Around 1901, the Old Testament scholar Rudolf Kittel (1853–1929) from Leipzig developed a plan for a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible. Kittel’s Biblia Hebraica (BHK) was published in 1906 in two volumes by Verlagsbuchhandlung J. C. Hinrichs in Leipzig.
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.
A distinctive feature of written Hebrew is that it omits most vowels. For more than a thousand years, only the consonants were written, while readers had to supply the appropriate vowels from memory when pronouncing the text. This characteristic also applies to the Qumran manuscripts.
