Background
He was born at Totnes, Devonshire, on the 4th of April 1718.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
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He was born at Totnes, Devonshire, on the 4th of April 1718.
He succeeded his father as master of a charity school, but by the liberality of friends he was enabled to go to Wadham College, Oxford, in 1744, where he distinguished himself in Hebrew and divinity. While an undergraduate he published two dissertations, On the Tree of Life in Paradise, with some Observations on the Fall of Man, and On the Oblations of Cain and Abel (2nd ed. , 1747), which procured him the honour of a bachelor's degree before the statutory time. In 1747 he was elected fellow of Exeter College, and in 17 50 he took his degree of M. A.
He was canon of Christ Church (1770) and rector of Culham (1753), in Oxfordshire, and was subsequently presented to the living of Menheniot, Cornwall, which he was unable to visit and resigned two years before his death.
His chief work is the Vetus Testamentum hebraicum cum variis lectionibus (2 vols. fob, Oxford, 1776-1780). Before this appeared he had written two dissertations entitled The State of the Printed Hebrew Text of the Old Testament considered, published respectively iu 1753 and 1759, which were designed to combat the then current ideas as to the "absolute integrity" of the received Hebrew text. The first contains "a comparison of 1 Chron. xi. with 2 Sam. v. and xxiii. and observations on seventy MSS. , with an extract of mistakes and various readings" ; the second defends the claims of the Samaritan Pentateuch, assails the correctness of the printed copies of the Chaldee paraphrase, gives an account of Hebrew MSS. of the Bible known to be extant, and catalogues one hundred MSS. preserved in the British Museum and in the libraries of Oxford and Cambridge.
Kennicott's great work was in one sense a failure. It yielded no materials of value for emendation of the received text, and by disregarding the vowel points overlooked the one thing in which some result (grammatical if not critical) might have been derived from collation of Massoretic MSS. But the negative result of the publication and of the Varieslectiones of De Rossi, published some years later, was important. It showed that the Hebrew text can be emended only by the use of the versions aided by conjecture. Kennicott's work was perpetuated by his widow, who founded two university scholarships at Oxford for the study of Hebrew. The fund yields an income of £200 per annum.
(This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)
In 1764 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1767 keeper of the Radcliffe Library.
In 1771 Kennicott married Ann Chamberlayne, sister of Edward Chamberlayne the Treasury official, and sister-in-law of William Hayward Roberts. She survived him by many years, dying in 1831.