Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia

The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) is the most recent complete scholarly edition of the Hebrew Bible, based on the Leningrad Codex. It contains all significant text variants as well as proposals for corrections in the critical apparatus.

Unlike the scholarly editions of the Greek New Testament, the BHS does not set out to reconstruct the original text of the Hebrew Bible. This would hardly be possible on the basis of the available textual evidence: the oldest portions of the Old Testament date back to the time of the Kingdom of Israel (8th/9th centuries BCE), from which period no manuscripts are extant today. The oldest direct textual witnesses are the manuscripts that were discovered from 1949 onwards in the Judean Desert, most of them near Qumran on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Among these were the remains of some 200 copies of individual books of the Bible from the period between 150 BCE and 70 CE. Except for one single copy of the Book of Isaiah which is preserved in its entirety, in most cases the biblical texts from Qumran comprise fragments with only a few words. Sometimes no more than individual letters can be identified.

Textual witnesses in significant quantities that are important to Old Testament textual research are today available only from around the 3rd century BCE: The first translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, the so-called Septuagint, dates to this era. This is the oldest and most significant indirect witness of the text of the Hebrew text as it existed at that time. Further ancient translations subsequently arose as additional indirect witnesses, particularly the Latin Vulgate, the Syriac Peshitta, and the Aramaic Targums.

The oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible that we know today is the Codex Leningradensis from the year 1008. Almost a hundred years older, but unfortunately no longer complete, is the Aleppo Codex from about 920. The Leningrad Codex and the Aleppo Codex are two prominent and exemplary instances of the so-called Masoretic Text. Originally comprising only consonants, this text was provided with vowel marks around 700 CE. In this form, it was handed down further with meticulous care by the so-called Masoretes.

The Masoretic Text does not reproduce the original biblical text in all instances. With the discovery of numerous manuscripts, above all the Qumran texts, we have at our disposal renderings of the Old Testament text that predate the Masoretic version. However, in view of the haphazard and incomplete nature of these textual witnesses, complete reconstruction of a text of the "original" Hebrew Bible is not possible. To be able to present a uniform text in a printed edition, it is thus reasonable to present the Masoretic Text, with extant variants in a critical apparatus—in combination with proposals for corrections of the Masoretic Text where applicable. The BHS, which reflects the findings from more than one hundred years of Old Testament textual research, is structured according to this principle.

The BHS is in worldwide use today and is esteemed among all denominations as a highly reliable edition of the Hebrew Bible. Since 2004, however, it has been successively replaced by the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), which is initially being published in individual fascicles.