Scholarly Bible Editions
It's one of the main targets of the German Bible Society to publish reliable and carefully edited Bible versions in the original languages. For many decades, the following editions with text critical apparatus have been used and respected worldwide:
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. As its basis, Kittel chose the Hebrew so-called “Textus receptus”, edited by Jakob ben Chayim.
The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) is the successor to the Biblia Hebraica edited by Rudolf Kittel. To this day, it is the only complete scholarly edition of the Codex Leningradensis and contains all significant text variants and proposals for correction in the critical apparatus.
A peculiarity of the way in which the Hebrew language was (and, like Arabic, still is) normally written is that it is written without most vowels. For more than a thousand years, the consonants were written, but the vowels required for pronunciation had to be supplied by the reader. This is true of the Qumran manuscripts.