Charles-François Houbigant’s Hebrew Bible of 1753

In 1753 and 1754 the Paris booksellers Antoine-Claude Briasson and Laurent Durand issued four large folio volumes containing the whole Hebrew Bible, a new Latin translation, and the Greek books that the Catholic Church regarded as deuterocanonical. The editor was Charles-François Houbigant, a priest of the French Congregation of the Oratory, who had spent some twenty years on the work. His Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, the Hebrew Bible with critical notes and a Latin version made according to the critical notes, was the first edition of the entire Hebrew Bible to propose systematic corrections of the received Masoretic text. Houbigant printed the Hebrew without vowel points, which he regarded as a late and unreliable addition, and set beside it a translation that followed not the received text but the text as he believed it should be restored, using the Samaritan Pentateuch, the ancient translations, manuscripts in Paris libraries and his own conjectures. The edition was admired for its beauty and its boldness and criticised, then and later, for the freedom of its emendations. It nonetheless marked a turning point in the study of the Hebrew text, standing at the beginning of the movement that led to the great collations of Benjamin Kennicott and Giovanni Bernardo de Rossi and, ultimately, to the critical apparatuses of modern editions. This article describes Houbigant’s life, the tradition of Oratorian scholarship to which he belonged, his early works on Hebrew, the plan and contents of his Bible, its principles and sources, its reception, and its place in the history of the Hebrew text.¹²³

Life

Charles-François Houbigant was born in Paris in 1686. In 1704, at the age of about eighteen, he entered the Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus, the society of secular priests founded in Paris in 1611 by Pierre de Bérulle. After his studies he taught in the colleges of the congregation, giving instruction in the classics at Juilly, the most celebrated of the Oratorian schools, in rhetoric at Marseilles and in philosophy at Soissons. In 1722 he was called to Paris to direct the conferences on church history and discipline held at the seminary of Saint-Magloire, one of the principal houses of the Oratory in the capital.⁴⁵

The strain of these duties led to a serious illness that left him deaf. The Catholic Encyclopedia records a curious detail of his affliction, reported in the older biographies: he could not hear the noise of the cannon fired at the Bastille, but he could hear the scratching of his pen on paper. Unable to continue teaching or preaching, he turned to study. He took advantage of a foundation established within the Oratory by Louis de Carrières, a member of the congregation known for his French commentary on the Bible, to support biblical studies, and he devoted himself to the oriental languages and above all to Hebrew. From this point his life was that of a scholar working among books, with few external events, and his deafness, which isolated him from much of the conversation of his colleagues, may have contributed to the independence of his judgement.⁶⁷

Houbigant lived to the age of ninety-seven. He spent much of his later life at a country house at Avilly, near Chantilly, where he set up a small printing press and, as a recreation, set type and printed his own works. In 1772 he founded a school for girls at Avilly and left it an endowment at his death. In his last years he lost his sight, and his faculties declined. He died in Paris on 31 October 1783. Among the papers found after his death were a life of Cardinal de Bérulle and notes on the theory of Jean Astruc concerning the sources used by Moses in the composition of Genesis, which had been published in 1753, the same year as the first volumes of Houbigant’s Bible.⁸⁹

The Oratory and Biblical Scholarship

The French Oratory had a distinguished tradition of biblical and oriental scholarship before Houbigant. Its founder, Bérulle, had encouraged the study of the Scriptures and the fathers as part of the reform of the clergy, and in the seventeenth century the congregation produced several scholars of European reputation. Jean Morin, a convert from Protestantism who joined the Oratory in 1618, published in 1631 his Exercitationes on the Samaritan Pentateuch, arguing that the Samaritan text was in many respects superior to the Masoretic, and he took part in editing the Samaritan Pentateuch for the Paris Polyglot. Richard Simon, a member of the Oratory until his expulsion in 1678, published in that year his Critical History of the Old Testament, which treated the text of the Hebrew Bible as a historical document subject to corruption and revision, and caused a scandal that led to the suppression of the first edition.^10111213

The Catholic scholars of the Oratory had a particular interest in the question of the integrity of the Hebrew text. The Council of Trent had declared the Latin Vulgate authentic for the public use of the church, and Catholic controversialists often argued that the Hebrew text had suffered corruption, whether by accident or by the deliberate alteration of the Jews, so that the Vulgate and the Septuagint preserved readings superior to it. Protestant theologians, on the other hand, generally held that the Hebrew text as transmitted by the Masoretes was the authentic Word of God and had been providentially preserved, and some of them, such as the Buxtorfs of Basel, defended even the antiquity of the vowel points. The Oratorian scholars were thus inclined, both by confessional interest and by critical conviction, to treat the Masoretic text as one witness among others, open to correction from the versions.¹⁴¹⁵¹⁶

The decisive contribution to this debate had come not from a Catholic but from a French Protestant, Louis Cappel of the academy of Saumur. Cappel had argued, in a work published anonymously in 1624, that the vowel points were not original but had been added by the Masoretes after the close of the Talmud, and in his Critica Sacra, published at Paris in 1650 with the help of Morin and other Catholic scholars, he collected variant readings from the versions, the parallel passages and the Masoretic notes, and argued that the Hebrew text could and should be corrected where the evidence warranted. The Critica Sacra was condemned by many Protestants but welcomed by Catholics, and it became the foundation of the critical study of the Hebrew text in the following century. Houbigant regarded himself as Cappel’s heir, and his own work carried Cappel’s principles further than Cappel himself had done.¹⁷¹⁸¹⁹

Hebrew without Vowel Points

Houbigant’s first publication, which appeared in Paris in 1732, was a vocabulary of Hebrew roots in French verse, Racines hébraïques sans points-voyelles, modelled on the Jardin des racines grecques, a mnemonic verse dictionary of Greek roots by Claude Lancelot of Port-Royal that had been widely used in French schools. As its title indicates, it taught the Hebrew roots without the vowel points. In the preface Houbigant defended the method of reading Hebrew devised by François Masclef, a canon of Amiens, whose Hebrew grammar of 1716 had taught the language free of the points and of the other inventions of the Masoretes, and he argued that the points were useless and even dangerous for the student of the Bible.²⁰²¹²²

Masclef’s system supplied vowels to the consonantal text according to simple rules, mainly by pronouncing each consonant with the vowel of its name or by treating certain letters as vowels. It was a practical method, intended to make Hebrew easy for students, but it had no basis in the historical pronunciation of the language, and it was criticised by scholars who knew the Masoretic system. Houbigant adopted it because he believed that the points represented not the original pronunciation of the biblical writers but a late interpretation imposed on the text by the Jewish scholars of the early Middle Ages. To read the consonants without the points was, in his view, to return to the text as the prophets and apostles had known it and to free the interpreter from the authority of the Masoretes.²³²⁴²⁵

This conviction shaped his whole approach to the Hebrew Bible. If the points were a late addition, then the reading they recorded was only one possible interpretation of the consonants, and the editor was free to propose others. The marginal readings of the Masoretes, the qere, which indicated how certain words were to be read in place of the written text, the ketiv, were likewise in his view merely the opinions of Jewish scholars and had no authority. In his Bible he took no account of them. Modern scholars recognise that the vowel points were indeed added in the early Middle Ages, but they also recognise that they record a tradition of reading far older than the written signs, and that Houbigant’s dismissal of the Masoretic tradition led him to discard evidence of great value.^26272829

The Prolegomena and the Psalter

In 1746 Houbigant published his Prolegomena in Scripturam Sacram in two volumes, setting out the principles of textual criticism on which his edition was to be based. Following Cappel, he argued that the text of the Old Testament had suffered alterations in the course of its transmission which, though they did not affect matters of faith or morals, obscured the sense of many passages. The errors were due chiefly to the carelessness of copyists, who confused similar letters, omitted words or lines by the slip of the eye from one occurrence of a word to another, transposed letters and words, and misunderstood abbreviations. Houbigant classified these errors and proposed rules by which they could be detected and corrected, using the evidence of the ancient versions, the parallel passages within the Bible, the context and the requirements of grammar and sense.³⁰³¹³²

The Prolegomena were accompanied in the same year by a Latin translation of the Psalms, which printed the Vulgate and a new version made from the Hebrew side by side. Two years later, in 1748, Houbigant published at Leiden a small edition of the Hebrew Psalter corrected according to his principles, whose title announced that the text had been purged of very many errors. These works were preparatory to the full edition of the Bible, and they gave scholars a foretaste of his method. The Psalter, with its numerous emendations, aroused both interest and opposition, and it anticipated the reception that the complete Bible would receive.³³³⁴

The Biblia Hebraica of 1753–54

The Bible itself appeared in four folio volumes dated 1753, though the work was completed only in 1754. The volumes followed the order of the books of the Hebrew canon, from the Pentateuch to the Prophets and the Writings, and they also included the deuterocanonical books, which Houbigant divided into three classes and printed in Greek rather than Hebrew, since the text of most of them was known only in Greek. In this the edition reflected its Catholic origin, for these books formed part of the Catholic canon defined at Trent, while Protestant and Jewish editions of the Hebrew Bible omitted them.³⁵³⁶

Each page was printed in two columns, the Hebrew or Greek text in one and the Latin translation in the other, and the critical notes were placed below or in tables at the end of each volume. The Hebrew text was that of the edition published at Amsterdam and Utrecht in 1705 by Everard van der Hooght, which had become the standard printed Hebrew Bible of the eighteenth century, but Houbigant reproduced it without the vowel points or accents, in accordance with his principles. He did not alter the Hebrew text itself; his corrections were indicated in the margin or in the notes, and the Latin translation followed the corrected text. The reader could thus see both the received consonantal text and the editor’s proposals for its improvement.³⁷³⁸³⁹

The edition was a fine example of Parisian typography, and contemporary and later writers praised its appearance. It was financed by the Congregation of the Oratory, which is reported to have spent some forty thousand francs on it, a large sum for a learned publication. The Latin translation was also issued separately in several octavo volumes in the same year, under the title Veteris Testamenti versio nova ad Hebraicam veritatem facta, a new version of the Old Testament made according to the Hebrew truth, so that readers who did not need the Hebrew could use the translation alone.⁴⁰⁴¹

Sources and Method of Correction

Houbigant’s corrections drew on several kinds of evidence. For the Pentateuch his principal source was the Samaritan Pentateuch, the form of the five books of Moses preserved by the Samaritan community, which had become known to European scholars in the seventeenth century and had been printed in the Paris and London Polyglots. The Samaritan text differs from the Masoretic in several thousand places, mostly in spelling but also in readings, and in a number of these it agrees with the Septuagint. Following Morin, Houbigant regarded it as an independent witness of great value and often preferred its readings to those of the Masoretic text. Later scholars, especially after the work of Wilhelm Gesenius in 1815, came to regard most of the Samaritan variants as secondary, the result of harmonisation and modernisation, and Houbigant’s reliance on it was judged excessive, though the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls has shown that texts of the Samaritan type existed in pre-Samaritan form in the Second Temple period.^42434445

For the other books he drew on the ancient versions, especially the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Aramaic Targums and the Syriac Peshitta, which had been printed in the polyglots and which often presupposed a Hebrew text different from the Masoretic. Where a version seemed to reflect a better reading, he proposed to restore it in the Hebrew. He also consulted Hebrew manuscripts in the libraries of Paris, including those of the Oratory and the royal library, and cited their readings in support of his corrections, although he did not describe the manuscripts fully or indicate precisely which manuscript supported which reading. This was a weakness that later critics, including Kennicott, pointed out, for it made it difficult to verify his evidence.^46474849

A large number of Houbigant’s corrections were, however, conjectural, based not on any manuscript or version but on his own judgement of what the sense, grammar or parallelism required. In this he followed the practice of the classical critics, who corrected the texts of Greek and Latin authors by conjecture where the manuscripts were corrupt, and he applied to the Hebrew Bible the same freedom that Richard Bentley had applied to Horace. He believed that the errors of the copyists could often be detected by their effects, as when a sentence lacked grammatical sense or a verse of poetry lacked its parallel member, and that the true reading could be restored by reversing the error. Many of his conjectures involved the confusion of similar letters, such as dalet and resh, or the division of words, and some of them have been accepted by later scholars or confirmed by the discovery of manuscripts.⁵⁰⁵¹⁵²

The principles that Houbigant applied were in themselves reasonable, and many of them are still used by textual critics today. His difficulty lay in their application. He was inclined to find errors where the text was merely difficult, to prefer smooth readings to harsh ones, and to correct the Hebrew according to his own sense of style. He paid little attention to the possibility that the versions had paraphrased or misunderstood their Hebrew original, or that the differences between them reflected the translators’ methods rather than different texts. His knowledge of Hebrew, though considerable, was not deep enough to recognise all the idioms of the biblical language, and some of his corrections removed genuine features of the text. Later critics judged that he had not formed a clear idea of the relative value of his authorities, and that his corrections were often arbitrary.⁵³⁵⁴⁵⁵

The Latin Translation

The Latin translation that accompanied the Hebrew was an integral part of Houbigant’s plan. Its title indicated that it was made according to the critical notes, that is, according to the corrected text rather than the received one. It was thus a translation of a hypothetical Hebrew text, the text as Houbigant believed it had been before the errors of the copyists, and it differed from the Vulgate and from the Protestant Latin translations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wherever he had proposed a correction. The translation was written in a clear and elegant Latin, and it was intended to make the meaning of the Hebrew accessible to readers who could not follow the critical arguments.⁵⁶⁵⁷

The translation had a certain influence on later versions. Its readings were consulted by translators and commentators in France, England and Germany, and some of them entered later translations of the Bible. In England, the Oxford scholar Robert Lowth, whose translation of Isaiah appeared in 1778, made use of Houbigant’s work and adopted a number of his corrections, while also using the collations of Kennicott. Lowth’s own approach to the text, which emended the Hebrew freely on the basis of the versions and of the parallelism of Hebrew poetry that he had analysed in his lectures on the sacred poetry of the Hebrews, was close in spirit to that of Houbigant, and it shows how far the French scholar’s methods were shared by the critics of the later eighteenth century.⁵⁸⁵⁹⁶⁰

The Latin translation was also significant in the context of Catholic biblical scholarship. Since the Council of Trent the Vulgate had been the authoritative Latin Bible of the church, and the Clementine edition of 1592 was the official text. A Catholic priest who published a new Latin translation from the Hebrew, departing from the Vulgate in many places, might have been suspected of challenging the authority of the church. Houbigant avoided this charge by presenting his translation as a scholarly aid rather than a replacement for the Vulgate, and by insisting that his corrections did not touch matters of faith. His work was received favourably by Pope Benedict XIV, a pope known for his learning and his patronage of scholarship,.⁶¹⁶²⁶³

Reception

The Bible was received with admiration and controversy. Its typographical quality, the scale of the undertaking and the learning displayed in the notes were widely praised, and it was recognised as the most ambitious attempt yet made to apply the methods of textual criticism to the whole Hebrew Bible. At the same time, the number and freedom of the corrections provoked opposition, especially among Protestant scholars who held to the integrity of the Masoretic text and among Jewish scholars who regarded the Masoretic tradition as authoritative. Some critics accused Houbigant of undermining the authority of Scripture by treating the Hebrew text as hopelessly corrupt, and others attacked his ignorance of the Masoretic tradition and of rabbinic Hebrew.⁶⁴⁶⁵⁶⁶

The most important response came from England, where Benjamin Kennicott of Oxford published in 1753, the same year as the first volumes of Houbigant’s Bible, the first of two dissertations on the state of the printed Hebrew text of the Old Testament. Kennicott argued, like Houbigant, that the Hebrew text had suffered corruption and needed correction, but he insisted that corrections should be based on the evidence of manuscripts rather than on conjecture, and he proposed to collate all the Hebrew manuscripts available in Europe to provide that evidence. His great collation, published in two volumes in 1776 and 1780, recorded the variants of more than six hundred manuscripts and printed editions, and it was followed by the supplementary collations of de Rossi in Parma. Kennicott regarded Houbigant as a predecessor and ally, but his method was in important respects a reaction against Houbigant’s reliance on conjecture.⁶⁷⁶⁸⁶⁹

In Germany, where the critical study of the Bible was developing rapidly in the later eighteenth century, Houbigant’s work was studied with interest. The reprinting of his critical notes and prolegomena at Frankfurt in 1777, under the title Notae criticae in universos Veteris Testamenti libros, shows that there was a demand for his work among German scholars, who could not easily obtain or afford the Paris folios. The German critics were generally more cautious than Houbigant in proposing corrections, and the results of Kennicott’s and de Rossi’s collations, which showed that the Hebrew manuscripts differed from each other mostly in minor matters, encouraged a more conservative view of the Masoretic text. Houbigant’s reputation declined accordingly, and by the nineteenth century he was often cited as an example of the excesses of conjectural criticism.⁷⁰⁷¹⁷²

Houbigant himself continued to defend his views. In his later works he answered critics, discussed questions of translation and interpretation, and translated into French English works of apologetics by Duncan Forbes, Thomas Sherlock and Charles Leslie, writers who had defended revealed religion against the English deists. These works show him as a Catholic apologist as well as a scholar, concerned to defend the Christian faith against deists and to present the critical study of the Bible as compatible with orthodoxy.⁷³⁷⁴

Houbigant and the Masoretic Text

Houbigant’s attitude to the Masoretic text was shaped by the controversies of the seventeenth century. For him, as for Cappel and Morin, the Masoretes were Jewish scholars of the early Middle Ages who had fixed the text and its pronunciation according to their own tradition, and their work had no claim to the authority of the original. The vowel points, the accents and the marginal notes were later additions that could be set aside, and the consonantal text itself had suffered corruption before the Masoretes received it. This view contained important truths, for the vowel points were indeed medieval, and the consonantal text had indeed undergone changes in the course of its transmission. But it underestimated the antiquity and reliability of the tradition that the Masoretes recorded, and it ignored the extraordinary care with which they had preserved the text.⁷⁵⁷⁶⁷⁷

The modern understanding of the Masoretic text is more nuanced. Scholars now recognise that the consonantal text of the Masoretic tradition was fixed by the end of the first century of the Common Era, and that it descends from one of several textual traditions current in the Second Temple period, as the Dead Sea Scrolls have shown. The vowel points and accents were added between the seventh and tenth centuries, but they record a tradition of reading that goes back much earlier. The Masoretic notes, far from being arbitrary, are a careful record of the features of the text, designed to protect it from change. In this light, Houbigant’s dismissal of the Masoretic tradition appears as a serious error, but his recognition that the text could be compared with other witnesses, such as the Samaritan Pentateuch and the Septuagint, anticipated the modern view that the Masoretic text is one of several ancient forms of the Hebrew Bible.^78798081

The question of conjectural emendation remains controversial. The apparatus of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, published between 1967 and 1977, included many conjectures in the tradition of Houbigant and the critics who followed him, and it was criticised by later scholars for doing so. The committee of the United Bible Societies led by Dominique Barthélemy, whose reports on the text of the Old Testament began to appear in 1982, adopted a much more conservative approach, accepting corrections only where they were supported by evidence and rejecting most conjectures. Barthélemy’s introduction to the first volume of his Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament includes a history of the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible in which Houbigant appears as an important figure in the development of the conjectural tradition. The newer editions, Biblia Hebraica Quinta and the Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, have taken different positions on the question, the former recording conjectures only rarely and the latter aiming to reconstruct an earlier text in some respects.^82838485

The Example of a Single Correction

The character of Houbigant’s method can be seen in the kind of case that recurs throughout his notes. Where the Masoretic text of a narrative omits words that the sense seems to require, and the Samaritan Pentateuch or the Septuagint supplies them, Houbigant restores them. A well-known example, discussed by many critics before and after him, is Genesis 4:8, where the Hebrew says that Cain spoke to his brother Abel, but does not record what he said, while the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, the Syriac and the Vulgate add the words “let us go out into the field”. For Houbigant such a case demonstrated that the Masoretic text had lost words by accident and that the versions preserved the original, and modern editors generally agree that something has dropped out of the Hebrew here, though they differ on whether the versions supply the original words or a later attempt to fill the gap.⁸⁶⁸⁷⁸⁸

Where no version offered help, Houbigant did not hesitate to propose a reading of his own, and here his successors were less ready to follow him. The difference between the two kinds of correction, those supported by a witness and those resting on the editor’s judgement alone, became the central issue in the debate that his edition provoked. Kennicott’s project of collation, de Rossi’s supplements and the cautious principles of the later committees can all be understood as attempts to enlarge the first category and to restrict the second, and in this sense Houbigant’s boldness defined the problem that the following two centuries of scholarship set out to solve.⁸⁹⁹⁰⁹¹

Assessment

Houbigant’s Bible occupies a significant place in the history of the Hebrew text. It was the first edition of the whole Hebrew Bible to propose systematic corrections of the received text, and it set out those corrections with their evidence in a form that allowed readers to judge them. It brought together the evidence of the Samaritan Pentateuch, the ancient versions and the Hebrew manuscripts in a single work, and it applied to the Hebrew Bible the methods of textual criticism that had been developed for classical texts. In these respects it anticipated the modern critical editions, with their apparatus of variant readings and proposed corrections.⁹²⁹³⁹⁴

Its weaknesses were equally significant. Houbigant’s dismissal of the Masoretic tradition, his overvaluation of the Samaritan Pentateuch and his readiness to correct by conjecture led him to propose many changes that later scholars rejected. His failure to identify his manuscript sources precisely made it difficult to verify his evidence. His Latin translation of a hypothetical corrected text, though elegant, was too dependent on his own judgement to serve as a reliable guide to the Hebrew. These weaknesses were recognised by his contemporaries and by later scholars, and they explain why his reputation declined in the nineteenth century.⁹⁵⁹⁶⁹⁷

Yet Houbigant’s work was a necessary stage in the development of the critical study of the Hebrew Bible. By raising the question of the correctness of the Masoretic text in so bold a form, he forced scholars to examine the evidence, and the collations of Kennicott and de Rossi were in part a response to the challenge he posed. Those collations, in turn, showed that the medieval Hebrew manuscripts offered little support for the kind of corrections Houbigant had proposed, and this led to a more conservative view of the Masoretic text. The modern understanding of the text, which combines respect for the Masoretic tradition with recognition of the evidence of other ancient witnesses, owes something to both sides of this debate.^9899100

Houbigant’s work also reflects the special position of Catholic biblical scholarship in the eighteenth century. As a priest of the Oratory, he inherited a tradition that treated the Hebrew text as one witness among others, and he was free to criticise it in ways that Protestant scholars, committed to the authority of the Hebrew, often were not. His edition shows the vitality of Catholic scholarship in France in the decades before the Revolution, when the Oratory, the Benedictines of Saint-Maur and other religious communities produced major works of learning. The Revolution, which suppressed the religious congregations, brought this tradition to an end, and Houbigant, who died in 1783, was among its last representatives.^101102103

For the modern reader, Houbigant’s Bible is a monument of eighteenth-century learning and a reminder of the questions that every editor of the Hebrew Bible must face. Should the editor reproduce the text as it has been transmitted, or attempt to restore an earlier form? What weight should be given to the ancient versions, to the Samaritan Pentateuch, to the medieval manuscripts and to conjecture? How should the tradition of the Masoretes be treated? Houbigant’s answers to these questions were bold and often wrong, but the questions themselves remain, and the debates of the present day about the aims and methods of critical editions of the Hebrew Bible are continuations of the debates in which he took part.^104105106

His edition also illustrates the material conditions of biblical scholarship in his time. The four folio volumes, financed by a religious congregation and printed by commercial booksellers, were expensive and difficult to obtain, and their influence depended on the reprinting of the notes in a cheaper form and on the willingness of scholars in other countries to engage with them. The collations of manuscripts depended on access to libraries and on the cooperation of librarians, and the comparison of versions depended on the polyglot Bibles that had made them available in print. In this world of learned collaboration and competition, Houbigant’s work took its place alongside the polyglots of the previous century and the collations that followed it, as one of the great printed resources for the study of the Hebrew text.^107108109

Houbigant’s life, finally, was that of a scholar who turned misfortune into opportunity. His deafness, which ended his career as a teacher and preacher, gave him the solitude in which to master Hebrew and to undertake a work of twenty years. His long life allowed him to see his edition published, reprinted and debated across Europe. His small printing press at Avilly, on which he set type with his own hands, expressed a devotion to the craft of the book that is visible in the beauty of his great folios. And his insistence on the right of the scholar to examine the text critically, while maintaining his loyalty to the church, made him a representative figure of the Catholic Enlightenment in France, a movement that sought to reconcile faith and reason in the study of Scripture.^110111112

Notes

1. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
2. Charles-François Houbigant, ed., Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson and Durand, 1753–54); Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue record. ↩
3. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
4. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
5. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
6. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
7. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
8. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
9. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
10. Jean Morin, Exercitationes ecclesiasticae in utrumque Samaritanorum Pentateuchum (Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1631). ↩
11. Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1685). ↩
12. See also “The Antwerp, Paris and London Polyglots” on this site. ↩
13. Grokipedia, “Samaritan Pentateuch”. ↩
14. Grokipedia, “Vulgate”. ↩
15. See also “The Vowel-Point Controversy” on this site. ↩
16. See also “The Sixtine and Clementine Vulgates” on this site. ↩
17. Louis Cappel, Critica Sacra, sive de variis quae in sacris Veteris Testamenti libris occurrunt lectionibus libri sex (Paris: Sébastien Cramoisy, 1650). ↩
18. See also “The Vowel-Point Controversy” on this site. ↩
19. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
20. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
21. François Masclef, Grammatica Hebraica, a punctis aliisque inventis Massorethicis libera (Paris, 1716). ↩
22. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
23. François Masclef, Grammatica Hebraica, a punctis aliisque inventis Massorethicis libera (Paris, 1716). ↩
24. Grokipedia, “Niqqud”. ↩
25. Grokipedia, “Masoretes”. ↩
26. See also “The Vowel-Point Controversy” on this site. ↩
27. See also “The Masorah Parva and Masorah Magna” on this site. ↩
28. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
29. See also “Elias Levita and the Masoret ha-Masoret of 1538” on this site. ↩
30. Charles-François Houbigant, Prolegomena in Scripturam Sacram, 2 vols. (Paris, 1746). ↩
31. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
32. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
33. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
34. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
35. Charles-François Houbigant, ed., Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson and Durand, 1753–54); Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue record. ↩
36. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
37. Charles-François Houbigant, ed., Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson and Durand, 1753–54); Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue record. ↩
38. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
39. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
40. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
41. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
42. Grokipedia, “Samaritan Pentateuch”. ↩
43. Jean Morin, Exercitationes ecclesiasticae in utrumque Samaritanorum Pentateuchum (Paris: Antoine Vitré, 1631). ↩
44. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
45. See also “The Antwerp, Paris and London Polyglots” on this site. ↩
46. Grokipedia, “Septuagint”. ↩
47. Grokipedia, “Vulgate”. ↩
48. See also “The Peshitta and Its Hebrew Vorlage” on this site. ↩
49. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
50. Charles-François Houbigant, Prolegomena in Scripturam Sacram, 2 vols. (Paris, 1746). ↩
51. Grokipedia, “Textual criticism”. ↩
52. See also “Richard Bentley’s Proposals for a New Testament” on this site. ↩
53. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
54. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
55. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
56. Charles-François Houbigant, ed., Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson and Durand, 1753–54); Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue record. ↩
57. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
58. Robert Lowth, Isaiah: A New Translation; with a Preliminary Dissertation, and Notes (London: J. Dodsley and T. Cadell, 1778). ↩
59. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
60. See also “The Kennicott Bible” on this site. ↩
61. See also “The Sixtine and Clementine Vulgates” on this site. ↩
62. Grokipedia, “Pope Benedict XIV”. ↩
63. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
64. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
65. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
66. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
67. Benjamin Kennicott, The State of the Printed Hebrew Text of the Old Testament Considered, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1753–59). ↩
68. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
69. See also “The Kennicott Bible” on this site. ↩
70. Charles-François Houbigant, Notae criticae in universos Veteris Testamenti libros, cum Hebraice, tum Graece scriptos, cum integris Prolegomenis ad exemplar Parisiense denuo recensae, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp and Wenner, 1777). ↩
71. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
72. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
73. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
74. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
75. Grokipedia, “Masoretes”. ↩
76. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
77. See also “The Vowel-Point Controversy” on this site. ↩
78. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
79. Grokipedia, “Masoretic Text”. ↩
80. See also “The Masorah Parva and Masorah Magna” on this site. ↩
81. See also “Jacob ben Hayyim and the Second Rabbinic Bible” on this site. ↩
82. Grokipedia, “Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia”. ↩
83. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
84. See also “Biblia Hebraica Quinta” on this site. ↩
85. See also “HBCE and the New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible” on this site. ↩
86. Grokipedia, “Samaritan Pentateuch”. ↩
87. Grokipedia, “Septuagint”. ↩
88. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
89. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
90. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
91. Grokipedia, “Textual criticism”. ↩
92. Charles-François Houbigant, ed., Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson and Durand, 1753–54); Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue record. ↩
93. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
94. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
95. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
96. Ernst Würthwein, The Text of the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Biblia Hebraica, rev. Alexander Achilles Fischer, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014). ↩
97. Dominique Barthélemy, Critique textuelle de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 1, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 50/1 (Fribourg: Éditions Universitaires; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1982). ↩
98. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
99. Benjamin Kennicott, The State of the Printed Hebrew Text of the Old Testament Considered, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1753–59). ↩
100. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 3rd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012). ↩
101. Grokipedia, “Jansenism”. ↩
102. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
103. Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam: Reinier Leers, 1685). ↩
104. See also “HBCE and the New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible” on this site. ↩
105. See also “Biblia Hebraica Quinta” on this site. ↩
106. Grokipedia, “Hebrew Bible”. ↩
107. See also “The Antwerp, Paris and London Polyglots” on this site. ↩
108. See also “Kennicott, de Rossi and the Eighteenth-Century Collations of Hebrew Manuscripts” on this site. ↩
109. Charles-François Houbigant, Notae criticae in universos Veteris Testamenti libros, cum Hebraice, tum Graece scriptos, cum integris Prolegomenis ad exemplar Parisiense denuo recensae, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Varrentrapp and Wenner, 1777). ↩
110. “Charles-François Houbigant,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1910). ↩
111. John McClintock and James Strong, “Houbigant, Charles François,” in Cyclopaedia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 4 (New York: Harper, 1872). ↩
112. Charles-François Houbigant, ed., Biblia Hebraica cum notis criticis et versione Latina ad notas criticas facta, 4 vols. (Paris: Briasson and Durand, 1753–54); Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue record. ↩