Kennicott, BENJAMIN

Kennicott, BENJAMIN, an eminent 18th-century biblical scholar, was born at Totnes, in Devonshire, April 4, 1718, son of the parish clerk and master of a charity school, to which latter office he succeeded at an early age. Some rich friends who recognised his promise helped him to enter Wadham College, Oxford, in 1744, and there he soon distinguished himself by his acquirements in Hebrew and theology, publishing, while still an undergraduate, two striking dissertations, On the Tree of Life in Paradise and On the Oblations of Cain and Abel. Soon after he was elected Fellow of Exeter College. In 1767 he was appointed Radcliffe librarian, and in 1770 canon of Christ Church, Oxford, where he died, August 18, 1783. The great work by which Kennicott's name will be remembered is his Vetus Testamentum Hebraicum cum Variis Lectionibus (2 vols. folio, 1776-80). Already in 1753 and further in 1759 he had published a work entitled The State of the Printed Hebrew Text of the Old Testament considered. This contained, among other things, observations on 70 Hebrew MSS., with an extract of mistakes and various readings, and strongly enforced the necessity for a much more extensive collation, in order to ascertain or approximate towards a correct Hebrew text. He undertook to execute the work thus projected in the course of ten years, and laboured, until his health broke down, from ten to fourteen hours a day. In spite of considerable opposition from Bishops Warburton, Horne, and other divines, Kennicott succeeded in enlisting the sympathies and obtaining the support of the clergy generally. Subscriptions to the amount of £10,000 poured in, and many foreign scholars, as Bruns of Helmstadt, undertook to help forward the work by collating MSS. in the libraries abroad. For ten years subsequently to 1760 accounts of the progress of the work were issued, and from first to last no fewer than 615 Hebrew MSS. and 16 MSS. of the Samaritan Pentateuch were collated. The text finally printed was that of Van der Hooft (without vowel-points), with the various readings printed at the bottom of the page. The Variae Lectiones Veteris Testamenti (Parma, 1784-88), published by De Rossi, is a valuable addition to Kennicott's Hebrew Bible. Jahn published at Vienna (1806) a very correct abridgment, embracing the most important of Kennicott's readings.