HBCE and the New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible

Almost every scholarly Hebrew Bible on a library shelf today prints the text of a single medieval manuscript and puts the evidence of every other witness underneath it. The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE) sets out to do something different. Begun as the Oxford Hebrew Bible and published since 2015 by SBL Press under the general editorship of Ronald Hendel, it prints in each volume the text its editor judges to be the earliest that can be recovered, with the reasons set out in an apparatus and a long textual commentary. Only one volume has appeared so far, Michael V. Fox’s Proverbs. Even so, the project has prompted a long and detailed debate about what an edition of the Hebrew Bible is for.

Two Ways to Edit an Ancient Text

Diplomatic Editions

An edition of any text that survives in many copies has to decide what to print on the page. The Hebrew Bible survives in thousands of medieval manuscripts, in the scrolls and fragments from the Dead Sea, in the Samaritan Pentateuch, and in ancient translations into Greek, Aramaic, Syriac and Latin. Emanuel Tov’s handbook of textual criticism states the two basic answers. A diplomatic edition reproduces one particular form of the Masoretic Text unchanged as its base text and records divergent readings in an accompanying apparatus. An eclectic edition presents a reconstructed text “selected from elements found in all known sources”, again with an apparatus.¹

Every major scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible in use is diplomatic. The Biblia Hebraica series, from the third edition of 1929–37 through Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) to the current Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), prints the Leningrad Codex, copied in 1008 or 1009. The Hebrew University Bible Project (HUB) prints the older but incomplete Aleppo Codex. Williamson describes the shared policy as reproducing “the text of an important medieval manuscript” and relegating to the apparatus “all reporting and evaluation of variants from whatever period, as well as conjectures for emendation”.²

Eclectic Editions

Editors of almost every other ancient text work the other way. For the Greek and Latin classics, the Greek New Testament and the critical Septuagint, the editor gathers the evidence and prints what he or she judges to be the probable original wording. The printed text matches no single manuscript in its entirety, and the apparatus documents what each source reads. Williamson, who is no enthusiast for eclectic Hebrew Bibles, nevertheless calls the difference in practice an “oddity” that has become more apparent since the Dead Sea Scrolls were published in full.³ The best-known example in biblical studies is the Novum Testamentum Graece, whose text is a modern reconstruction found in no single ancient copy.

Eclectic editions of the Hebrew Bible are not new in themselves. Tov lists dozens of reconstructions of single books and chapters from the late nineteenth century onwards. They include Cornill’s Ezekiel (1886), Haupt’s colour-printed edition and its English sequel, the Polychrome Bible (1893–1904), and C. C. Torrey’s reconstruction of the archetype of the twin Psalms 14 and 53 in 1927. That last one drew a rival reconstruction from Karl Budde the following year.⁴ Kittel himself said that his Biblia Hebraica was born as a criticism of Haupt’s edition, which had combined textual and literary judgements and changed the Masoretic Text drastically.⁵ Newer experiments include Pier Giorgio Borbone’s edition of Hosea (1990), Anthony Gelston’s eclectic text of Isaiah 52:13–53:12 (1990) and Kristin Hognesius’s edition of 2 Chronicles 1–16 (2003).⁶ What none of them attempted was an eclectic edition of the whole Bible, prepared by a team to common rules.

From Oxford to Atlanta

Genesis 1–11 and the Oxford Hebrew Bible

The HBCE grew out of one scholar’s work on one book. Ronald Hendel, now Norma and Sam Dabby Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, published The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition with Oxford University Press in 1998.⁷ Writing in 2016, he recalled that he had “formulated a plan to create a new critical edition of the Hebrew Bible” two decades earlier, and that, “much to my surprise, a number of excellent scholars agreed to take part”.⁸

The proposal went to Oxford University Press in New York, and the series was announced as the Oxford Hebrew Bible. David Baker notes that the name came from the publisher, not the university.⁹ Williamson, writing from Oxford’s Oriental Institute, records that the Press’s Delegates were consulted only when the decision was “more or less a fait accompli”, and says that he regretted “the proposed title and its implications”.¹⁰ The public launch came in 2008. Vetus Testamentum printed Hendel’s programmatic “Prologue to a New Critical Edition” together with sample editions by three of the editors: Sidnie White Crawford on Deuteronomy 32:1–9, Jan Joosten on 1 Kings 11:1–8, and Eugene Ulrich on Jeremiah 27:1–10, which in the Greek numbering is chapter 34.¹¹ Hendel had already published a small sample of a plural text in a study of 1 Samuel 17.¹²

A New Name and a New Publisher

In May 2014 the Society of Biblical Literature announced that it would publish the project under a new name, The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition, still under Hendel’s general editorship. The announcement planned twenty-one volumes with an international team of authors. It described the method as building “an eclectic text, drawing together readings from many manuscripts and, where warranted, conjectural readings”. In books like Jeremiah, “entirely variant texts of books are set side by side”.¹³ In an essay for the Bible and Interpretation website that August, Hendel described the HBCE as “a new model for a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible”, though one that “will be generally familiar to scholars who use critical editions of other ancient works such as the Septuagint or New Testament”.¹⁴ The SBL’s series page now names Hendel and Crawford as joint leaders of the editorial board, with editors drawn from North America, Europe, Africa and Israel.¹⁵

How the Edition Works

Aiming at the Archetype

The HBCE does not claim to print the original text of any book. Its stated target is the archetype. The SBL describes this as the manuscript that was “the latest common ancestor of all the extant manuscripts”, or the “earliest inferable text”. This is “not identical to the original text (however one defines this elusive term)”. More precisely, the edition aims at a corrected archetype, since the archetype itself will have contained scribal errors that can be put right.¹⁶

Hendel’s 2008 prologue gives the reason for the caution. Each biblical book is “the product of a complicated and often unrecoverable history of composition and redaction”. The original that lies behind the archetype is often “a collective production, sometimes constructed over centuries, perhaps comparable to the construction of a medieval cathedral”.¹⁷ Fox, writing in the first volume, goes further. The text he has produced “never had physical existence. It is a construct”. Its goal, he says, “is heuristic: approachable but not wholly attainable”.¹⁸ An early project document puts the same point more bluntly: “The dream of a perfect text is unreal, counterfactual. The best we can do is to make a good critical text.”¹⁹

Copy-Text and Accidentals

An eclectic Hebrew text runs into a practical problem that editors of Greek texts largely escape. The consonants of the biblical books are ancient. Their vowel points and cantillation accents were added by the Masoretes in the early Middle Ages, and the spelling itself changed during transmission. No one can reconstruct how an archetype of Isaiah or Kings was spelled, still less how it was pointed.

Hendel’s answer comes from English literary editing: W. W. Greg’s theory of the copy-text, set out in “The Rationale of Copy-Text” (1950–51). Greg distinguished substantives, the words that carry meaning, from accidentals such as spelling and punctuation. The editor argues for every substantive reading but follows one good manuscript for the accidentals.²⁰ The HBCE’s copy-text is the Leningrad Codex, chosen as the earliest complete manuscript and one whose quality is widely recognised. It is not followed slavishly, and obvious scribal errors are corrected.²¹ Where the edition departs from the copy-text, it keeps the copy-text’s spelling conventions. In the 2008 prologue, readings that departed from Leningrad were to be printed without vowels or accents. The editors’ guide of 2010 changed this, so that such readings are now vocalised in the style of the copy-text but left without accents. They are marked off with half-brackets, so the reader can see at once where the printed text is not Leningrad’s.²²

Ketiv and qere pairs need their own rule. These are places where the Masoretic consonants (כְּתִיב, ketiv, “what is written”) differ from the form tradition reads aloud (קְרֵי, qere, “what is read”). The HBCE treats them as variants like any other. The qere is taken as the intended reading of the copy-text and kept unless the ketiv is clearly preferable. A preferred ketiv is then marked as a non-copy-text reading.²³ The Masorah, the medieval scribes’ apparatus of notes, is not printed at all, since it was never part of the archetype.²⁴

Critical Text and Apparatus

Below the critical text runs an apparatus that, in Hendel’s words, presents “the evidence” and justifies “the editorial decisions”.²⁵ It is selective in a different way from the diplomatic editions. It concentrates on readings that reflect ancient Hebrew variants. Differences that arise only in the process of translation are generally left out, as are later Masoretic manuscripts unlikely to preserve an independent ancient text and differences of spelling.²⁶ The major witnesses (the Masoretic Text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint and the Dead Sea Scrolls) are cited throughout. The Targums, the Peshitta and the Vulgate are cited only when they appear to depart from the Masoretic Text, on Hendel’s reasoning that “the latter in most instances reproduce the readings of M”. Readings from translations are given in the original language and also retroverted into Hebrew. Baker counts that last feature a clear advantage over BHQ and the HUB, because readers can see what Hebrew a translator probably had in front of him.²⁷

A short example shows the kind of decision involved. At Genesis 4:8 the Masoretic Text reads וַיֹּאמֶר קַיִן אֶל־הֶבֶל אָחִיו (va-yomer qayin el-hevel aḥiv, “Cain said to his brother Abel”) and then moves straight on to the field, without saying what Cain said. The Samaritan Pentateuch, the Septuagint, the Peshitta and the Vulgate add נֵלְכָה הַשָּׂדֶה (nelkhah ha-sadeh, “let us go out to the field”). Tov counts the shorter Masoretic reading as an accidental omission.²⁸ A diplomatic edition prints the Masoretic sentence and reports the longer reading underneath. An eclectic editor who agrees with Tov puts the words into the text.

Parallel Editions

The HBCE’s most distinctive feature concerns books that circulated in more than one edition. The SBL names Exodus, Samuel, Kings and Jeremiah as examples. In such books, “the HBCE text will be plural, approximating the archetypes of each ancient edition”, printed in parallel columns aligned to show where they differ. Editions that survive only in Greek translation are retroverted into Hebrew as far as possible.²⁹ Where one edition is not the ancestor of the other, the editors also aim to reconstruct their common ancestor, as far as the evidence allows.³⁰

Jeremiah is the classic case. The Greek text is about one-sixth shorter than the Masoretic Text, and it places the oracles against the nations in the middle of the book rather than at the end. Two fragmentary Hebrew scrolls from Qumran, 4QJerᵇ and 4QJerᵈ, share the Greek text’s main features. Tov regards the old question as settled: the translator very likely worked from a shorter Hebrew edition and did not abridge the longer one.³¹ Ulrich’s sample of Jeremiah 27 set the two texts side by side. Joosten’s sample of 1 Kings 11 did the same for the Books of Kings, and in verse 5 it recorded a variant reconstructed from the Peshitta as an “equal” reading, one the editor could not rank above or below the copy-text.³² Adrian Schenker has said that BHQ will flag such literary variants in Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Kings, and Tov singles out chapters of Ezekiel, such as chapter 7, as a hard test for any eclectic text.³³

The Textual Commentary

Each volume opens with a text-critical introduction to the book and its witnesses. It ends with a commentary in which the editor argues the decisions that the apparatus can only summarise.³⁴ The SBL presents the commentary as more than a defence of the critical text. Many variants are simple scribal errors, but “others are deliberate revisions, motivated by the desire to explain, update, harmonize, and even expurgate the text”. The edition therefore “moves both backward and forward in time”: back towards the earliest inferable text, and forward through the interpretations that later scribes built into it.³⁵ Tov opens his own chapter on critical editions with A. E. Housman’s complaint that a “critical edition” was too often one “in which the editor is allowed to fling his opinions in the reader’s face without being called to account and asked for his reasons”.³⁶ The HBCE’s commentaries are its attempt to give the reasons.

The Volumes So Far

Proverbs (2015)

The first volume, Michael V. Fox’s Proverbs: An Eclectic Edition with Introduction and Textual Commentary, was published by SBL Press in April 2015.³⁷ Fox, Halls-Bascom Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had already written a two-volume commentary on the Book of Proverbs for Yale University Press. The volume runs to about five hundred pages in three parts. A long introduction covers method, the Hebrew witnesses and the versions, with tables classifying the ketiv–qere cases. Then comes a textual commentary printed under the critical text. Last is the critical text on its own, set to be read from the back of the book in the Hebrew direction, with brief notes beneath.³⁸ One reviewer, Joseph Abrahamson, singled out Fox’s habit of giving every versional reading both in its own language and in English, so that readers can check how Fox understood it.³⁹

Proverbs was not a typical first case, and Fox said so. He judged the Greek Proverbs to be a literary revision different from the Hebrew. In his view no Hebrew text behind it could be reconstructed, so he gave no parallel Greek column. He recorded its differences in the apparatus to a text close to the Masoretic one instead.⁴⁰ He also defined his goal more narrowly than the project’s general aim. He sought “the correct hyparchetype of the Masoretic Proverbs, that is to say, the proto-Masoretic text”.⁴¹ Hendel’s Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible (2016) ends with an appendix comparing the Proverbs volumes of BHQ, edited by Jan de Waard in 2008, and the HBCE.⁴²

Work in Progress

The publisher’s pages still list Proverbs as the only completed volume. The SBL’s project page said after its publication that “more volumes will appear over the next decade”.⁴³ A list of editorial assignments shows the scale of the plan. Hendel is editing Genesis and Crawford Deuteronomy. Alexander Rofé and Guy Darshan have Samuel, Matthieu Richelle (with Jean Koulagna and Sr Bonifatia) 1 Kings, Andrés Piquer Otero 2 Kings, Miika Tucker Jeremiah, Stephen Cook Ezekiel and Eugene Ulrich Daniel. Several books, among them Joshua, Job and Esther, were still unassigned.⁴⁴ Richelle, a professor at UCLouvain, describes his 1 Kings as “in progress”.⁴⁵

The Debate

Williamson: “Do We Need a New Bible?”

The most detailed early critique came from H. G. M. Williamson, then Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford. He gave it as a lecture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome on 27 March 2009, and Biblica printed it that year.⁴⁶ Williamson accepts much of the project’s rationale. In books like Samuel and Jeremiah, he writes, the text-critical work of the Oxford Hebrew Bible “is entirely justified and indeed necessary”. He also agrees that no form of the text should be preferred for religious reasons.⁴⁷ His objections are to the edition as a printed Bible.

The first concerns the copy-text. The Masoretic Text, he argues, “is not in itself a unified entity”. Its spelling, with vowel letters added inconsistently over centuries, and its pointing belong to linguistic levels “as much as a millennium apart”. Hendel’s rule of keeping the accidentals of Leningrad glosses over that mixture.⁴⁸ At Isaiah 7:11 the Masoretes pointed שְׁאָלָה (she’alah, “ask” or “request”), but three later Greek versions and the Vulgate presuppose שְׁאֹלָה (she’olah, “to Sheol”). The consonants are identical, and Williamson notes that nearly all commentators and translations follow the second reading. NRSV, for example, has “let it be deep as Sheol”. His point is that a rule which takes the vowels from the copy-text treats the Masoretes’ choice as a mere accidental, when here it decides the meaning.⁴⁹ He gives a subtler case from the accents. In passages such as Ruth 1:22 the word הַשָּׁבָה (ha-shavah, “who returned”) is accented as a perfect verb after the definite article. That construction is unknown in Classical Hebrew and looks like a later linguistic habit of the Masoretes. Because it is marked only by the accent, it “will not show up in the text of the new edition”.⁵⁰

The second objection concerns multiple editions. Williamson finds the sample Hebrew column behind the Greek Jeremiah “astonishing”. Wherever it runs parallel with the Masoretic Text, it is printed fully vocalised. That, he argues, presents readers with “a text which we know simply never existed”. He calls the policy “grossly irresponsible”.⁵¹ He doubts too whether fragmentary scrolls can support whole parallel editions, or whether every such scroll was a biblical text at all.⁵²

The third is that the most important judgements do not fit into an apparatus. Crawford’s sample of Deuteronomy 32, for instance, ends by deleting a word by conjecture even though every surviving witness has it. Decisions like that, Williamson argues, rest on philology and literary judgement that only a commentary can explain, so an eclectic text hides from inexperienced readers “precisely the judgments of the scholar which are most determinative”.⁵³ His conclusion is that full textual commentary is what the field needs. He expects that part of the project to be widely used, “but it is not a Bible, new or old”.⁵⁴

Tov: An Archetype That Never Existed

Emanuel Tov, the author of the standard handbook on the subject and an editor of the HUB until 2004, was critical from the start. Writing in 2008, he argued that “there never was an ‘archetype’ or ‘original text’ of most Scripture books”. Most books, in his view, passed through compositional stages, each meant to be authoritative when it was completed.⁵⁵ If an editor may rebuild verses, Tov asked, why stop there? By the project’s own logic, editors could leave out passages that most critics regard as secondary, such as the Song of Hannah in 1 Samuel 2 or the remark at Genesis 12:6 that “the Canaanites were then in the land”. He did not expect them to, but he thought the logic pointed that way. He also judged the plan to reconstruct whole Greek-attested editions “naive”, given how little is known of texts such as the short Jeremiah. And he foresaw rival eclectic editions of the same book: “On whose edition, or whose Bible, will scholars focus their exegetical activity?”⁵⁶

Tov repeated the core objection in his formal response to the 2013 symposium. Fox’s statement that the reconstructed text “never had physical existence” was in his view an argument against the whole enterprise. “I agree, but if so, why should we reconstruct it?”⁵⁷ He noted that Proverbs could not show the parallel-column system at work, since Fox had found a Hebrew column for the Greek impossible to reconstruct. In Tov’s view, neither column could be fully reconstructed in other books either. “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” he wrote. The real test would be books such as Deuteronomy 32, Joshua 24, Samuel, Jeremiah and Ezekiel.⁵⁸

Tov’s verdict was mixed, however. He voted for a diplomatic edition, but thought the HBCE preferable to the diplomatic editions “in several respects”. He expected its parallel columns to handle large blocks of variant text better than any apparatus. He judged it easier to use than BHQ or the HUB, and he said that the HBCE and the Biblia Qumranica would excel at training a new generation of exegetes.⁵⁹

Other Voices

Baker’s 2010 survey of the new editions welcomed an eclectic edition in principle. He also thought the project’s eventual decision to add vowels to non-copy-text readings was the most workable of the options. His own worry was practical. With no one-volume edition planned, the HBCE would reach few of the non-specialist readers it aimed to spare from the apparatus. He also asked whether the minor versions deserved to be cited only when they disagree with the Masoretic Text.⁶⁰ The SBL itself names Adrian Schenker, general editor of BHQ, alongside Tov and Williamson among its critics.⁶¹ More recently Gert Prinsloo has argued that diplomatic and eclectic editions share the same weaknesses. Both offer only a selective “snippet view” of the evidence. Like Tov, he favours a synoptic edition that sets whole witnesses side by side.⁶²

Hendel’s Replies

Hendel answered at length, first in “The Oxford Hebrew Bible: Its Aims and a Response to Criticisms” (2013). There he argued that many of the objections reflect “differences about the epistemology of textual criticism and critical biblical scholarship”.⁶³ Revised versions of that response and of the 2008 prologue open Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible, which also includes essays on the genealogy of the idea of a critical edition, on what a biblical book is and on a typology of scribal error.⁶⁴ In its foreword Hendel credits “the precise arguments of our critics” with sharpening the project, so that its “conceptual underpinnings and practices” developed “into a finely-grained structure”.⁶⁵ One change of this kind is the decision, noted by Baker, to vocalise readings that depart from the copy-text. The SBL’s own description of the series makes the same point: “Detailed argument is the lifeblood of good scholarship.”⁶⁶ Hendel closed his 2013 article modestly: “This is our theory of what a critical edition should be. It will not be a perfect edition.”⁶⁷

Alongside BHQ and the HUB

Hendel presented the HBCE as a complement to the diplomatic editions, not a rival: “The BHQ and OHB are complementary rather than contradictory projects.”⁶⁸ Tov disagreed, arguing that an edition that changes its base text and one that never does reflect different Weltanschauungen.⁶⁹ In practice the three editions now coexist, each at a different stage.

Adrian Schenker’s terminology helps to sort them. BHQ is an editio critica minor, a single-volume manual edition with a compact apparatus. The HUB and the HBCE are editiones criticae maiores.⁷⁰ BHQ prints Leningrad diplomatically with its full Masorah and marks its preferred readings in the apparatus. Nine of its planned twenty fascicles are now in print.⁷¹ The HUB prints the Aleppo Codex with Masorah and a series of apparatuses for the ancient versions, early Hebrew witnesses (scrolls, Samaritan Pentateuch, rabbinic quotations) and medieval manuscripts, followed by editorial notes.⁷² Its volumes on Isaiah (1995), Jeremiah (1997) and Ezekiel (2004) were joined in 2024 by The Twelve Prophets, edited by Michael Segal and Shemaryahu Talmon.⁷³ The HBCE alone offers a reconstructed text and a full argued commentary. Michael Segal, co-editor of the HUB’s Twelve Prophets, has remarked that the two kinds of edition “are fundamentally not as far apart from each other as is usually claimed”.⁷⁴ Each records the same evidence. They differ over whether the editor’s conclusions belong in the text or underneath it.

The Digital Edition

From the start the HBCE was planned to exist online as well as in print. The SBL promises “a sophisticated electronic version” containing the print material, “all the texts and versions” and photographs of important manuscripts. It is to be “an interactive polyglot edition”, free and open-access, built on an open architecture so that others can reuse the data.⁷⁵ Electronic versions were meant to follow each volume within a couple of years.⁷⁶ The phrase recalls the great printed polyglots of Alcalá, Antwerp, Paris and London, the Complutensian among them, and before them Origen’s six-column Hexapla. Hendel counts those polyglots among the first modern critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, and the last chapter of Steps is titled “From Polyglot to Hypertext”.⁷⁷

The technical work was taken up at the University of Chicago. Its Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research initiative (CEDAR) began in 2017 and tested database methods on several textual traditions, from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare.⁷⁸ The Hebrew Bible team was led by Jeffrey Stackert, with Simeon Chavel, Hendel and the postdoctoral research specialist Sarah Yardney. It used the OCHRE database platform, developed at Chicago’s Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures.⁷⁹ A tool called Critical View stacks manuscripts or editions on one another and colour-codes them: green for agreement, red for disagreement, black for text found in only one witness. Comparative View sets texts in different languages side by side and highlights words that occupy the same place, without judging whether they agree. The project’s demonstration compares Hendel’s critical text of Genesis with the Leningrad Codex.⁸⁰ Yardney, Sandra Schloen and Miller Prosser described this digital HBCE in Open Theology in 2019.⁸¹

When CEDAR ended in 2021, the Bible team carried on as the Chicago Digital Bible. In its database every word, letter and diacritical mark is stored as a separate item and then reassembled into each manuscript on request, rather than kept as a fixed string of text. The project says its first edition, the Song of Songs, will appear in 2026–27, with tools that let users compare manuscripts and build their own critical editions.⁸² That brings the project close to the kind of edition Tov said he wanted in 2014, a visual electronic device in which scholars could work with the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the scrolls “on an equal footing”.⁸³ On this point the critic and the editor want something similar: a way of seeing the witnesses together that a single printed page cannot give.

Notes

1. Emanuel Tov, Textual Criticism of the Hebrew Bible, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: Fortress; Assen: Van Gorcum, 2001), p. 20; see also p. 141 on the eclectic Göttingen Septuagint. See our review of the third edition. ↩
2. H. G. M. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible? Reflections on the Proposed Oxford Hebrew Bible”, Biblica 90 (2009), pp. 153–75, at pp. 155, 157; on the date of the Leningrad Codex, p. 155 n. 4. ↩
3. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 157. ↩
4. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 372–73 n. 2; Emanuel Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions: Philosophy and Praxis”, revised in his Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran: Collected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), ch. 18, § 2f, citing C. C. Torrey, “The Archetype of Psalms 14 and 53”, JBL 46 (1927), pp. 186–92, and K. Budde, “Psalm 14 und 53”, JBL 47 (1928), pp. 160–83. ↩
5. Emanuel Tov, “New Editions of the Hebrew Scriptures: A Response”, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 3 (2014), pp. 375–83, at p. 375 and n. 3, citing R. Kittel, Über die Notwendigkeit und Möglichkeit einer neuen Ausgabe der hebräischen Bibel (Leipzig, 1901). ↩
6. Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 2f n. 48; Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 373 n. 2. ↩
7. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page, consulted 19 October 2026); Ronald S. Hendel, The Text of Genesis 1–11: Textual Studies and Critical Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ↩
8. Ronald Hendel, Steps to a New Edition of the Hebrew Bible, Text-Critical Studies 10 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2016), p. ix. ↩
9. David L. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible? Review of Biblia Hebraica Quinta, Hebrew University Bible, Oxford Hebrew Bible, and Other Modern Editions”, Tyndale Bulletin 61.2 (2010), pp. 209–36, at p. 220. ↩
10. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 159 n. 12. ↩
11. Ronald Hendel, “The Oxford Hebrew Bible: Prologue to a New Critical Edition”, Vetus Testamentum 58 (2008), pp. 324–51; Sidnie White Crawford, Jan Joosten and Eugene Ulrich, “Sample Editions of the Oxford Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 32:1–9, 1 Kings 11:1–8, and Jeremiah 27:1–10 (34 G)”, Vetus Testamentum 58 (2008), pp. 352–66; Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 159 and n. 13. ↩
12. Ronald Hendel, “Plural Texts and Literary Criticism: For Instance, 1 Samuel 17”, Textus 23 (2007), pp. 97–114; cited by Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 159 n. 13, and Tov, “New Editions”, p. 379. ↩
13. Society of Biblical Literature, announcement of 22 May 2014, as quoted in full on the blog OTTC: A Blog for Old Testament Textual Criticism, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE)”, 22 May 2014. ↩
14. Ronald Hendel, “A New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible”, Bible and Interpretation, August 2014. ↩
15. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page). ↩
16. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page); the same wording appears in Hendel, “A New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible”. ↩
17. Hendel, “Prologue”, as quoted in Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 3g. ↩
18. Michael V. Fox, Proverbs: An Eclectic Edition with Introduction and Textual Commentary, HBCE 1 (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015), pp. 4–5, as quoted in Joseph Abrahamson, “Review: Michael Fox, Proverbs”, διαθηκη (blog), 12 June 2017. Fox had used the phrase earlier in “Editing Proverbs: The Challenge of the Oxford Hebrew Bible”, Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages 32 (2006), pp. 1–22, at p. 7. ↩
19. Oxford Hebrew Bible, “Introduction” (project document, p. 16), as quoted in Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 3g n. 94. ↩
20. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 222 and n. 16, citing Hendel, “Prologue”, pp. 343–46, and W. W. Greg, “The Rationale of Copy-Text”, Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–51), pp. 19–36. ↩
21. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 222; Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 2f, citing Hendel, “Prologue”, pp. 343–44. ↩
22. Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 2f, quoting Hendel, “Prologue”, p. 345; Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, pp. 222 n. 17, 224–25 and 227 n. 24, citing “The Oxford Hebrew Bible: Guide for Editors” (2010), pp. 3–4. ↩
23. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 225. ↩
24. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 225. ↩
25. Hendel, “Prologue”, p. 325, as quoted in Gert T. M. Prinsloo, “Diplomatic or Eclectic Critical Editions of the Hebrew Bible? Considering a Third Alternative”, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 78.1 (2022), a7813. ↩
26. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 226. ↩
27. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 226, quoting Hendel, “Prologue”, p. 347. ↩
28. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 236–37; on the section break in the middle of the verse in some Masoretic manuscripts, p. 53. ↩
29. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page). ↩
30. Oxford Hebrew Bible, “Introduction”, p. 2, as quoted in Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 3g; Hendel, “Prologue”, pp. 329–30, as quoted there, § 2f. ↩
31. Tov, Textual Criticism, pp. 320–21; Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 167, who puts the difference at “approaching 20%”. ↩
32. Crawford, Joosten and Ulrich, “Sample Editions”, p. 359, as described in Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 2f; Tov, “New Editions”, p. 379. ↩
33. Tov, “New Editions”, pp. 377, 379, the latter citing A. Schenker, “The Edition Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ)”, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 2 (2013), p. 10. ↩
34. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, p. 227. ↩
35. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page). ↩
36. Tov, Textual Criticism, p. 371, quoting A. E. Housman, introduction to M. Manilii Astronomicon, vol. 5 (London, 1930), p. xxxiii. On Housman see Grokipedia. ↩
37. Society of Biblical Literature Bookstore, “Proverbs: An Eclectic Edition with Introduction and Textual Commentary” (HBCE 1, April 2015; consulted 19 October 2026). ↩
38. SBL Bookstore, “Proverbs”, which also lists Fox’s Proverbs 1–9 and Proverbs 10–31 (Yale University Press); Abrahamson, “Review”. ↩
39. Abrahamson, “Review”. ↩
40. Tov, “New Editions”, pp. 377–78, citing Fox, “Editing Proverbs”, p. 4. ↩
41. Fox, “Editing Proverbs”, p. 7, as quoted in Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 3g n. 98; compare Fox, Proverbs, p. 2, as quoted by Abrahamson: “The primary goal of The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition (HBCE) is to reconstruct the corrected archetypes of biblical books.” ↩
42. Hendel, Steps, p. 331, “Appendix: Comparing Critical Editions: BHQ Proverbs and HBCE Proverbs”; on de Waard’s fascicle (BHQ 17, 2008) see Tov, “New Editions”, p. 376 n. 5. ↩
43. Society of Biblical Literature, “Hebrew Bible Critical Edition: Volumes Published” (former project page, archived by the Internet Archive); SBL, series page. ↩
44. Society of Biblical Literature, “Hebrew Bible Critical Edition: Editorial Assignments” (former project page, archived 2023). Assignments may have changed since. ↩
45. Matthieu Richelle, “About” (personal website, consulted 19 October 2026). ↩
46. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 153 n. *. ↩
47. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, pp. 161, 163. ↩
48. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, pp. 163, 165. ↩
49. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, pp. 165–66. Vowels are given here in standard Tiberian form. ↩
50. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 167, listing Gen 18:21; 46:27; Isa 51:10; Job 2:11; Ruth 1:22; 2:6; 4:3. ↩
51. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 169 and n. 29. ↩
52. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, pp. 169, 173. ↩
53. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 171. ↩
54. Williamson, “Do We Need a New Bible?”, p. 175. Williamson returned to the subject in “Comments on New Editions of the Hebrew Scriptures”, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 3 (2014), pp. 384–91. ↩
55. Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 3g; on his role in the HUB, Tov, “New Editions”, p. 375. ↩
56. Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 3g. ↩
57. Tov, “New Editions”, p. 378 and n. 13, citing Fox, “Editing Proverbs”, p. 7. ↩
58. Tov, “New Editions”, pp. 377–78. ↩
59. Tov, “New Editions”, pp. 378, 381–82. ↩
60. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, pp. 223–26. ↩
61. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page). ↩
62. Prinsloo, “Diplomatic or Eclectic Critical Editions”, sections “A critical evaluation” and “Considering a third alternative”; Tov, “New Editions”, pp. 382–83. ↩
63. Ronald Hendel, “The Oxford Hebrew Bible: Its Aims and a Response to Criticisms”, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 2 (2013), pp. 63–99, abstract. ↩
64. Hendel, Steps, pp. vii–viii (contents) and x–xi (sources of the chapters). ↩
65. Hendel, Steps, p. ix. ↩
66. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page). ↩
67. Hendel, “Its Aims and a Response”, p. 99, as quoted in Tov, “New Editions”, p. 383. ↩
68. Hendel, “Prologue”, p. 337, as quoted in Tov, “Hebrew Scripture Editions”, § 2f. ↩
69. Tov, “New Editions”, p. 377. ↩
70. Prinsloo, “Diplomatic or Eclectic Critical Editions”, section “Critical editions of the Hebrew Bible: A brief overview”, citing A. Schenker (1996), p. 59. ↩
71. Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, “Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ)” (project page). See also our article on Biblia Hebraica Quinta. ↩
72. Baker, “Which Hebrew Bible?”, pp. 218–19. ↩
73. Tov, “New Editions”, p. 376 n. 7; Magnes Press, “The Twelve Prophets: The Hebrew University Bible Project Edition” (Jerusalem, 2024; consulted 19 October 2026). ↩
74. Michael Segal (2017), p. 45, as quoted in Prinsloo, “Diplomatic or Eclectic Critical Editions”, section “A critical evaluation”. ↩
75. Society of Biblical Literature, “The Hebrew Bible: A Critical Edition” (series page). ↩
76. SBL, “Volumes Published” (archived). ↩
77. Hendel, Steps, ch. 13, “From Polyglot to Hypertext”, from p. 317; on the polyglots as the first modern critical editions, Hendel, “The Idea of a Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible: A Genealogy”, Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 3 (2014), pp. 392–423, at p. 394, as quoted in Prinsloo, “Diplomatic or Eclectic Critical Editions”. ↩
78. Chicago Digital Bible, “About the Project” (consulted 19 October 2026); Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, “The CEDAR Project: Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research” (project page). ↩
79. OCHRE, “Critical Editions for Digital Analysis and Research (CEDAR), Bible project” (consulted 19 October 2026); Neubauer Collegium, “The CEDAR Project”; University of Chicago Divinity School, “Sarah Yardney” (staff page). ↩
80. OCHRE, “CEDAR, Bible project”. ↩
81. Sarah Yardney, Sandra R. Schloen and Miller C. Prosser, “New Digital Tools for a New Critical Edition of the Hebrew Bible”, Open Theology 5 (2019), pp. 80–94. ↩
82. Chicago Digital Bible, “About the Project”. ↩
83. Tov, “New Editions”, p. 383. ↩