The Digital Kennicott project aims at creating a TEI-compliant digital edition of Benjamin Kennicott's Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (Oxford 1776, 1780). The work is a two-volume collation of variants of the text of the Hebrew Bible from both medieval manuscripts and printed editions. To date, it constitutes one of the most extensive and comprehensive collection of variants of the HB in existence, and our main source of data on the transmission of the biblical text in the Middle Ages. The edition will allow users to navigate the Hebrew text and the critical apparatus for each biblical book. The manuscripts will be identified and accompanied by the relevant metadata. The TEI encoding of the apparatus will allow targeted philological analysis using computational tools.
The project aims at making Kennicott’s work more accessible, machine readable and actionable. This will be achieved by:
1) Producing a TEI-compliant digital edition of the VTH;
2) Collating and digitizing a few unpublished medieval manuscripts of the Bible;
3) Creating a corpus of linguistically annotated variants. The creation of a corpus of variants aims to make more accessible new data essential to the advancement of the fields of Hebrew linguistics and text criticism. Linguistic annotation will allow information to be extracted by means of complex queries, based not only on keywords, but also on specific linguistic characteristics, impossible to detect with the digital resources currently available.
Ultimo aggiornamento
10.06.2025