the edition in which the Aleppo Codex itself, rather than the Leningrad Codex, stands as the printed text. It is also a reminder that “critical edition” can mean more than one thing. The Biblia Hebraica tradition offers a handy apparatus in one volume; the Jerusalem edition offers a much fuller record, but only for the books it has so far reached. Neither replaces the manuscripts. Both are ways of reading them.

Selected Bibliography