Biblia Rabbinica: The Biblical Text in Rabbinic Literature – Collection of the Variant Readings on the Basis of the Babylonian-Yemenite Textual Tradition.

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Hanna Liss
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 437490897

The so-called Textus Receptus (TR) of the Hebrew Bible is based on a Tiberian Masoretic tradition, which goes back mainly to the Masoretic families Ben Asher and Ben Naphtali. This textual tradition first became established in the Ibero-Sephardic region, and later in the Christian world, mainly through Hebrew letterpress printing. With the Second Rabbinic Bible by Daniel Bomberg (1525), this text type achieved its first standardization, which is still valid today. The fact that other text types (Palestinian; Yemenite-Babylonian) have survived alongside it, of which a large number of medieval manuscripts – especially the Ashkenazi and Italian manuscripts – have genuine text variants, has so far been almost completely unnoticed and underresearched. Moreover, until recently, no clear philological statement could be made about the Bible text traditions in the rabbinic writings. This project aims to invesigate the Rabbinic Bible text tradition by undertaking a quantitative and qualitative overview of the diversity of the Hebrew consonantal biblical text in the various geo-cultural spaces of Judaism. The aim of the project is the exhaustive computer-assisted recording and evaluation of the reading variants in selected rabbinic texts on the basis of the Babylonian-Yemenite text traditions, which have been incorporated into the rabbinic biblical text tradition on a large scale. The analysis of these variants will open up the reconstruction of the variability of biblical textual history up to the High Middle Ages, and thus close an important gap in biblical textual criticism. Since Christian biblical scholarship has based its biblical text exclusively on a Tiberian manuscript (Firkovich, Evr. I B 19a, basic text of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia [BHS] and the Biblia Hebraica Quinta [BHQ]), the project underway will also close a gap in Western European Christian Hebraic studies, whose Hebrew textual basis, mediated by the Jews, was the Ashkenazic text type until the late 13th century.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants