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Computer Assisted Research on the Bible in the 21st Century
Edited by Luis Vegas Montaner Guadalupe Seijas de los Ríos-Zarzosa Javier del Barco
Gorgias Press 2010
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword .................................................................................................vii Section I: General and Theoretical Approaches ................................1 From Louvain-la-Neuve (1985) to El Escorial in Madrid (2008): 25 years of AIBI ..............................................................................3 R.-Ferdinand Poswick Major Theoretical Issues from Two Decades of Bible and Computer Conferences.........................................................13 Luis Vegas Montaner13 The Greek Pentateuch and the Library of Alexandria ....................25 Natalio Fernández Marcos25 Section II: Technological Developments of Biblical Tools ..........43 Electronic Tools for Biblical Study at Home, at the University, and in the Classroom ....................................................................45 Emanuel Tov45 Displaying Hebrew and Aramaic on Handheld Devices that Lack Proper Complex Script Support................................61 Drayton C. Benner61 The Hexapla Project: Traditional Scholarship meets Modern Technology......................................................................79 Elizabeth Robar79 Section III: Computers and Linguistic Analysis of Biblical Texts ................................................................................................97 The Challenge of Consistency..............................................................99 A. Dean Forbes99 The Computer and Complex Phrase Structure: A Unified Approach to Embedding, Gapping and Recursion...............................................................................117 Janet W. Dyk Biblical Hebrew Linguistics as Corpus Linguistics ........................135 C. H. J. van der Merwe135 v
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The Series of Woes in Pre-Exilic Prophecy: A ComputerAssisted Study on Syntax and Semantics.................................159 Javier del Barco, Guadalupe Seijas de los Ríos-Zarzosa Index of Authors ..................................................................................177
FOREWORD The last thirty years have seen significant development and technical achievements wrought by the application of computer technology to the development of computerised editions and analysis of biblical texts. This development, however, is still in need of a critical evaluation from a historical perspective. There is a need to evaluate the current tools available in the field of the study of the Bible and computer technology, and a necessity to consider the adequacy of the trends in Bible research to satisfy the increasing demand for software related to the computer-assisted programs for the linguistic analysis of the Bible. Such an evaluation requires consideration not only of the technical achievements, but also failed objectives and future challenges. Establishing a discussion forum in which this critical evaluation could take place was precisely the aim with which we organised the international conference “Bible and Computers: The Present and Future of a Discipline”, which took place in San Lorenzo del Escorial, Madrid, on June 16–19, 2008. Following the example of the seven conferences organised until 2004 by the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique (AIBI), the Universidad Complutense was elected at Louvain in 2004 as the designated site for the following conference. This international conference was organised by the members of the research group AUTHOR (Análisis Unificado de Textos Hebreos por Ordenador) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, with the aid of an international scientific committee whose members were highly qualified specialists on the subject. Computer Assisted Research on the Bible in the 21st Century is, therefore, the result of the papers presented and the discussions held at this conference. The selection of peer-reviewed papers included here shows the plurality of research lines currently being worked on in relation to the application of computer technology to the analysis of the Bible. To vii
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begin with, rapid technical development makes it necessary to face technical problems which are constantly arising, not only in the presentation and use of databases and texts in different languages and alphabets, but also in the adaptation of these tools to different platforms, from the traditional PC to the most recent PDA in a permanently on-line environment. In addition, the development of these tools allows for a more effective approach to what has been a priority since computer technology was first applied to the study of the Bible: the linguistic analysis of a biblical text, always with the aim to understand better the grammatical structure of the biblical languages and, consequently, to understand better the Bible itself. The development of both approaches has been uneven in the last few years; while in some cases the progress has been noteworthy and promising, in others expectations have not been completely fulfilled or have not been adequately adapted to the demands of specialised tools in the analysis of biblical texts. On account of this, the first section of the present volume presents a historical approach to biblical research from both theoretical and practical points of view; the two following sections then consider in greater detail the developments in research technology and the application of computer tools to the linguistic analysis of the text of the Bible. The first section consists of contributions of both general and theoretical character in which, from a comprehensive perspective, some particularly relevant aspects are discussed. F. Poswick (“From Louvain-la-Neuve (1985) to El Escorial in Madrid (2008): 25 Years of AIBI”) offers, according to his privileged point of view as Secretary of AIBI for many years, a brief summary of the most significant contributions of the AIBI conferences by focusing on the proceedings of each of them. L. Vegas Montaner (“Major Theoretical Issues from Two Decades of Bible and Computer Conferences”) focuses on the history of research carried out within the framework of the AIBI from a theoretical and linguistic point of view, underlining the aims sought in the development of computer tools. N. Fernández Marcos (“The Greek Pentateuch and the Library of Alexandria”) presents a historical account of the study of the Bible’s Greek text. He draws a comparison between the present aspiration of a Universal Library accessible to the greater public by means of the modern Internet and the Library of Alexandria, envisaged at its time as the universal temple of knowledge. Admittedly, Greco-Roman culture, as well as the
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Judeo-Christian influences upon it, both in Western Europe as well as in the Byzantine world and Eastern Europe, constitutes a significant part of what is known as Western culture. The second section is dedicated to the technological development aimed at solving the technical problems already mentioned. The articles included in this section focus on the creation, development and application of computer programs and resources that will facilitate the study of the text of the Bible from different perspectives. Indeed, already from the first AIBI conferences some fundamental questions related to technological developments were put forward: How to apply IT to the Bible? To what extent are these technological developments used and are they useful? Are programs really adapted to research needs or, on the contrary, does research advance by adapting itself to IT achievements? E. Tov (“Electronic Tools for Biblical Analysis at Home, at the University, and in the Classroom”) explains how the astonishing development of hardware in the last two decades has led to software development and its use by an increasing number of people. In contrast to the use of mainframes in the past, researchers and students today make use of databases and PC programs at home or at the university, with terminals connected to servers both on-line and in the classroom. Tov describes the various electronic resources developed during this time for the linguistic and textual study of Hebrew script, paying special attention to CATSS database and the Accordance and SESB programs. D. Benner (“Displaying Hebrew and Aramaic on Handheld Devices That Lack Proper Complex Script Support”) analyses in turn how the technology for visualising complex writing systems has been significantly developed in the last few years thanks to the expansion of the Unicode standard for the development of Smart Fonts. In tandem, the quickly expanding business of mobile phones has increased the demand for Bible software. These handheld devices, however, usually lack adequate systems for complex alphabets and some do not even recognise Unicode. In his article, Benner presents a way of facing such limitations and allowing an aesthetically agreeable visualization of the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets—thanks to the use of SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL fonts—with all the consonants, vowels, cantillation accents, Masoretic symbols and modern editorial marks required for the visualization of Hebrew and Aramaic documents,
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mainly the Bible. E. Robar (“The Hexapla Project: Traditional Scholarship Meets Modern Technology”) focuses on the historical and technological development of the Hexapla Project. This project started in 2001 with the aim of producing a critical on-line, fully searchable edition of the Hexaplaric Fragments—apart from the standard print edition. The author describes the development of such a project, indicating the challenges and achievements of each step of the database construction. For instance, initial problems of compatibility in the use of ASCII fonts for Greek, Hebrew and Syriac were solved by the adoption of Unicode fonts. The initial design of the database in XML format gave way to a relational database, which offers greater flexibility in the complex task of managing critical apparatuses and, by means of a new interface, offers a user friendly environment for the textual critic. The articles in the third section focus on problems of linguistic analysis of the biblical texts, and on what the most suitable technologies are to finding a solution for them. From a methodological point of view, they all share the use of technology and IT (software, databases, platforms, etc.) as basic tools for the development of their research, both in terms of the grammatical analysis of the texts as well as in the treatment of data. A. Dean Forbes (“The Challenge of Consistency”) analyses the sources of inconsistency in the representation of the linguistic structure of biblical Hebrew developed by himself and F. Andersen, assuming that people’s intervention in determining such representation is necessarily taken into account. The need to correct such sources of inconsistency leads the author to present a sample case based on the creation of what he has called text surrogates. Such a strategy enables him to focus on those areas where inconsistency is higher, under the firm conviction that such mistakes will only be solved by applying a higher level of automatization in the representational process. J. Dyk (“Computers and Complex Phrase Structures in Biblical Hebrew”) questions in her article the validity of syntactical analysis based on a bottom-up or top-down structural approach, since it is very difficult to integrate into them the expression of syntactical embedding or gapping. In order to do so, new, more adequate formulas that could allow the codification of such linguistic elements need to be sought, since these cannot be just simply integrated with a structural design of hierarchical character. Dyk proposes, therefore, carrying out an analysis focused on basic
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units of grammatical expression, which, in her opinion, should be treated equally regardless of whether they are isolated or clustered in more complex structures. C. van der Merwe (“Biblical Hebrew Linguistics as Corpus Linguistic”), stemming from a firm belief in the application of electronic tools to linguistic analysis of biblical Hebrew, focuses on articulating a model that could be more suited to describing particles in biblical Hebrew. He seeks to develop a well-articulated language theory that could allow him an appropriate interpretation of quantitative data. He further develops the notion of corpus linguistics, as well as a user model of electronic tools that allows him to distinguish between prototypical and less prototypical uses of the particle אף, which establishes certain differences with the use of other particles. J. del Barco and G. Seijas de los Ríos-Zarzosa (“The series of Woes in Pre-Exilic Prophecy: a Computer-Assisted Study of Syntax and Semantics”) present, for the volume’s conclusion, a linguistic study of woe oracles in which, by means of using a database in which morphosyntactic information has been previously codified, they combine the syntactical analysis of the texts with the use of stylistic and semantic elements typical of this sort of oracle. They try to discern, therefore, a relationship between grammatical form and linguistic and literary function within a specific context. Many other queries and problems related to the application of IT to the study of the Bible are yet to be explored. With regard to the future, some challenges seem particularly relevant to the role to be assumed by technology in the development of linguistic research, such as the use of Wi-Fi technologies, the composition and accessibility of virtual libraries, the scope of the e-book format as a tool for study and analysis of biblical texts, the compatibility of different platforms used in different research centres, the optimization of Internet potential and on-line research, among other innovations. The future organization of discussion forums on the application of technology to the study of the Bible seems to us, therefore, even more necessary in this new century than it was in the previous one, and, for this reason, we hope that the present volume will encourage a reflection upon where we stand today and, above all, in which aspects the support of technology is most needed in order to achieve a better understanding of biblical texts as our collective research progresses. ***
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The publication of the present volume has been made possible thanks to the support of various institutions which contributed financially to the organisation of the conference where the papers which constitute the present volume were presented. The Universidad Complutense de Madrid collaborated enthusiastically from the beginning in this venture and facilitated the organisation of the scientific meeting in El Escorial. We would especially like to thank the Departamento de Estudios Hebreos y Arameos for their support and assistance in various aspects of its organization. The Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación has made possible both the organisation of the conference as well as the publication of the present volume by financing the research project AUTHOR (HUM2005-05747 and FFI2008-01120) and by the awarding of a special grant (HUM2007-30067-E). We would like to extend our gratitude to the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), an institution that also granted special aid for the organization of the conference, as well as to the Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (CCHS) of the CSIC, which also contributed financially. We would also like to thank the Asociación Española de Estudios Hebreos y Judíos for its assistance. Finally, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to each of the members of the scientific committee for their enthusiasm for this project from its outset and for their generous collaboration throughout the process. Madrid, November 2009
FROM LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE (1985) TO EL ESCORIAL IN MADRID (2008): 25 YEARS OF AIBI R.-FERDINAND POSWICK INFORMATIQUE & BIBLE, ABBAYE DE MAREDSOUS, B-5537 DENÉE, BELGIQUE The AIBI (Association Internationale Bible et Informatique— International Bible & Computing Association) was created in 1982 in Belgium. Even though the first international conference organized by AIBI would not take place in Louvain-la-Neuve until September 1985, it was in this year that the 25-year history of the AIBI started. Article 2 of the incorporating document of this association, which is institutionally dormant as of this moment, pointed out that it wished to promote the study of the use of “the automated processing and communication tools” as applied to the biblical field and that it hoped to “specify the best computing practices” in this field. The following brief survey of AIBI conferences focuses on some significant technical developments that can be traced by reading the contributions published in the six books of Acts (see: Bibliography). However, this survey is not intended to be a history of the main trends in research, nor a full account of all technical (hardware or software) developments described in these contributions. My purpose here is simply to remind readers where we as an institution have come from as well as how circumstances used to be for us at various points in time over the last 25 years.
LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE (1985) Our scholarly international exchanges started at the dawn of ‘micro-computers’, today known as personal computers, which 3
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had the effect of compelling all the pioneering projects (often institutionally sanctioned and carried out on main frame computers) to find ways of reshaping their whole work, with the simultaneous result that these projects entered into competition with individual projects, which quickly turned into commercial ones. Jean Bajard registered 22 centers where computer science had been in use for 5, 10 or 15 years for application to the text of the Bible or to the interpretation of its contents (Acts-86, 83). Among others, the names of these centers are: Andersen-Forbes; CATAB (Lyon); CATTS; CNRS; CIB-Maredsous; The Computer Bible; GRAMCORD Project; The Michigan Project; MIKRAH; Responsa Project; University of Stellenbosch; The Way International; University of Tübingen; Werkgroep Informatica (Amsterdam); The WORD Processor… The 2008 conference at El Escorial in Madrid would bring together, among other participants, eight representatives of groups active since 1985.1 This quarter century of stability has seen the cultivation of expertise in writing and electronic processing tools, which were only in fledgling stages in 1985. At that time, everyone had their own proposals for managing non-Latin characters, in spite of the limited resources given by the ASCII or EBCDIC codes. On that occasion, P. Chiaramella (Grenoble, Acts-86, 119) set out the key elements of a technological prospective. He talked about Text Editors changing from Line Editors to Word Processors, like Notably: Emmanuel Tov and the CATTS project (Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of Pennsylvania); Dean Forbes and his projects on biblical Hebrew with Frank Anderson (thanks to Xerox, Palo-Alto tools); R.-Ferdinand Poswick (Informatique et Bible, Maredsous); Stellenbosch University (represented by W. Claassen and J. Cook at that time, and by Chr. Van der Merwe in Madrid); Bar-Ilan University of TelAviv (then represented by T. Radday, and by Yosef Ofer in Madrid); P. Miller’s GRAMCORD project (represented by the ACCORDANCE users in Madrid, among others); the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam (represented by Eep Talstra and Janet Dyk in Madrid); the Madrid Complutense University (with Luis Vegas Montaner). 1
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the WORDSTAR software; he spoke highly of the mouse and of the floppy disk, while announcing the coming of Digital Optical Disks, non-erasable and burned by laser, which could store up to 500,000 A4 pages or, astonishingly, 500 Mb. He also hinted at Artificial Intelligence (AI), the processing of natural language, expert systems, as well as Information retrieval, at the time when databases with fields, network or relational databases (INGRES, SQL) had started developing. Scanners were represented by the KURZWEIL system at that time (Acts–86, 326). Nonetheless, enthusiasm was keen, and everybody was already trying to use an Apple II, a MacIntosh, or an IBM PC-XT or AT. The first database on the Massoretic Hebrew text with multicriteria interrogation functions was called COMPUCORD of Mikrah (Maredsous and R. Bennum, New York, Act-86, 409). It was run on an IBM PC-XT or AT. P. Miller’s database on the Greek of the New Testament was also available on an IBM PC (Acts-86, 409).
JERUSALEM (1988) John J. Hugues’ recent publication Bits, Bytes and Biblical Studies (Zondervan, 1987) was considered at that time to be a good assessment of all the work carried out so far.2 It was the time when the TUSTEP software suites of the Tübingen University were being presented (W. Ott; W. Bader, Acts-89, 73 and 419). Notions of CD-ROM and hypertext also appeared then and Microsoft Windows as well as UNIX operating systems were beginning to be heard of. The dBASE III software was used for managing databases; at the same time, apart from COBOL and FORTRAN, PASCAL and Turbo-PASCAL were the programming languages in use. John J. Hugues presented his book at the Jerusalem AIBI Conference. It will be replaced by Ian Lancashire’s work (who attended the ALLC-AIBI Conference in Jerusalem), The Humanities Computing Yearbook 1989–90, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991. 2
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The IBM PC-AT hard disks had a 30 to 40 MB storage capacity for data while the Random Access Memory (RAM) was about 640 Kb. Yet the making of a CD-ROM still represented a considerable investment (US$ 4,000 at least), without any guarantee that one could find the appropriate access software (R. Kraft, Acts-89, 322). Graphic cards and hypercards were also being talked about for images and sound. But the problem which one was always facing was the difficulty of managing and transferring non-Latin characters between various platforms and in ASCII codes. Among various innovations, worthy of mention are the electronic/telephone telecommunication link established between the French videotext (TELETEL, Minitel) all the way to Jerusalem (R.-F. Poswick, Y. Juste, Acts-89, 490) and the Smart Book (‘The World’s first portable electronic Book’) presented by Tom Tresseder (Australia, Acts-89, 581).
TÜBINGEN (1991) I&B (J. Bajard, R.-F. Poswick, Acts-92, 263) described its way of managing large databases (up to 285 Mb) while maintaining compatibility between main frames (IBM 360 and subsequent models), mini computers (IBM 1 Series) and PC’s by storing data on hard disks with a capacity of between 20 and 200 Mb and by managing storage of 6250 BPI magnetic tapes, giving access through the mainframes to the IBM 3800 laser printing facilities (notably the 18,603 pages of the TOB concordance listings) or to Siemens Hell Digiset phototypesetting facilities of the Paris National Printing Office. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and T. Brunner’s Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), the large database of the Irvine University (California), were first being spoken of at this time. The Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam developed the first version of QUEST software (Harmsen, Acts-92, 319) by means of programming on UNIX platforms in C, in PASCAL, in PROLOG languages and with other tools. The first biblical libraries stored on CD-ROMs with search programs, such as Robin Cover’s CD-Word (Acts-92, 592), were also being examined. SGML (Cf. TEI) and UNICODE “which could replace various ASCII codifications within three to four years” (Pecoud, Acts-92, 351) were explicitly being talked about for the first time.
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Philips’ CD-I was in competition with IBM and INTEL’s DVI (Acts-95, 590) for storing mass electronic data. ‘Object directed’ programming had become popular and the limits of research work on Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Berleur, Acts-92, 377) were better assessed. After a survey carried out by AIBI among its users, J. Berleur’s contribution produced interesting data on electronic tools used at that time by people who worked in the field of the biblical texts: 33% PC’s; 25% PC’s in relation with main frames; 15% MacIntosh; 13% PC and MacIntosh used in tandem. On the use of word processing systems: 18% for Word, 14% for WordPerfect, 4% for NotaBene, 4% for Nisus and at least about ten other software programs which have been forgotten long since. … or also the more widespread use of dBASE among about twenty other database management systems!
AMSTERDAM (1994) In his inaugural speech, Eep Talstra (Acts-95, 25) alluded mainly to the following advances in technology: the possibility of submitting work on a network to a colleague by FTP (File Transport Protocol), the significant increase in RAMs, the CPU speed (Central Processing Unit), the use of PostScript for finalizing files with non-Latin fonts and for having them printed on fast laser printers and also for the possibility of working in Windows. The increase in the number of various achievements, such as the encoding of tasks and databases on New Testament Greek, allowed for a first critical assessment (H. Hahne, Acts-95, 223), in connection with GRAMCORD (4.04); Bible Windows (2.6); Bible Works (2.2.2.); The Word (3.05); Logos (1.68); and also ACCORDANCE (the GRAMCORD adapted for MacIntosh environment). HTML (Acts-95, 107, 437, 471) and the management of digital images in GIF, JPEG or TIFF were first being mentioned; electronic addresses of the http://www… type were starting to be talked about: the Web itself was coming into being.
AIX-EN-PROVENCE (1997) E. Nida announced that the next challenge for the use of electronics in the biblical field would be the use of multimedia (Acts-98, 27).
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Many people already used Microsoft-Access–2 or were programming in Visual Basic. On top of some Web sites, participants were also mentioning their electronic address (e-mail address).
STELLENBOSCH (2000) An electronic newspaper, produced and managed ‘on line’ (A. Adair, Acts-02, 135) was presented and the maintenance of ‘Web sites’ was alluded to. Moreover the use of dBASE III and IV was more widespread for different projects in the field of biblical studies. But it was thought (J. Lust, Acts-02, 365) that ACCORDANCE was probably the best software for studying the Septuagint. David Trobisch (Acts-02, 427) proposed to create a central database on the Internet for circulating all the New Testament manuscripts, while already several Web sites were offering papyri images, accessible on line and in color (K. De Troyer, Acts-02, 573). It thus seemed that we were heading for the Network Society (Swart, Acts-02, 593) and towards online assisted teaching, notably for the biblical languages (Chr. Van der Merwe, Acts-02, 615), or teaching with the help of PowerPoint presentations (P. Flint, Acts-02, 323).
MADRID (2008) Because contributions made in 2004 in Louvain had not been published, we had to go straight to those presented in 2008 where we were obliged to note that the CATTS project was still there and represented by E. Tov, who praised its implementation in ACCORDANCE. The other flagship product was the commercial set proposed by the Biblical Society of Stuttgart (SESB); it was a comprehensive set of databases, including texts (original or translations), lexica, dictionaries, search functions, sophisticated display and various other functions, all of which were operational on the basis of the LOGOS Libronix Digital Library System. UNICODE and XML were also being talked about as well as the access to non-Latin characters on WindowsMobile or on PALM.
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The Hexapla Project (Louisville, Kentucky, USA) proposed a methodology for creating this new critical edition of Origen’s Hexapla, based entirely on cooperative effort through the Internet, an enterprise carefully vetted under a strict hierarchy.
CONCLUSION The problems initially encountered for encoding non-Latin characters seem to have been almost entirely solved thanks to the launch of UNICODE. One should nevertheless be aware of the pitfalls of implementing UNICODE: transfer from ASCII to UNICODE, different types of UNICODE implementation or representation! Initial problems with random access memory on microcomputers or mass storage spaces also seem to have been overcome to a large extent. Little has been said here, however, about the prospects of medium or long term conservation of all work already done. What will be left within 10 or 20 years? The transition to ‘Flash’ memories and USB keys has been little discussed even though this does point the way forward by eradicating the mechanical problems still linked to disk rotation. The huge volumes demanded by electronic imagery, necessary for providing access to original manuscripts to the great majority of people, require memories which will be expressed in TERABYTES (Tb) and no longer in gigabytes (Gb); a further prospect is the role of large computers in hosting the world networks of data exchanges. Who actually will hold the data on the Internet, and in what kind of a cooperative project? The electronic book (e-book) is beginning to proliferate in various forms and will be in everybody’s hands before long; its prototype was called Smart-Book and debuted in Jerusalem in 1988, some 20 years ago. Nevertheless, the more advanced versions (UMTS) of the mobile (cellular) phone will increasingly become the unique writing and reading tool for a culture based on electronic writing. Data structuring (SGML, TEI, HTML, XML), in order to guarantee their independence from software while keeping it usable in different environments, is only starting. Does the prior ‘nontagged’ work run the risk of being written off if it is not transposed into these formats?
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Despite its limited circulation among graphic professions, one can wonder about the persistence of the biblical applications on MacIntosh thanks to a better management of graphic aspects (notably the non-Latin characters) and to a higher usage which leaves searchers little reason to invest too much in learning about information technology. It is amazing how widespread the acceptance is of Windows and of Microsoft products, without any notice or attention paid to free market products of the LINUX type. The extensive and critical use of statistics applied to texts has not yet found its place in the realm of the automated search in the field of biblical texts. But promising projects do exist, of which some are already quite advanced. Their objective is to make available to searchers all the sources they need for their critical work: manuscripts on any kind of medium (clay, stone, bronze, papyrus, parchment, paper); dictionaries or encyclopedias with hypertext links; various auxiliary tools to be used in geography or chronology; and, soon, the most important monographs and commentaries. The collectivization and sharing of research in the field of biblical studies is on the inexorable move. But the question now is whether the content of these texts, which are the object of the research, still has an impact on the social fabric of which the searchers are part. This is a hermeneutic and epistemological question, which had in fact been asked before at the 1991 AIBI Conference in Tübingen, but which the hubbub caused by technological evolution could possibly keep in obscurity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY (Acts-86): Actes ... Proceedings of the First International Colloquium Bible and Computer: the Text, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique), 2–3–4 Septembre 1985. Paris/Genève: Champion/Slatkine, 1986. (Acts-89): Actes ... Proceedings of the Second International Colloquium Bible and Computer: Methods, Tools, Results, Jérusalem, 9–13 Juin 1988. Paris/Genève: Champion/Slatkine, 1989. (Acts-92): Actes ... Proceedings of the Third International Colloquium Bible and Computer: Interpretation, Hermeneutics, Expertise, Tübingen, 26–30 August 1991. Paris/Genève: Champion/Slatkine, 1992.
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(Acts-95): Actes ... Proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium Bible and Computer: The impact of computers on Bible studies, Amsterdam, 15–18 August 1994. Paris: Champion, 1995. (Acts-98): Actes ... Proceedings of the Fifth International Colloquium Bible and Computer: Translation and Transmission, Aix-en-Provence, 1–4 Septembre 1997. Paris: Champion, 1998. (Acts-02): Bible and Computer. The Stellenbosch AIBI-6 Conference. Proceedings of the Association Internationale Bible et Informatique “From Alpha to Byte”. University of Stellenbosch, 17–21 July 2000, ed. Johann Cook. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2002.
MAJOR THEORETICAL ISSUES FROM TWO DECADES OF BIBLE AND COMPUTER CONFERENCES LUIS VEGAS MONTANER UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE, MADRID, SPAIN After years of development of computer assisted studies on the Bible in an expanding number of research centers, it was inevitable that an international academic forum be created for the free exchange of methods, results and ideas among scholars. This was done in 1985 with the first Bible and Computer conference. As a complement to F. Poswick’s technical survey of this series of conferences, we shall present here a panoramic view of some major theoretical approaches in the AIBI conferences.
TEXTS AND VERSIONS The main interest from the earliest Bible and Computer conferences was the discussion and exchange of experiences with regard to the use of computers in the study of biblical texts, as well as solving, among other problems, the visualization of non-Latin alphabets and their standard codification. The first conference in Louvain-la-Neuve, under the general title of “The Text”, concentrated mainly on the discussion of several methodological and technical questions on the different texts of the Bible, with a description of various automatized databases on biblical texts. Along the same lines, at the Jerusalem conference, under the theme “Methods, Tools, Results”, a great number of tools were discussed and shown in operation. As would be presented at subsequent conferences, increasingly powerful technologies were demonstrated for their possibilities of application in the field of Bible studies. In addition to reports on 13
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mainframe databases, various applications on micro-computers have been displayed, with software for multi-character printing and processing of texts. The Hebrew text of the Old Testament has always received primary attention, and the study of Biblical Hebrew has remained an essential topic for all the conferences and has been the object of morphological, syntactic and lexical analyses. The manuscript tradition and the orthographical features of the Masoretic text, as well as its accentual system, are particular points which have been stressed in several conferences. The text of the Septuagint has also been the object of particular interest from several points of view. The relationship between the Hebrew text of the Bible and its Greek translations has received due attention, showing how scholars can benefit from complete automatized data and programs increasingly suited to textual criticism and linguistic, lexical, and literary analysis. Different kinds of research on other ancient versions of the Bible, such as the Aramaic Targum and the Syriac Peshitta, have also been presented over the years. In terms of methodology, it has become clear that work based on quantitative analysis has remained one of the main approaches to computerized text processing. The statistical method was used in lexical and stylistic approaches to the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, the Greek version of the New Testament, patristic writings, and also to much younger biblical corpora in modern languages. In contrast to the high number of contributions to the study of the Old Testament, the number of papers presented on the New Testament is significantly lower, scattered throughout the history of the conferences. In two of them (Amsterdam and Stellenbosch), there was one complete session dedicated to computer research in the area of the New Testament texts. The majority of computer projects on the New Testament concentrate on philology (e.g. questions of manuscripts and textual transmission, grammar, vocabulary and authorship) where important tools for scholarly research have emerged as a result. Computer aided research on the language of the New Testament does not appear to have followed the same lines as Old Testament studies. For example, computer aided New Testament projects with a syntactic focus are lacking, despite the fact that a morphologically tagged text has been available for years. Some
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discussions did centre on the reasons for these differences between Old Testament and New Testament studies and posed various methodological questions related to problems specific to the New Testament. The main concern of the first AIBI conferences were the two Old Testament texts then available in computerized editions accepted by the majority of researchers, the Hebrew Masoretic text and the Greek Septuagint. Subsequently, other ancient versions and new translations of the Bible were available in electronic form, enabling research in these areas to develop. A focus on “Translation and Transmission” guided the organization of the Aix-en-Provence conference. There E. Nida, based on his long expertise in linguistics and the use of computers to explore the theory of dynamic translation, suggested in his keynote speech that the next challenge was to master the various elements constitutive of transmission in order to be able to translate the Bible tradition into electronic multimedia. It was remarked that the analysis of existing translations, both ancient and new, allows us to gain a better grasp of the languages which convey, both in the past and today, biblical texts. This analysis also enables us to observe how editors of these translations have understood their source texts and whether or not they have incorporated outside elements which provide additional valuable testimony. The techniques used in translating the Bible permit an understanding of how the transmission from the source text to the target text is undertaken and to what extent we have a new text or simply a copy of a text in another language. The application of different textual syntax approaches to Hebrew was also considered. Proper textual division, as well as the value assigned to the elements which make up the text and its sentences, will necessarily affect the correct translation of the Hebrew Bible. The term “Transmission” includes everything surrounding the biblical text. These outside sources can differ greatly in type: graphic layout, dictionaries, comparisons between languages, external literature (such as Ugarit and Qumran), and traditional or modern commentaries of various origins, etc.
HERMENEUTICS After having dealt mainly with technical questions and methods and tools for the analysis of the biblical texts in the first two
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conferences, the Tübingen congress focused on “Interpretation, Hermeneutics, Expertise”, bringing “meaning” to our attention: What is the functionality of the “text”, and what in a text brings meaning? Several contributions centred on hermeneutic questions, asking for the possibility of transforming the theoretical insights and grammar conceptions into a practical methodology. It was stressed that a clear definition of the actual object of our research of the text was key to knowing how to read (textual criticism), to delimit (literary/redactional criticism), or to understand it (dictionnaries, grammatical solutions). All these preliminary stages led to a reflection on the interpretation of specific texts, with the analysis of their expressions (Syntax), their content (Semantics) and their use (Pragmatics). It became clear that the discussion about the contribution of computers to biblical studies is almost identical to a debate about the different methods used in textual research. As a matter of fact, biblical scholars want their computers to do more than sort and concord data. They want to use the computer to investigate the possibilities of formalizing an exegetical methodology and to assist them in experimenting with different methods of biblical exegesis. The Amsterdam conference further developed these methodological approaches on biblical exegesis under the general rubric “Desk and Discipline”. What help can computers give in the process of analyzing and interpreting biblical texts? Does the computer help us at our desk by replacing our books (dictionaries, text editions) and files (notes on cards), or does the computer also reorganize our discipline by influencing its methodology, by changing or making explicit the order and the type of our linguistic and literary argumentation? As Talstra remarked, “modelling” is the key concept, and three different levels at which the computer makes these modelling kinds of contributions to biblical studies can be observed: —at the level of viewing scientific texts, computers are used to imitate the raw data and documents from which we begin our research: text processors used to handle different character sets on screen or on paper, scanners employed to digitize documents of ancient texts, etc. —at the level of preparing scientific results, computers can imitate the more classical concordance type reference volumes for
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searching and sorting linguistic material. The researcher is therefore provided with prepared materials, not with machine-made analytical proposals. —at the level of scientific argumentation, software can mimic our reasoning process in reading texts. The user can receive machine-made analyses for such diverse tasks as parsing and labeling clauses, analyzing text-syntactic or text-semantic structures, or identifying the actants in the text. Although the impact of computing on the whole process of interpreting biblical texts cannot be ignored, it was stressed that not all the problems had received clear answers yet. A number of wellknown tensions continued to exist: top-down versus bottom-up, formal linguistics versus semantics, literary theory versus linguistic theory. Does “form” come before “function” and “grammatical function” before “lexical information”? How does one perform both paradigmatic research (looking for one linguistic feature in the entire corpus) and syntagmatic research (analyzing all the different linguistic features and their interactions within one textual composition)? Along the same line, the subsequent conferences considered the effect of computer directed analysis on the research methodology on the Bible and its exegesis, with special attention to hypertext and online biblical studies.
HEBREW SYNTAX Since a text is never simply a combination of isolated linguistic items, the linguistic information generated by the structure of the text itself is of a different type from the paradigmatic linguistic information dealt with by existing programs for searching and concording. Although existing databases of biblical texts are important tools for textual criticism, comparison of manuscripts and translations, and relevant contributions on morphological and lexical research were made in all the conferences, biblical scholars also require computer-assisted research to contribute to the study of syntagmatic features of higher linguistic levels. They want the computer to define clause hierarchies as well as clause types and, beyond a mere search for the frequency of a verbal form, they want to detect the linguistic markers which indicate, for example, the shift between narrative or discursive discourse or between foreground and background textual sections. This need for greater
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syntagmatic definition and analysis will lead to the production of programs able to explore the syntactic structure of biblical texts. Of great importance from one congress to the next are the syntactical studies of Biblical Hebrew, with different points of focus. To have at our disposal a Hebrew Bible which has been syntactically codified for computer analysis is of capital importance, since the use of existing information on, for example, verbal morphology permits only partial syntactic studies. The creation of databases of syntactic content and computer programmes which are able to separate the different textual segments (textual “analysis” in the strict sense of the term) are then indispensable. It is also convenient to pay attention not only to the values and functions of the components of phrases and sentences, but also to their relationship with the cantillation handed down by the Masoretic tradition. Furthermore, the application to Hebrew of the varied theories of textual syntax has to be taken into consideration also. Classical Hebrew grammar pays much more attention to the description and interpretation of individual forms than to the study of syntagmatic relations. A methodological change has occurred by the use of the computer in Hebrew linguistic studies and in the development of a computer-oriented linguistic methodology, especially in the field of computer-assisted analysis of Biblical Hebrew syntax. Two important methodological concepts are being used: a “rule-based” approach and a “data-based” approach. In the first, scholars let the computer select linguistic data on the basis of conventional grammatical rules, while in the second approach the computer compiles new linguistic data by comparing “raw” linguistic materials with sets of previously analyzed data in order to propose new grammatical analyses (on the basis of the statistics of the previously analyzed data). The data-oriented approach may be most fruitful in the research of phrase-level and clause-level data, where the formulation of grammatical rules is much more complicated than on the level of morphological analysis. In previous times the computer has been used primarily to retrieve word-level information, such as grammatical and lexical features. In order to analyze texts we must use the computer to organize and retrieve syntagmatic features (i.e. linguistic information on all levels within
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the context of a textual composition such as word connections, clause types, and textual hierarchy). Into this context can be inserted research carried out by the Werkgroep Informatica, Faculty of Theology, VUA, under the direction of E. Talstra, which aims at the development of a syntactically analyzed machine-readable database of the Hebrew Bible. According to Talstra, developing text-analyzing programs forces one to rethink how grammar should be approached. It would be better to use computer programming first to make an inventory of the text-level linguistic features we need to understand. This means that text-level computer-assisted analysis would be most effectively accomplished by starting with the dataoriented approach rather than the rule-based approach. Computerassisted research at the text-level would therefore be a tool for grammatical research, not merely the result of grammatical theorizing. Some results taken from the book of Genesis were generated by programs which identify clauses and construct clause hierarchies and textual structures. The more complex task of identifying grammatical clause connections and markers of textual hierarchy (e.g. the beginning and end of direct speech) requires a similar combination of rule-based and data-based methods. Over the course of the AIBI conferences Talstra and his team have presented results of their ongoing research on the relationship of grammar and encoding towards the building of a hierarchically structured database and the production of a syntactically orientated concordance of biblical Hebrew texts; text grammar and complex linguistic constructions: the hierarchical nature of embeddings; the Hebrew participle; how a discourse analysis and a computerassisted linguistic analysis could add to traditional exegetical approaches. The group integrated by A. D. Forbes (Palo Alto, USA)— F. I. Andersen (Melbourne, Australia) has also dealt with the topic of biblical syntax throughout various AIBI conferences, tailoring their presentations to the running theme of each of them. Their project, which began in 1970 with the transcription of the vocalized text of the Hebrew Bible into machine-readable forms, had a main focus on analysing the text into units (“segments” of text) suited for grammatical study. When addressing the methods and tools for the study of Old Testament syntax, they gave priority to the
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probabilistic approach over the rule-based approach. This latter approach places heavy emphasis on dominance relations and lends itself to the study of sentence deep structure, whereas the former focuses exclusively on precedence relations and seeks only to describe sentence surface structure. They developed two probabilistic models of sentence surface structure for the grammatical categories incidence and ordering with the aid of the S statistical analysis package. Another important issue is marking clause boundaries, on which the theoretical problems involved have been described and some practical solutions proposed. Problems of recursion and embedded subordinate clauses, as well as missing clause components, contribute to ambiguities in the computer analysis of the texts. Indeterminacy is very evident in Hebrew clause boundaries, and scribal practice does not have any clear signals of clause termination. On the contrary, Hebrew does have some very clear signals of clause beginning, which makes it possible to propose several clause-onset rules as an aid for automatic text division. Syntactic ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible has been one of the main issues dealt with by these researchers. Computer parsing is one approach that might be able to detect ambiguity in texts in an unbiased manner. Several kinds of ambiguity and methods for discovering and representing it, as well as a standard means for resolving it, have been discussed. Prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguity received particular attention. As a corollary to the use of electronic syntactic databases already built, Forbes and Andersen directed their efforts towards clause-type concordances of the Bible. A concordance of clauses organized with reference to their syntactic structures and which reports the phrase markers of the text should serve the theoretical interests of text linguistics and the practical tasks of translation and interpretation in the broadest possible ways. The systematic and disciplined application of agreed principles and procedures to the syntactic analysis and description of the grammatical structure(s) of all the clauses of the Hebrew Bible can produce parse graphics, the comparison of which will permit the isolation for comparative study of all clauses with identical structure, while the accesibility of substructures within the graphs will enable the comparison of clauses that resemble one another only partially.
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Mention should also be made of the presentation made by Forbes in Leuven of the topic “Hebrew Grammar Visualised: Syntax and Discourse”. Another more recent group is also focused on biblical Hebrew syntax at the Universidad Complutense. Its director, L. Vegas Montaner, was present at the first AIBI conference and other members of the research group have been taking a greater part in successive conferences, such as G. Seijas and J. del Barco. In the framework of the project AUTHOR morpho-syntactical databases of biblical poetry (Isaiah, Ezekiel, Minor Prophets, Psalms) have been created in Madrid. Related software, which allows flexible and complex searches in order to detect the identity and intensity of the phenomena, has also been designed. According to the theoretical principles of text linguistics approaches, poetic texts have been analyzed taking into consideration clause structure (word order and position of the verb within the clause), particles with a macro-syntactic function and the use of verbal forms within a context broader than the sentence. A description of the database features and a case study of the mutual relationship between imperfect and consecutive perfect tenses in the proto-Isaiah was presented in Amsterdam, paying due attention to the biblical parallelism. The distinction between different kinds of discourses has guided the contributions to AIBI conferences that followed. An analysis of the perfect tense in discursive texts was carried out on Isaiah and Psalms, taking into account some important aspects, such as the word order of the constituents in related clauses and the masoretic notation of verse structures, this last aspect being important in the process of automatization of clause division. A similar methodology, applied to the discourse analysis of the preformative conjugation in Isaiah, Minor Prophets and Psalms, was presented in Leuven. The search for a computer-assisted classification of discourse types in poetic biblical texts led to the analysis of the consecutive imperfect and the interrogative clauses in Isaiah (ch. 1–35), which resulted in a different syntactical behaviour according to the type of the text. A study on Amos described some specific features in two different levels of text-markers: those working as a boundary between two types of discourse, and the development of these textmarkers into an independent type of discourse at the same level of
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the two sections that they separate. In the analysis of the narrative and discursive texts of Psalms, the consideration of syntactic differences concern mainly verbs, word order, and grammatical person.
ANALYSIS OF SPECIFIC TEXTS Under the premise that computer-assisted methods will only reach the majority of biblical scholars if they are able to become a tool for text-level analysis, it was deemed important to devote time to the analysis of specific chapters from the Bible. As a consequence, one section of the Tübingen conference was dedicated to the analysis of Genesis 22, Lamentations 3 and 5, and 2 Samuel 12 in some linguistic respects (e.g. formulas, actants, dialogues, sentence connections, modalities), with a description of their syntactic structures (discourse analysis) and a reflection on the contribution of computerized linguistic analysis to textual interpretation. A methodological section concentrated on the debate about different grammatical approaches on the basis of syntactic data, paying special attention to the definition of a clause and how to mark clausal boundaries with the help of a computer. Also, the Amsterdam congress had a session with papers representing different perspectives in the area of clause segmentation and clause analysis in a single chapter from the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 39 and Deuteronomy 8 were chosen for the occasion). In order to facilitate a comparison of the different approaches, the common structure of each paper was as follows: —Overview of the approach: the textual basis for the application, with indication of which machine-readable text and which morphologically analyzed text were employed. —Overview of the clause segmentation process: its kind (automatic, manual or a combination), its steps and criteria used for clause segmentation. —Overview of the clause analysis: its kind (automatic, manual or a combination), the type of analysis (clause identification, hierarchy, etc.), and criteria and steps used in analysis. In the contributions of this session it was possible to observe the struggle to find a proper balance of syntactic, semantic and non-linguistic information.
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CONCLUDING REMARKS Many other issues, apart from the above mentioned, have been discussed, to higher or lesser degree, in the seven conferences, both in terms of computer techniques and tools as well as regarding aspects related to scientific methodology in various fields: the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (manuscripts, Masorah) and their versions, both ancient (Septuagint, Peshitta, et al.) and modern; New Testament; textual criticism; lexical, semantic, statistical, literary and cultural studies; electronic publishing, multimedia, education, etc. All of these fields of study attest the variety of interests pursued by Bible and Computer scholars, and the richness of the debate displayed in the proceedings of these conferences.
THE GREEK PENTATEUCH AND THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA NATALIO FERNANDEZ MARCOS CENTRO DE CIENCIAS HUMANAS Y SOCIALES. CSIC. MADRID The Bible has been an active agent in all the great transformations of western civilisation. The most influential translation in antiquity was that of the Greek Pentateuch. It was through this that the wisdom of Israel passed from the medium of a Semitic to an IndoEuropean language, namely Greek, the universal language of the time. Thanks to its adoption as the official Bible by the new religion, Christianity, and thanks to the new translations from the Greek to the languages of the different nations within the Roman Empire, the Bible spread out to the eastern and western frontiers of the oijkoumevnh. This process, which was to have monumental consequences, started in the first part of the 3rd century BCE in Ptolemaic Alexandria.1 The use of the Bible was also a determining factor in the transition from scroll to codex, and the use of the codex coincided with the formation of the Christian corpus of Scriptures.2 The Latin Bible was the first book printed by Gutenberg (Mainz 1455), See Fernández Marcos, N. “Las traducciones en la Antigüedad.” Sefarad 67 (2007) 263–82. 2 “The passage from roll to codex represents indeed the most dramatic transformation in the history of the book before Gutenberg”, see Stroumsa, Guy G. “The Scriptural Movement of Late Antiquity and Christian Monasticism.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 16 (2008) 61–77, 66. 1
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the so-called forty-two lines Bible; at the end of the fifteenth century no less than 124 editions of the Latin Bible had been printed.3 Biblical texts were at the centre of Humanistic and Renaissance discussion, and the print edition contributed enormously to the diffusion and expansion of the Reformation. Will the new electronic revolution now taking place on-line supplant the traditional printed book? Will the Bible be present and active in this new transformation of the global village? The number of seminars and conferences on this subject is witness to the fact that the Bible is again at the forefront of a new transformation. After the decay of her famous library, the spirit of Alexandria continued to live in other centres of knowledge throughout history: Rome, Antioch, Edessa, Nisibis, Bagdad, Toledo, and El Escorial. The library of El Escorial could not have been possible without the personal support of Philip II, a spiritual descendant of the Ptolemies eighteen centuries earlier, and without the expertise of his librarian Benito Arias Montano, a humanist and orientalist skilled in ten languages.4 My aim in this paper is to highlight the ancient dream of the Alexandrian Library as a universal temple of knowledge, which could embrace—by means of book editions and/or translations—
See Copinger, W. A. The Bible and Its Transmission, 220. London: Henry Sotheran & Co, 1897, and de Hamel, C. The Book. A History of the Bible, 190ff. London: Phaidon Press, 2001. 4 “Uno de los hitos [en la restitución del espíritu de Alejandría tras su ocaso] lo tenemos cerca, en la biblioteca de El Escorial, cuya existencia y contenido no se pueden comprender sin apelar a la educación, personalidad y pensamiento de Felipe II, un descendiente espiritual— dieciocho siglos después—de los Ptolomeos,” see Sánchez Ron, J. M. “Todos hemos estado en Alejandría: centros de saber en la historia del conocimiento.” In García Maza J., ed. Siempre estuvimos en Alejandría, 249– 69, 258. Madrid/Valencia, 1997. “Notoria fue, en particular, la influencia del citado Arias Montano, el erudito bibliotecario, el Eratóstenes escurialense, que dominaba el hebreo, griego, latín, sirio, árabe, alemán, francés, flamenco, toscano, portugués, además de, por supuesto, castellano …,” ibid., 260–61. 3
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all the scientific and literary achievements of antiquity.5 In fact, it could be said with some certainty that, as a result of the activities of the Royal Museum, philology and text processing started in the West. It was there that the production of the first official editions of the classics and the scientific transmission of the legacy of antiquity were produced. My paper has the added goal of relating the origins of the Septuagint to the project of the “Mythical Library”, where western academic life and scientific research started. I want to re-establish the connection between classical and biblical studies, a connection which existed at the beginning of historical criticism in the 18th century.6 The German lyricist and Jewish freethinker Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) pronounced what was, no doubt, an exaggerated statement: “All men are either Hebrews … or Hellenes.”7 I would like to adjust his sentiment, modestly, to, “We are all Europeans or people of Western civilisation,” since I hold that the Bible and the Greco-Roman classics permeate the greater part of Western cultural expression.
1. THE LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA Ptolemy I Lagos, one of Alexander’s generals and one of his most faithful friends, founded the Mousei'on ca. 306 BCE, an institution both scientific and religious in character. The director was a priest appointed by the king. Its members, devoted to the service of the Muses, were lodged in the royal palace, as Strabo tells us: “The Museum is also a part of the royal palaces; it has a public walk, an Exedra with seats, and a large house, in which is the common mess-hall of the men of learning (filolovgwn a[ndrwn) who share the Museum. This group of men not only hold property in Erskine, A. “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Museum and Library of Alexandria.” Greece & Rome 42 (1995) 38–48, and Jacob, C., and F. de Polignac. Alexandrie IIIe siècle av. J.C. Tous les savoirs du monde ou le rêve de l’universalité des Ptolémées. Paris, 1992. 6 See Van Seters, John. The Edited Bible. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2006. 7 See Jacobs, J. “Heine.” In Singer I., ed. The Jewish Encyclopaedia, vol. 6, 329–30. New York/London, 1916. 5
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common, but also have a priest in charge of the Museum, who formerly was appointed by the kings, but is now appointed by Caesar.”8 Most of the residents were philologists, whose interest lay in the recovery and transmission of the classical legacy. They lived in conditions of privilege, under royal patronage and supervision, and with a substantial level of financial support. But they did not escape the criticism and envy of their colleagues. They were the target of satirical poems (sivlloi, ‘squint-eyed’), burlesque imitations of the Homeric hexameters, such as those by Timon of Phlius (320–230 BCE), a disciple of Pyrrho of Elis, the Sceptical philosopher: “There are many who just fill out the papyri, well fattened in populous Egypt, who constantly peck at each other in the birdcage of the Muses.” The disciples of Aristotle, and specifically the peripatetic Demetrius Phalereus, might well have been very active in originating and organising this institution. This library, together with the sister library of the Serapaeum, brought together the best of the ancient world at an early stage: Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia, all under the cultural policy of the Ptolemies. It seems that already in the 3rd century BCE, with the help of successive librarians, all of them outstanding scholars, the library had brought together some hundred thousand papyri scrolls, and maybe as many as five hundred thousand in Callimachus’ time. For a period of one thousand years, until the Arabic conquest of Alexandria in 640 CE, the library was the main vehicle for preserving and transmitting the intellectual legacy of the past. Among its librarians are numbered five of the most famous philologists of antiquity: Zenodotus of Ephesus, Callimachus of Cyrene, Eratosthenes of Cyrene, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and
Strabo is writing at the end of the 1st century BCE; see Strabo, Geography, 17.1.8, Leonard Jones, Horace, ed. & trans. Loeb Classical Library. London/New York, 1932: tw'n de; basileivwn mevro" ejsti; kai; to; 8
Mousei'on, e[con perivpaton kai; ejxevdran kai; oi\kon sussivtion tw'n metecovntwn tou' Mouseivou filolovgwn th'/ sunovdw/ tauvth/ kai; crhvmata koina; kai; iJereu;" oJ tetagmevno" tovte me;n uJpo; tw'n basilevwn, nu'n d j uJpo;
mevgan, ejn w|/ to; a[ndrwn. e[sti de; ejpi; tw'/ Mouseivw/ Kaivsaro".
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Aristarchus of Samotracia.9 As we shall see in the next section, this intellectual atmosphere corresponds to the description of the Ptolemaic court and the activities of the library supplied by the Letter of Aristeas. Zenodotus produced an edition of Homer after comparing the copies which were circulating in the various cities, divided each of the epics into 24 books, and used the letters of the alphabet to designate each book. The poet Callimachus created a new model of cataloguing in the form of his writing-tablets or pivnake" in which he divided Greek literature into literary genres or different topics; scrolls were organised in alphabetic order. The list drawn up for each name or author included some biographical data, the incipits of the author’s works, and the number of lines of each work. These are clear indicators of a scholarly milieu that created a climate fitting for the translation of the Greek Pentateuch, the best known collection of a foreign corpus, one probably translated into Greek in conjunction with the project of the library. Eratosthenes was a philologist and poet, and also a true scientist. He carried out research into the surface area of the earth as well as the origins of humankind; he published the first complete catalogue of constellations or katasterismoiv, in which mythical anecdotes and astronomical calculations are combined in order to explain the origins of the different groups of stars. Aristophanes of Byzantium was heir to a century of philological tradition and improved the editorial techniques by means of a greater number of diacritical signs. He excelled in lexicographical studies, his Levxei" extending to all fields of literature, prose and poetry. He was the first to publish selected lists of authors, numbers and names of the epic, lyric and tragic poets, a kind of classical canon before the canon. Finally Aristarchus was the consummate philologist, the person principally responsible for the correction (diovrqwsi") and recension of texts. He manifests his opinion in the margin by means of diacritical signs, and maintains the spurious passages in the text preceded by an obelus as a sign of doubtful authenticity It is disputed whether Callimachus was librarian or not. For a possible list of librarians see Oxyrhynchus Papyri, 1241, in Grenfell, B. P., and A. S. Hunt. Oxyrhynchus Papyri. London 1898–. 9
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(ajqevtesi"). He remains the best editor and interpreter of antiquity. As important as his editions are his commentaries or uJpomnhvmata, where he justifies and explains his editorial decisions and interprets the more difficult passages. Aristarchus defended the position that each author is the best interpreter of himself. Although the quotation seems to come from Porphyry, it has also been attributed to Aristarchus and parallels his method of interpretation: {Omhron ejx JOmhvrou safhnivzein, “to explain Homer by Homer”, an exegetical rule which will later be applied to the Scriptures, especially by the school of Antioch. While the scroll was in use, text and commentary were written on separate scrolls. When the codex was introduced, the margins of the codices offered space for the notes and commentaries.10 There is another feature that may parallel the transmission of the Homeric texts to that of the biblical texts. The first Homeric papyri from the end of the 4th century BCE attest a total lack of uniformity; they are poluvsticoi, with many additions, and recall the stage of textual fluidity of the biblical texts attested by the Qumran documents. Homer was for the Greeks and Romans as authoritative as the Pentateuch was for the Jews. Although the Alexandrian editors had a great influence in determining who the first rank authors were, those worth imitating and commenting by grammarians, and worthy of being studied at the school, they did not establish a canonical list of these authors.11 This Hellenistic process of ‘canonisation’ of the classics might illuminate the See for this section Pfeiffer, R. Historia de la Filología Clásica. I Desde los comienzos hasta el final de la época helenística, 165–400. Madrid: Gredos, 1981 [English original, Pfeiffer, R. History of Classical Scholarship. From the Beginnings to the end of the Hellenistic Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968]; and Fraser, P. M. Ptolemaic Alexandria I–III, I, 323–30. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972. See also Harold Ellens, J. “The Ancient Library of Alexandria: The West’s Most Important Repository of Learning.” Bible Review 13 (1997) 19–29. 11 A list of authors, not of writings. This might be one of the reasons why the biblical writings, anonymous in general, were attributed to specific authors like Moses, David, Solomon, and the different Prophets. See Van Seters, The Edited Bible, 40–41. 10
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process of canonisation of Scripture, be it in Hebrew or in Greek. It is worth emphasizing that the Alexandrian editors neither deleted nor insert anything into the text; they simply signalled it with the sign of inauthenticity. One can find some point of similarity in the procedure of the Masoretes who respected the written text and indicated the qere and other Masoretic notes in the margin.
2. A RETURN TO THE LETTER OF ARISTEAS After almost five centuries of scepticism concerning the historical value of the Letter, finally, in the middle of the 20th century and particularly in the last decade, more attention has been paid to the general information transmitted by the Letter of Aristeas in relation to the origins of the Greek translation, the intellectual climate of the Alexandrian library, and the Ptolemaic court.12 The Letter of Aristeas is a pseudepigraphic writing, a literary fiction from the last part of the 2nd century BCE. Among treatises such as the Symposium and many other expositions or ejkfravsei"— on Jerusalem and Palestine, the High Priest and the Temple, the presents of Ptolemy and Eleazar, the allegorical explanation of the Jewish dietary prescriptions by the High Priest, etc.—the Letter describes the origin and circumstances of the first translation of the Torah into Greek. However, in spite of incorporating several legendary motifs, it is also indicative of the atmosphere of Alexandria in the first part of the 3rd century BCE, the promotion of culture by the first Ptolemies, and the intellectual milieu of the library. The author of the Letter displays throughout the writing diverse allusions to the ambitious project of Ptolemy II, described in paragraphs 9–11: the librarian Demetrius Phalereus “received an enormous fund to gather, if possible, in the library, all the books of the earth.”13 In paragraphs 29–30 the survey of the librarian is See Fernández Marcos, N. “The Greek Pentateuch and the Scholarly Milieu of Alexandria.” Semitica et Classica 2 (2009). 12
13
jEcrhmativsqh polla; diavfora pro;" to; sunagagei'n, eij dunatovn, a{panta ta; kata; th;n oijkoumevnhn bibliva, Letter of Aristeas § 9. The Greek
text of the Letter is taken from the edition of Thackeray, H. St. J. “The Letter of Aristeas.” In Swete, H. B., ed. An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Cambridge, 21902, Appendix 499–574. See also Fernández
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recorded: the books of the Jewish Law are lacking and with the king’s agreement the decision is taken to write to the High Priest of Jerusalem, Eleazar, in order to get the best experts from Jerusalem for the translation, six for each of the tribes. These men shall examine the “agreement of the majority in order to obtain the exact interpretation.”14 These phrases echo the philological activity in the library with the Homeric edition as applied here to the translation.15 They wish to put the Jewish Law “in a distinguished place fitting to the royal projects and implementations” (Letter of Aristeas § 32). Although the library is not mentioned in this context, the implicit reader understands that this distinguished place of honour cannot be other than the library. Moreover, in the letter of Ptolemy to Eleazar the destiny of the translation for the library is stated explicitly: “we decided to translate your Law from what you call Hebrew language to the Greek language, thus that we may have it also near us in the library together with the rest of the royal books.”16 Throughout the Symposium, which occupies the most important section of the letter, the Jewish translators from Jerusalem, who were received with all kinds of honours by the king, are presented as cultivated philosophers able to respond wisely to any question related to life or the best way of government. The paragraphs devoted to the phenomenon of the translation are few, but they reproduce the kind of work and terminology used in the library for the restoration of the text of the Greek authors. The method behind the translation was that of agreement between themselves by comparing results, ajntibolhv, a technical term used in Alexandria for the collation of the manuscripts.17 With this specific Marcos, N. “Carta de Aristeas.” In Díez Macho, A., ed. Apócrifos del Antiguo Testamento II, 11–63. Madrid: Ediciones Cristiandad, 1983. 14
… o{pw" to; suvmfwnon ejk tw'n pleiovnwn ejxetavsante" kai; lavbonte" to; kata; th;n eJrmhneivan ajkribev" ... Letter of Aristeas § 32.
See Honigman, S. The Septuagint and Homeric Scholarship in Alexandria. London/New York: Routledge 2003. 15
16
... i{n j uJpavrch/ kai; tau'ta par j hJmi'n ejn biblioqhvkh/ su;n toi'" a[lloi" basilikoi'" biblivoi", Letter of Aristeas § 38. 17 oiJ de; ejpetevloun e{kasta suvmfwna poiou'nte" pro;" eJautou;" tai'" ajntibolai'", Letter of Aristeas § 302.
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language, the author of the Letter is claiming for the translators a similar role and level of accuracy as those of the editors of Homer. Once the translation had been legitimated and approved by all the Jews it was presented to the king. When the complete text of the translation was read to the king, particular emphasis was placed on the wisdom of the lawmaker. Afterwards Ptolemy paid a deep reverence and ordered that these books be treated with the highest care and be preserved scrupulously (aJgnw'", Letter of Aristeas § 317).18
3. CHRISTIAN AUTHORS AND BYZANTINE CHRONICLERS The tradition reflected in the Letter of Aristeas, which links the origins of the Greek Pentateuch with the library of Alexandria and the cultural policy of Ptolemy II, was already accepted in the Jewish community and consolidated only a century after the translation. It is supported and transmitted by diverse sources such as Aristobulus in the 2nd century BCE, Philo and Josephus in the 1st century CE, and the Rabbis in the centuries following. It is difficult to accept that the tradition itself, although embellished in different ways, might have been totally invented and was not based on recognized historical circumstances.19 Moreover, we have another view of this at our disposal, even in later authors who record features of the same tradition independent of the Letter of Aristeas.
18
proskunhvsa" ejkevleuse megavlhn ejpimevleian poiei'sqai tw'n biblivwn kai; sunthrei'n aJgnw'". Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, I, 330 states:
“And certainly it is natural to suppose that translations of these books were deposited in the Library as they became available.” Perhaps on deposit in the library were also translations of the Persian texts of Zoroaster, since it is said that Hermippus, a student of Callimachus, wrote a commentary on Zoroaster’s writings; see Pliny, Naturalis historia, XXX.4. 19 See Kreuzer, S. “Entstehung und Publikation der Septuaginta im Horizont frühptolemäischer Bildungs—und Kulturpolitik.” In Kreuzer, S., and J. P. Lesch, eds. Im Breenpunkt: Die Septuaginta. Studien zur Entstehung und Bedeutung der Griechischen Bibel. Band 2, 61–75, 68–70. BWANT, 161. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2004.
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A series of statements of Christian authors reflects the close relationship between the first translation of the Septuagint and the library of Alexandria. From the context of the Letter (§ 317) one can plausibly deduce that the text of the translation was on deposit in the library for consultation of the scholars, and that it might have been there over two hundred years, or at least until the time of Julius Caesar when, in 48 BCE, some boxes containing ancient volumes were accidentally burnt while being prepared to be moved to Rome. But it is quite possible that the copy of the Septuagint did not perish in this disaster. The Greek Pentateuch was known and quoted by such Jewish-Hellenistic writers as Demetrius, Aristobulus, Eupolemus, Ezechiel Tragicus, Aristeas the historian, Philo and Josephus, the authors of the New Testament (see especially Acts 13:15 and 15:21).20 In all events, Tertullian, Justin, Epiphanius and Chrysostom state that the Septuagint could be seen and consulted in the Serapaeum, the filial library of the Museum. As Veltri states: “Christian sources call to mind the fact that everybody can verify the presence of the manuscript(s) of the (Greek) Torah in the library of Alexandria as a proof that the story is true.”21 In the 2nd century, Justin, in his first Apology (I.31.5) directed to Antoninus Pius, states that after the original translation the books were to be found among the Egyptians until his time, and were to be found
For quotations according to the Septuagint where the Septuagint differs notably from the Masoretic Text, see Fernández Marcos, N. Introducción a las versiones griegas de la Biblia. Segunda edición revisada y aumentada, 261–69. Madrid: CSIC, 1998, and Swete, H. B. An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek, 369–72. Cambridge: University Press, 1902. 21 See Veltri, G. Libraries, Translations, and “Canonic” Texts: The Septuagint, Aquila and Ben Sira in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, 29. JSJS 109. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2006. See also Hengel, M. The Septuagint as Christian Scripture: its Prehistory and the Problem of its Canon, 224. Edinburgh/New York: T&T Clark, 2002: “The translation stored in the famous library of Alexandria, is like the publication of a political constitution and/or of a cultural perception.” 20
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everywhere among all the Jews.22 Tertullian (2nd/3rd century) in his Apologeticum 18.8–9 states: “Today these documents, translated into Greek, are exhibited with the same Hebrew texts in Ptolemy’s library in the Serapaeum. But the Jews also read them in public.”23 And John Chrysostom affirms:24 [So] that you may learn that books do not make a place holy and that the disposition of those who gather there defiles it, let me tell you a story from ancient history. When Ptolemy Philadelphus, who was collecting books from all over the world, learned that among the Jews there were books which philosophised about God and the best way of life, he sent for Kai; tou'to genomevnou [that is, the translation] e[meinan aiJ bivbloi kai; par j Aijguptivoi" mevcri tou' deu'ro, kai; pantacou' para; pa'sivn eijsin jIoudaivoi" ... In the 4th century Epiphanius (De mensuris et ponderibus, 22
11, PG 43, 255) says that the finished translation was placed ‘in the first Library,’ which was located in the Broucheion, see Fraser, Ptolemaic Alexandria, I, 323. 23 Ita in Graecum stilum exaperta monumenta hodie apud Serapeum Ptolemaei bibliothecae cum ipsis Hebraicis exhibentur. Sed et Judaei palam lectitant. Apologeticum, cura et studio E. Dekkers, in Tertuliani Opera. Pars I. Turnholti: Brepols, 1954. 24 In his Adversus Judaeos Orationes Octo (PG 48, 843–942), 851: Kai; i{na mavqhte, o{ti oujc aJgiavzei to;n tovpon ta; bibliva, ajlla; bvevbhlon poiei' tw'n suniovntwn hJ proaivresi", iJstorivan uJmi'n dihghvsomai palaiavn. Ptolemai'o" oJ Filavdelfo" ta;" pantacovqen bivblou" sunagagwvn, kai; maqw;n o{ti kai; para; jIoudaivoi" eijsi; grafai; peri; Qeou' filosofou'sai, kai; politeiva" ajrivsth", metapemyavmeno" a[ndra" ejk th'" jIoudaiva", hJrmhvneusen aujta;" di j ejkeivnwn kai; ajpevqeto eij" to; tou' Seravpido" iJerovn: kai; ga;r h\n {Ellhn oJ ajnhvr: kai; mevcri nu'n ejkei' tw'n profhtw'n aiJ eJrmhneuqei'sai bivbloi mevnousi. Tiv ou\n, a{gio" e[stai tou' Seravpido" oJ nao;" dia; ta; bibliva; Mh; gevnoito. In fact the homilies were
pronounced against Jews and Judaizers of the Christian community. There is no modern edition of these homilies. Only homilies 1 and 8 have been translated into English by Meeks, Wayne A., and Robert L. Wilken. Jews and Christians in Antioch, in the First Four Centuries of the Common Era, 83– 126. Missoula, MO: Scholars Press, 1978. The following translation is taken from this last work, 96–97.
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NATALIO FERNÁNDEZ MARCOS men from Judaea and commissioned them to translate these books. Ptolemy placed the books in the temple of Serapis. He was a Greek and this translation of the prophets is in use to this very day. Now then, are we to consider the temple of Serapis holy because of these books? Of course not!
The Serapaeum was destroyed together with other Egyptian temples in 389 following an order from the emperor Theodosius. However, Chrysostom pronounced his homily against the Jews some years before in 386. According to the ancient sources, various witnesses seem to coincide in attesting the presence of the translation in the library, although no one is entirely verifiable. To this evidence should be added the information transmitted by some Byzantine Chroniclers: Johannes Tzetzes, the monk Syncellus and Georgius Cedrenus. All three tell of the intense translation activity in the court of Ptolemy II as they methodically collected ancient traditions. The Ptolemaic dynasty was open to other cultures. Under Macedonian influences its policy was based on the integration of the different ethnic peoples of Alexandria. The 12th century scholar Tzetzes transmits the story of the translation differently. He uses different terminology and notes that not one but two libraries existed in Alexandria. And he continues: “Once all the books of the Greeks, those of every one of the nations, along with the books of the Hebrews had been collected together (sunhqroismevnwn), that unsparing king … translated to the Greek script and language the foreign books by means of wise men who shared their language ….” The differences (sunavgein in Aristeas, sunaqroivzein in Tzetzes) suggest that Tzetzes was not dependent on Aristeas or Josephus, but drew his information from another source.25 G. Cedrenus also links Demetrius to the translation: See Collins, Nina L. The Library in Alexandria & the Bible in Greek, 91–92. Leiden/Boston/Köln: Brill, 2000, and Orth, W. „Ptolemaios II und die Septuaginta-Übersetzung.“ In Fabry, H.-J., and U. Offerhaus, eds. Im Brennpunkt: Die Septuaginta. Studien zur Entstehung und Bedeutung der Griechischen Bibel. Band I, 97–114, 106–8. BWANT, 153. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2001. 25
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And he [Ptolemy Philadelphos] translated to the Greek language through the seventy most wise Hebrew men the divine Scriptures and the rest of the Greek, Chaldaic, Egyptian and Roman books, ten thousand all together, since all were in another language. He placed these translations in his libraries of Alexandria …. And the king struck by the beauty of the divine Scriptures asked in presence of all the court the philosopher Menedemus and Demetrius Phalereus how being the divine Scriptures of such value … no one of the historians or poets mentioned them.26
In view of the evidence transmitted by such different sources, one may conclude that the framework of the story of the translation as narrated by the Letter of Aristeas is quite plausible. One might object that, if the translation was deposited in the library it should be mentioned or quoted by pagan authors. This objection, according to Aristeas, was already put in the mouth of the king who asked Demetrius (Letter of Aristeas § 312): “How is it possible that such an important work is not mentioned by the historians or the poets?”27 The author of the Letter makes mention in his answer of the legend of the sacred book that cannot be touched by pagan hands without being punished by the divinity (Letter of Aristeas §§ 313–16). Be that as it may, in this case the argument ex silentio is perilous, especially when taking into account the oblivion into which ancient works and those of JewishHellenistic production had fallen. These works were preserved by PG 121, 325AB: o}" [Ptolemy Philadelphos] kai; th;n metabolh;n tw'n qeivwn Grafw'n kai; loipw'n JEllhnikw'n, Caldaikw'n, Aijguptivwn kai; JRwmaikw'n eij" devka muriavda" ajriqmoumevnwn biblivwn, pasw'n te ajlloglwvsswn oujsw'n, eij" th;n JEllavda glw'ssan metepoivhse dia; tw'n o j sofwtavtwn JEbraivwn: a}" kai; ejn tai'" kata; th;n jAlexavndreian biblioqhvkai" aujtou' ejnapevqeto ... jEpi; tw'/ kavllei toivnun tw'n qeivwn Grafw'n ejkplagevnto" tou' basilevw" kai; pavntwn tw'n ejn tevlei, parovnto" kai; Menedhvmou filosovfou kai; Dhmhtrivou Falhrevw" hjrwvta oJ basileuv" o{ti pw'" toiouvtwn o[ntwn ... oujdei;" iJstorikw'n h] poihtw'n ejmnhvsqh aujtw'n. 27 pw'" thlikouvtwn suntetelesmevnwn oujdei;" ejpebavleto tw'n iJstorikw'n h] poihtikw'n ejpimnhsqh'nai; 26
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Christians and only in the measure that they served Christian interests. Similar books such as those of Manetho, Berossus and even Josephus are not even quoted by pagan authors until the 3rd century CE, by the Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry.28 The evidence may simply have been lost for a number of reasons. As Cook asserts: “Hecataeus, Ocellus Lucanus, Alexander Polyhistor, Diodorus Siculus, Nicolaus of Damascus and Ps.-Longinus are pagan authors who are aware of the LXX (or the Jews’ books of Laws) although extant quotations are sparse.”29
4. THE JEWISH-HELLENISTIC WRITERS AND THE LIBRARY These Jewish authors, known only thanks to the quotations of the Christian authors Clemens of Alexandria (Stromata) and Eusebius of Caesarea (Praeparatio Evangelica), write in the manner of the Greeks. They use practically all the literary genres cultivated by the Greeks and Romans: tragedy with biblical theme (Ezechiel Tragicus), epic (Philo the Ancient on Jerusalem), philosophy (Philo of Alexandria), short novel (Joseph and Asenet), short story (Judit), historiography (Artapanus, Demetrius, Eupolemus, and Flavius Josephus). They use Hellenistic topoi and rhetorical devices in order to construct a Jewish identity. They have discovered the power of story and narrative rhetoric over historical facts.30 For example, the epic poet Theodotus writes on Jacob and Sechem in a Homeric framework and reinterprets the biblical version of the rape of Dinah from Genesis 34. The poem contains echoes of the
In De abstinentia 4.11–14. See Cook, J. G. The Intepretation of the Old Testament in Graeco-Roman Paganism, 52. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. And in page 2 he insists: “Most of the (pagan) Greek literature concerning the Jews written between IV B.C.E. to II C. E. has been lost, as a glance at F. Jacoby’s FGrH will show.” 30 See Gruen, E. S. Heritage and Hellenism. The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press 1998. 28 29
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Septuagint, while most of its expressions and structure are Homeric. Other authors also appropriate the Hellenistic topoi of the prw'to" sofov" (first sage) and prw'to" euJrethv" (first inventor) and the foundation myths to demonstrate the cultural priority and, accordingly, superiority of the Jews over Babylonians and Egyptians. Rewriting the past of Israel to serve the needs of the moment is one of the characteristic devices used by these authors. History becomes, in a certain way, rhetorical propaganda. PseudoEupolemus, in the middle of the 2nd century BCE, presents Abraham as the inventor of astrology and its teacher to the other peoples. Astrology was, according to Artapanus, also taught by Abraham to the Egyptians. Eupolemus presents Moses according to the literary topos of the cultural benefactor, the founder of civilisation, the first wise man and lawgiver. It was from him that the Phoenicians and the Greeks received the alphabet. Artapanus is even more perspicacious in combining pagan mythology with biblical traditions in an euhemeristic fashion. Taking advantage of the homophony, Artapanus identifies Moses with Mousaios, a mythical Greek poet and teacher of Orpheus. Artapanus transmits the only realistic portrait of Moses in the Hellenistic fashion: “he was tall, ruddy complexioned, with long flowing grey hair, and dignified.”31 Even the Letter of Aristeas not only quotes Hecataeus, Menedemus, Demetrius Phalereus, Theopompus and Teodectes, but Jerusalem’s description (Letter of Aristeas §§ 83–106) seems to be inspired by the description of the ideal city of Aristotle in his Politics VII, 11.3–4.32 The author of the Letter follows Aristotle’s See Fernández Marcos, N. “Interpretaciones helenísticas del pasado de Israel.” Cuadernos de Filología Clásica 8 (1975) 157–86; idem, “Rhetorical expansions of biblical traditions in the Hellenistic Period.” Old Testament Essays 15 (2002) 766–79, 771–76, and Holladay, C. R. Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors. Vol I, Historians. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983; Vol II, Poets. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989; Vol III, Aristobulus. Chico, CA: University of California Press, 1995. 32 Especially the praise of Jerusalem water supplies (Letter of Aristeas §§ 88–91), see Honigman, Homeric Scholarship, 23–25, 23: “For example, the detailed description of the combined sources supplying water to the 31
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advice concerning the needs of the povli", especially in the water’s installations (Letter of Aristeas §§ 88–91). When one compares the Jewish literary legacy in the Greek language, the literary genres and compositions which arose and grew up in the shadow of the Greek Bible, with the legacy of Qumran, one is struck by how deep the differences are. The Jewish-Hellenistic writers had access to the most important writings of Greek antiquity. In other words, they had access to the great library of Alexandria. It is quite possible that Theodotus, Aristobulus (who knows the Greek Bible and uses the allegorical interpretation of Scripture before Aristeas), Ezechiel Tragicus, and other Jewish-Hellenistic authors were in contact with the library. It is possible that some distinguished members of the Alexandrian polivteuma were engaged in the cultural activities of the library, just as other Hellenistic Jews, whose names and qualities are well known, made their own cursus honorum in business and politics.33 It is true, no individual Jews, scribes or intellectuals, are known in the early 3rd century BCE, but we should bear in mind that in antiquity writers or authors were dependent on patrons and institutions, that is, on the centres of power concentrated mainly in the royal palaces and the temples. Therefore they functioned as the spokesmen for the perspectives of these institutions, not for their own, and they disappeared from the scene as individual actors.
5. CONCLUSIONS For the first translation of the Torah into Greek, exceptional circumstances had to align in order to make it possible: the cultural climate of Alexandria and the competition between the different peoples to achieve a place of prestige over the dominant Greek culture. It is impossible to think of such a complex undertaking Temple (chs. 88–91) finds its raison d’être in Aristotle’s insistence on the need for the polis to enjoy a good water supply, both in quality and quantity (Politics, 7.11.3–4).” 33 See Paul, A. La Biblia y Occidente. De la Biblioteca de Alejandría a la cultura europea, 98–106. Estella (Navarra): Verbo Divino, 2008 [French original, Paul, A. La Bible et l’Occident. De la bibliothèque d’Alexandrie à la culture européenne. Paris: Bayard, 2007].
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without the institutional support of the Ptolemaic monarchy and the infrastructure of the Museum itself. The team of translators were bilingual Jews, scribes cultivated both in Hebrew and Greek languages and literatures. The scholarly milieu created around the famous Library is the most fitting Sitz im Leben for the origin of the Greek Pentateuch. The Letter of Aristeas does not affirm explicitly that a copy of the translation was deposited in the Museum or Serapaeum.34 It does, however, indicate the moment when the king manifests his interest in preserving the Greek Pentateuch carefully (Letter of Aristeas § 317). The Greek Pentateuch was known and consulted by the Jewish-Hellenistic authors, by Philo, Josephus, and the authors of the New Testament. It had to be in open access, and the best place to provide such an access was the Library. Christian authors claim that people could consult the translation in “the first Library” or in the Serapaeum,35 and the Byzantine Chroniclers inform, with apparent independence from the tradition of the Letter, on the translation activity in the court of the Ptolemies and precisely on the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures in this context. If not demonstrably true, the links between the translation of the Greek Pentateuch with the ambitious Ptolemaic cultural project and the intellectual climate of the Library, as narrated in the Letter of Aristeas, are more than plausible.
34 35
The library created later by Ptolemy III Euergetes. See Epiphanius of Salamine (PG 43, 255–56): Kai; ou{tw" aiJ bivblioi
eij" JEllhnivda ejkteqei'sai ajpetevqhsan ejn th'/ prwvth/ biblioqhvkh/ th'/ ejn th'/ Broucivw/ oijkodomhqeivsh/. [Eti de; u{steron kai; eJtevra ejgevneto biblioqhvkh ejn tw'/ Serapivw/ mikrotevra th'" prwvth", h{ti" kai; qugavthr wjnomavsqh aujth'": ejn h|/ ajpetevqhsan aiJ tou' jAkuvla, kai; Summavcou, kai; Qeodotivwno", kai; tw'n loipw'n eJrmhnei'ai, meta; diakosiosto;n kai; penthkosto;n e[to". The first library is the Museum, close to the royal
palace, in the Brucheion Greek quarter of Alexandria. The Serapaeum was located at Rhakotis in the southwestern part of the city; see Barnes, R. “Cloistered Bookworms in the Chicken-Coop of the Muses: The Ancient Library of Alexandria.” In MacLeod, R., ed. The Library of Alexandria. Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, 61–77, 62–63. London/New York: I. B. Tauris 2005.
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Concerning the relationship of my paper with the main topic of the Conference, Bible & Computers, I would like to finish with a prudent reflection made by Prof. Robert Barnes, a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the Australian National University: “In the late twentieth century, the problems of large libraries have by no means been resolved. There has been much premature speculation that digital recording of texts will overcome all difficulties of collecting and storing them, and will make them available immediately to anyone, anywhere in the world. In fact the digitising of library holdings of printed texts has scarcely begun, and its costs, with present technology, would seem to limit it to a comparatively small selection of commonly used texts. Although most new books nowadays must be recorded somewhere in digital form, the economics of publishing discourage wide access to the books in that form. Above all, we simply do not know whether present technology will preserve texts even as efficiently as libraries of manuscript and printed books have done. The Alexandrian library may have preserved its books, without substantial loss, for up to 600 years.36 We should not be confident that we will preserve our own literature for anything like as long.”37
36 37
Probably for up to a millennium until the Arabic conquest. See Barnes, “Cloistered Bookworms,” 75.
ELECTRONIC TOOLS FOR BIBLICAL STUDY AT HOME, AT THE UNIVERSITY, AND IN THE CLASSROOM EMANUEL TOV DEPARTMENT OF BIBLE, THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY. JERUSALEM 91905, ISRAEL 1. RETROSPECTIVE Over the past two decades many developments have taken place in the area of the computerized study of Scripture. The impressive progress in hardware has enabled much advancement in software and thus has provided access to a greater number of users. Approximately a quarter century ago the main components for the computer-assisted study of Scripture were developed and used merely on mainframes, media that were available only remotely, and hence extensive use by scholars and students alike was delayed. It was not feasible for users, especially students, to make use of terminals linked to mainframes. Another problem was that several projects, among them our own CATSS project, presented the Hebrew and Greek data in transliteration. Therefore, in my presidential address to the 1988 AIBI conference in Jerusalem, I appealed to our colleagues not only to develop tools, but also to enable greater access for colleagues and students to these tools.1 When developing tools, specialists used to speak of “possibilities”, “Achievements and Trends in Computer-Assisted Biblical Studies,” Proceedings of the Second International Colloquium Bible and Computer: Methods, Tools, Results, Jérusalem, 9–13 juin 1988 (Travaux de linguistique quantitative 43; ed. C. Muller; Paris/Genève: Champion–Sladkine, 1989) 33–60. 1
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but primarily needed were applications for non-specialists and tools accessible for the average person. Today, we realize that an appeal such as that made in 1988 is no longer needed; our colleagues are actively using the tools we have developed, thanks to advancements made in what we then named microcomputers, now known as personal computers. The servers of today and the networks of personal computers integrated with servers take the place of the mainframes of those bygone days. There still are many mainframes, immensely more powerful than those of the past, but they are seldom used for projects in the humanities. Users now employ the databases and programs on personal computers in their homes and universities, on terminals connected to servers, and increasingly more often on the Internet and in the classroom.
2. THE CATSS PROJECT The development of the CATSS database and software went hand in hand with the availability of better and more powerful hardware. Our project aimed to develop tools for the comparative analysis of the MT and LXX. To that end, we created a detailed comparison of the Hebrew text of BHS and the Greek text of the Rahlfs edition of the LXX which were broken down into very small units. The words of the Hebrew and Greek Bibles were then connected to a morphological analysis and lemmatization of all these words in both languages, enabling searches in these languages. The initial comparison of the details in the Hebrew and Greek Bibles was created by a computer program, which was based on the structure of the Hebrew and Greek languages and on the assumption that most Greek translations closely followed the structure of the Hebrew language. In most books of the LXX this automatic comparison created a correct alignment, even in free translation units, as long as most of the Hebrew lexemes were represented by a one-to-one equivalent in Greek. At the next stage, the results of this automatic comparison were fine-tuned by a team of collaborators in Jerusalem who also added detailed notes on matters of translation technique, the reconstructed Vorlage of the LXX, the relation of the LXX to the Ketiv-Qere notes of MT and also to the Qumran biblical scrolls, etc. All these notes were included in the so-called “column b” that was added to “column a” and contained a detailed alignment of MT and the LXX.
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The program and database were developed simultaneously in the 1980s and into the 1990s by R. A. Kraft and myself using different systems: the IBYCUS system at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and two different mainframes at the Hebrew University. Working on different machines in those days was more complex than it would have been today. This situation necessitated the writing of separate programs in different computer languages for the computers at UPenn and at the Hebrew University. Even more challenging, when the Hebrew University changed its mainframes without consulting with us or informing us, we had to write completely new programs for inputting and correcting data and for searching the parallel Hebrew and Greek words. When we finished our database of parallel Hebrew–Greek words, we were able to perform limited searches ourselves at both sites of the project, but very few external scholars used our data. The program was used mainly by some fifteen scholars who were connected with the project, but it can be said that it was used, and valuable studies on translation technique as well as textual and linguistic aspects were based on the data gathered from the project.2 The data were also used by two daughter or sister projects that compiled major research tools for the Greek Bible. The improved morphological analysis of all the words in the LXX was recorded by Taylor in a printed edition that presented this analysis as a running text of the LXX.3 The LXX lexicon by Lust-EynikelFor a bibliography, see my “A Computerized Database for Biblical Research.” In The Greek and Hebrew Bible—Collected Essays on the Septuagint, 31–51 (41–3). VTSup, 72. Leiden/Boston/Cologne: E. J. Brill, 1999; “The Use of Computers in Biblical Research.” In Flint, P. W., et al., eds. Studies in the Hebrew Bible, Qumran and the Septuagint Presented to Eugene Ulrich, 337–59 (354). VTSup, 101. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006; Kraft, R. A., in http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/rs/rak/catss.html. See also the description of J. Treat in http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~jtreat/rs/rscpuhx.html. 3 Taylor, B. A. The Analytical Lexicon to the Septuagint—A Complete Parsing Guide. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994. Subsequently, that analysis, now named CATSS-Taylor-Wheeler, has been made available in seven different software packages, listed in Tov, “Use of Computers,” 356–7. 2
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Hauspie was also based on our data, developed our data much further, and added a completely novel lexicographical description of all the LXX words.4 However, the use of our data by outsiders was not possible because the data were stored in a ASCII transliteration in Roman letters at two different universities and were not easily accessible. The original data have been available for many years at the UPenn website (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/), but it is my understanding that they have not been used much in their ASCII form. The breakthrough in the use of the data of the CATSS project came in 1997 when the database was integrated into the Accordance program using Hebrew and Greek fonts instead of transliteration, for use on personal computers instead of on mainframes. The platform was that of Macintosh, with the PC world later included by way of screen emulation. The powerful Accordance program had been launched in 1994, and came to include an ever-growing number of text modules for the study of ancient Scriptures and related subjects.5 In short, it was the development of personal computers that saved the CATSS project from oblivion; similar developments took place in other projects as well. Powerful tools for computer-assisted analysis of the Hebrew Bible, including grammatical analysis, vocalization, and Masorah were now accessible on personal computers. Let me mention two such programs. Originating in the Amsterdam project of E. Talstra, the SESB project, is now a powerful part of Logos.6 This program originated with the Werkgroep Informatica and includes syntax analysis and attention to clause hierarchy. Likewise, the Tokhnit
Lust, J., E. Eynikel, and K. Hauspie. A Greek-English Lexicon of the Septuagint, I–II. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1992, 1996. 5 For the data, see http://www.accordancebible.com/modules/ index.php. 6 http://www.logos.com/products/details/1981. 4
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“HaKeter”, initially developed alongside the Responsa Project,7 is now available on the PC.8
3. ELECTRONIC RESOURCES In an electronic journal TC (2003)9 as well as in a printed publication (2006),10 I published a list of all the electronic resources relevant to the textual criticism of Hebrew Scripture. This list is constantly being updated,11 although I realize that I may not be aware of all the available resources. The list is subdivided into the following types of information: 1. Source texts of the Hebrew Bible; 2. Source texts of the ancient versions; 3. Modern translations of Hebrew Scripture; 4. Critical apparatuses; 5. Morphological analyses; 6. Tools for the study of these texts. In biblical scholarship, computer-assisted studies have focused on the following five areas: authorship studies, stylistics, linguistics, statistics, and textual criticism. Beyond these monographic studies, we can now consult many electronic resources, both freeware and commercial software packages. Usually the rule is that the more recent the program, the more sophisticated the software.
Global Jewish Database* (Responsa Project, CD-ROM 12, Bar-Ilan University) (with cross-references to Rabbinic Literature), see http://www.biu.ac.il/JH/Responsa/index.html. 8 Tokhnit “HaKeter”–Ma’agar HaTanakh, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan; part of the Miqraot Gedolot“HaKeter” Project based on the Aleppo Codex (in books in which the Codex is missing, its text has been reconstructed according to sources close to the Aleppo Codex). 9 “Electronic Resources Relevant to the Textual Criticism of Hebrew Scripture.” TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism 8 (2003) [http://purl.org/TC]. 10 Tov, “The Use of Computers.” 11 The latest update is included in the second volume of my collected writings, Hebrew Bible, Greek Bible, and Qumran—Collected Essays, 228–46. TSAJ, 121. Mohr Siebeck, 2008. 7
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a. Hebrew Bible The Hebrew Bible has been available for a long time in machinereadable form, with vowels and accents. The Greek Bible with accents has also been available for at least three decades. All these sources are designed exclusively for a PC environment except for Accordance (Macintosh) and the Jewish Classics Library (PC and Macintosh). However, with emulation programs, the PC programs can be used on the Macintosh, and the Accordance data can be used on a PC. Before listing the available sources, I should mention that the great majority of the software packages are available only as commercial products. In my constantly updated list of available sources, I indicate such commercial products with a star,12 and when reviewing the list one will notice how little is available as freeware on the Internet. This is probably one of the concessions that have to be made to the conditions under which we work, since the preparation and maintenance of each software package costs several hundred thousand US dollars. In principle, it should not be difficult to accept the idea that these software packages have a price-tag attached, since books are likewise commercial products and no one rebels against purchasing them. However, somehow there seems to be a reticence to pay money for abstract material included on a lightweight CD. Software packages are usually sold for US $200–300, but the cost can easily jump to $1,000 if one orders several modules as well as tools such as lexicons. On the Internet, we can find the bare Hebrew and Greek biblical texts as freeware, though not the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, none of these texts is searchable in a meaningful way, since they are not linked to morphological analyses. In addition, various sources offer freeware lexicons (such as Liddell and Scott),13 editions (such as von Gall’s
Tov, “The Use of Computers.” Liddell, H. G., R. Scott and H. S. Jones. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford, 91940; LSJ is used together with Barber, E. A. A Greek-English Lexicon, A Supplement. Oxford, 1968, and Glare, P. G. W. Revised Supplement. Oxford, 1996: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/. 12 13
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edition of the Samaritan Pentateuch,14 Tischendorf’s edition of codex Sinaiticus,15 and the LXX edition of Brooke, McLean, and Thackeray)16 and single manuscripts (such as the large Isaiah scroll17 and the Aleppo Codex18) as scanned images. The Israeli sites Mechon Mamre and Snunit offer free access to many biblical and rabbinic texts, but without good search facilities.19 Many modern English Scripture translations are freely available as well. In addition, the valuable Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL)20 and the non-updated version of the CATSS comparison of the MT and LXX are freely available in ASCII format.21 The great majority of the commercial software packages of the Hebrew Bible represent the Leningrad Codex or BHS. In principle, these two sources should be identical, since BHS is based on codex L, but in practice they are not. The main text that is used, the so-called Michigan-Claremont-Westminster text, has been corrected according to codex L. On the other hand, the Bar-Ilan database, Tokhnit “HaKeter”, presents the Aleppo Codex, which differs in only a small number of details from codex L; for students of grammar, however, these differences are important. No less than fourteen software packages offer the Hebrew Bible text.22 Von Gall, A. F. Der Hebräische Pentateuch der Samaritaner. Giessen: Tšpelmann, 1914–1918: http://rosetta.reltech.org/Ebind/docs/TC/. 15 Von Tischendorf, C. Bibliorum Codex Sinaiticus Petropolitanus. Leipzig: Giesecke et Devrient, 1862: http://rosetta.reltech.org/Ebind/docs/TC/. 16 Brooke, A. E., N. McLean, and H. St. J. Thackeray. The Old Testament in Greek according to the Text of Codex Vaticanus. Cambridge: University Press, 1906–1940: http://rosetta.reltech.org/Ebind/ docs/TC/. 17 http://www.ao.net/~fmoeller/qumdir.htm, http://www.imj.org.il. 18 http://aleppocodex.org/flashopen.html. 19 http://www.mechon-mamre.org/i/t/t0.htm, http://kodesh.snunit. k12.il. 20 http://cal1.cn.huc.edu/. 21 http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu. 22 In all programs, slight adjustments are made to the appearance of the text since all use different fonts. In 2003, A. Groves wrote to me: “The text was first made available for word-processing using the Hebraica 14
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The text of MT is thus available in several software packages bearing such names as Accordance, BibleWorks, Jewish Classics Library, Logos, WordSearch, Gramcord, Bible Windows, SESB, and Global Jewish Database. The Masorah Magna and Parva are searchable in the BarIlan database. The Qumran biblical texts are available in M. Abegg’s module included in Accordance and Logos with all the search facilities of these programs. This module presents the Qumran texts in two ways, according to manuscript and the sequence of the biblical text. The presentation according to manuscript allows the user to analyze the features of individual manuscripts. The presentation according to the sequence of the biblical texts allows the user to analyze all the Qumran biblical material at the same time. All these analyses enable the “compare” function that, with one click, displays all the differences between texts; for example, differences can be displayed between MT and the large Isaiah scroll from cave 1. A module of the biblical scrolls by S. Pfann was announced by Logos in 2007.
font created and distributed (font and text) by Linguist’s Software (Phil Payne in Seattle). Until Hebrew Bible search software became available, this was probably the most widely used version in word processing. There are now many word-processing versions of the text available using fonts produced by the various Bible software companies. Some of the companies have licensed Linguist’s Software. The most common of which I am aware are: Hebraica I & II and the New Jerusalem font (Linguist’s Software), the BibleWorks font, the BibleWindows font, SuperHebrew (I think the predecessor to Hebraica?) and the Gramcord font. Then there is SIL’s font (called SIL Ezra; public domain). I also think that SBL has produced a public domain font. Anyway, these are the fonts I see from my various students. Note that each of these fonts maps the Hebrew a little differently, so the vendor has revised our text for use with their fonts. Which means that a text in a particular font is not easily converted to another font.” In addition, Accordance uses its own font (Yehudit).
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b. Other Sources A. Tal’s edition23 of the Samaritan Pentateuch is available within Accordance with full morphological analysis. In this text, too, the “compare” function displays all the differences between MT and the SP. In addition to Hebrew Scripture, ten software packages also contain the LXX as encoded by the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) from the edition of A. Rahlfs (1935),24 without any variant readings. The variants of the LXX have been encoded by CCAT in Philadelphia, though not yet for all books. Other tools available are the text editions by Swete,25 Brooke, McLean, and Thackeray (see n. 16), and also Field (1875),26 the grammar of Conybeare and Stock (1905),27 the Introduction by Swete,28 and modern translations of the LXX,29 some of them as scanned images. The edition of the Vulgate is presently available in nine software sources.30 Tal, A. The Samaritan Pentateuch, Edited According to MS 6 (C) of the Shekhem Synagogue. Texts and Studies in the Hebrew Language and Related Subjects, 8. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1994. 24 Rahlfs, A. Septuaginta, id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes. Stuttgart: Württembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935. 25 Swete, H. B. The Old Testament in Greek According to the Septuagint. Cambridge: University Press, 1887–1894. 26 Field, F. Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt sive veterum interpretum graecorum in totum Vetus Testamentum fragmenta. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1875. 27 Conybeare, F. C. and St. G. Stock. A Grammar of Septuagint Greek, included in Selections from the Septuagint. Boston: Ginn and Company, 1905: http://ccel.org/c/conybeare/greekgrammar/. 28 Swete, H. B. An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. Cambridge: University Press, 21914. 29 The most important ones are Brenton, L. L. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament with an English Translation. London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1879, available within Accordance and at http://www.bcbsr.com/ topics/olb.html; Pietersma, A. and B. G. Wright, ed. NETS, A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under That Title. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/nets/; Septuaginta Deutsch: 23
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The Targumim as well as the Peshitta are available in several sources, foremost in conjunction with the Comprehensive Aramaic Lexicon (CAL), together with lexicographical information and search capacities,31 and also within the biblical software packages. The non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls are well represented within the software packages, both as text editions and photographic images. The module of the non-biblical texts prepared by M. G. Abegg features prominently among the modules of Accordance and Logos. A revised form of that module has been included in my own DSSEL,32 which includes text editions, modern translations, and images of all the Qumran texts. Within DSSEL, all these corpora of information are searchable with Wordcruncher (Wordcruncher 7.0) software. In addition, Wordcruncher provides valuable statistics programs that can be applied to the results of these searches. This program allows the user to see the images and the transliterated texts at the same time. The higher the number of available modules, the more greatly are students and scholars served in their study of the Bible. Accordance, for example, has modules of MT, SP, the biblical and non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, and all the versions. These modules are not integrated or hyperlinked, except for the module of CATSS. They lack the variants from the text editions in the apparatuses of all these texts. All these details could be added by way of hyperlinks, but such information would involve several additional projects. The apparatus of BHS, which is now available, provides a partial answer to this issue. Accordance also provides morphological information, many lexica, encyclopedias, several Church Fathers, http://www.septuaginta-deutsch.de/. The NETS translation is also available within Accordance. 30 For the history of the encoding of the Vulgate text and for further sites, see the data provided by R. A. Kraft in http://www.le.ac.uk/elh/grj1/linksa.html. 31 Based mainly on Mikra’ot Gedolot “HaKeter”. Ramat-Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 1992–2000, as well as on various editions. 32 The Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library. Brigham Young University, Revised Edition, 2006; part of the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Reference Library of E. J. Brill Publishers (ed. E. Tov; Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006).
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Josephus, rabbinic literature (very partial), commentaries, the nonbiblical Dead Sea Scrolls, and the BHS apparatus. While Accordance does not have hyperlinks, it offers two valuable services providing similar, if not better, research facilities. Accordance enables the presenting of any two parallel texts in parallel text panes, such as MT, any of the versions, and the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. A further option (“compare”) allows for the indication of the differences between the texts as long as they are in the same language, such as MT and a biblical Dead Sea Scroll. Many of these modules are also offered by Logos. Logos seems to be better in the area of hyperlinks between the various texts but, on the other hand, it marks many links that are not meaningful since they have been determined automatically. DSSEL is the only program that combines searches of the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bible in a single file of results. c. Lemmatization and Morphological Analysis The key to the effective use of any software program of Scripture texts is the availability in the background of lemmatization and morphological analysis (grammatical tagging) of all the Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Syriac text words. This lemmatization allows for a search of all the text words as well as for producing concordances.33 Accordance and DSSEL also provide valuable statistical information. In the case of Accordance, the distribution pattern of one or more words is displayed graphically in different colors in graphs. While word searches are available in several programs, Accordance is probably the only one that enables the creation of complete concordances. Such concordances can be produced within Accordance for any text range defined for this purpose: any combination of biblical books or parts thereof, combinations of verses, pericopes, or selections, such as in Scripture the presumed Deuteronomistic segments, Wisdom literature, or late biblical prose or poetry. Defining such ranges is See http://www.balboa-software.com/semcomp/scbible2.htm for H. Hahne’s descriptions of these aspects in “Using a Computer in Biblical and Theological Studies, Lesson 6: Computer-Assisted Bible Study, Part 2.” 33
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subjective, and the ranges can be changed at any given moment. The search facilities of the various programs differ; some are more sophisticated than others. The most sophisticated programs for the Hebrew Bible, Accordance and SESB, also allow for the search of morphological features, such as the frequency of the individual binyanim of the verb and unusual nominal forms, and also the search for combinations of lexical and grammatical information. In addition, SESB also allows for syntactical searches. The morphological and lexical information in the background of these programs also allows for grammatical and orthographical studies on the Qumran texts. Although these morphological analyses usually follow one central source, such as the HALOT lexicon in the case of Hebrew Scripture,34 they are also determined by subjective judgments, and a lexeme that one scholar considers a noun may be considered by another to be a verb. One scholar may ascribe a given verbal form to the niph‘al, while another one considers it to be a hitpa‘el. One source discerns in Scripture one core meaning of dever, while another differentiates between two homographs. Accordance probably places too many groups of words under the heading of “particle”. This subjectivity comes to light when one reviews the differences between the existing morphological analyses. The various morphological analyses that are at the base of the software packages should be considered separate sources since they reflect independent research. Seven different morphological analyses of Hebrew Scriptures are based on codex L / BHS. These include the Westminster Hebrew Old Testament Morphology of GrovesWheeler, available in at least five software packages, the Werkgroep Informatica (including syntax and clause hierarchy) from Amsterdam, the Bar-Ilan analysis, the analysis of the Academy of the Hebrew Language, as well as additional commercial and private morphological analyses. For the LXX, I know of just one such analysis, that of CATSS-Taylor-Wheeler, which is available in seven different software packages. For the Targumim, there is the CAL Koehler, L., W. Baumgartner and J. J. Stamm, The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, trans. and ed. under the supervision of M. E. J. Richardson. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994–2000. 34
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analysis, while for the Vulgate there is no such morphological analysis, and searching in that translation is restricted. In addition, four different morphological analyses exist for the non-biblical Qumran texts. The availability of different lemmatizations enlarges the search facilities, since different lemmatizations and grammatical decisions yield different results. Accordingly, different search results for the exact same search executed in different software packages may derive from (1) differences in the base text, among them errors; (2) differences in tagging words and determining of lemmas; (3) differences due to the capabilities and assumptions of the software. In an example given by H. Hahne (n. 33), the various programs provide differing numbers for the occurrences of the pair of Greek particles μεν and δεν. The bilingual CATSS database, in Accordance, allows for examination of Greek-Hebrew equivalences, of features in translation technique, and searches of Hebrew and/or Greek grammatical features. The interface of the same program presented by different software packages may differ, as for example in the presentation of the CATSS database in Accordance and Logos.
4. PRESENT AND FUTURE A while ago we mentioned the drawback that many, if not most, of these software programs are commercial products and therefore may not be available to every student. This is true but, by the same token, not every student can afford to buy all the relevant textbooks needed for thorough study. University libraries come to our aid here, not only with regard to free access to books, but also by enabling free access to the software packages at three levels of availability: 1. the library offers such facilities, often at dedicated terminals limited to a given program; 2. the library or university services offer the programs on an internal university network, allowing the use of these programs on all computers on campus; and 3. the freest access is for those programs that the university allows its members to use in their homes on the web. University libraries buy site licenses for these programs, so that the conditions differ from university to university. Universities also provide the users with an ever-increasing number of electronic journals. At my
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own university users can freely access the following programs, in the different ways described above:35 Accordance (limited number of modules); Anchor Bible Dictionary; Dead Sea Scrolls in DSSEL; HALOT; SESB; TLG; Maagarim, the historical dictionary of the Hebrew language; Responsa project including the rabbinic literature; and many more. While these programs are actively used for study and research in the library, in study rooms on campus, and in home environments, the software packages are also making their way into the classroom. An increasing number of professors and students take their computers to the classroom, enabling students to do independent research, make precise observations, and challenge the professors by examining data while the professor is speaking. In text-based classes, like my own Septuagint class, use of the computer replaces that of printed books almost entirely, excluding the variants of the LXX that are not included in the software programs. The bulk of my preparations for that course are now done on the computer, although my notes are still hand-written and I continue to print out certain searches rather than store them. At conferences, too, an increasing number of scholars bring their laptops. The texts of the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls are consulted while the lecture is in progress. For example, one can easily research various aspects of the translation technique of the LXX. As for the classroom, most American universities require the professors to post their syllabi on the web, and in this way the professors also announce their requirements for the classes and share papers with the students. This development is also taking place in Israel. For this purpose, many of my colleagues in Israel use the program called “HighLearn” that was officially adopted by The available programs are listed on http://www.mslib.huji. ac.il/main/siteNew/?page=26. 35
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the university, while I myself prefer to place the same material on my website. These procedures do not include software packages for the use of the ancient sources, since all of these are commercial programs, but they do contain links to freeware on the Internet. This specific program also allows the professor to send notices, to calculate grades, to send assignments, and post texts. In this context, I should also mention the ever-increasing use of web-based multi-user programs for projects with the aid of which at any given moment users can compose and post papers, which can then be reviewed by editors and monitored continually to the printing stage. I refer to such programs that are now named Wiki environments, such as Confluence.36 In the course of this work, word-processing programs are used and the tools mentioned above can also be used. No one knows what the future has in store. We can only give a prognosis of some features and developments, and express some wishes. I would hope that the programs themselves will be further developed, streamlined, and be made cross-platform. I hope the number of modules will be greatly expanded and that the individual words in the biblical texts and translations will somehow be provided with hyperlinks, not only to lexicons and atlases, but also to commentaries. I hope that libraries will make more and more software packages available on their networks. I also hope that the new Wiki environments will include more software packages among their possibilities. In the classroom of the future, students should definitely have their computers with them alongside printed books, or even in their stead. These computers should include the Hebrew Bible together with the main versions, perhaps together with modern translations. Secondary literature such as commentaries can be added subsequently. At the same time, we should never forget that computers are mere tools that help us to perform our research. The use of computers is not a goal in itself. Our main goal is to research the Bible, its versions, and its language. Much research is executed on computers, but most research will nevertheless involve printed books. The integration of
36
http://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/.
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electronic data in the research of the future will improve that research as well as our teaching.
DISPLAYING HEBREW AND ARAMAIC ON HANDHELD DEVICES THAT LACK PROPER COMPLEX SCRIPT SUPPORT DRAYTON C. BENNER NEAR EASTERN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, CHICAGO, IL, USA INTRODUCTION In the early days of computing, keyboards and systems of data representation presupposed the use of Latin characters and the conventions governing their use in modern Germanic and Romance languages. There was little in the way of flexibility provided for the many other systems of writing present in the modern world, to say nothing of the ancient world. Technology for displaying languages using complex scripts has made impressive advances in recent years. While there are many advances still to be made, there is much worthy of praise, from the establishment and expansion of the UNICODE standard to the development of “smart fonts.” The establishment of UNICODE has allowed for a system of data representation that is no longer font-dependent.1 The development of “smart fonts” has allowed for context-sensitive placement of glyphs according to rules embedded within fonts themselves, not according to rules reFor an introduction to the UNICODE standard, see The Unicode Consortium, Allen, J. D., et al., ed. The Unicode Standard 5.0. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison Wesley Professional, 52006. 1
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written by every application developer wishing to display text using a “smart font.” These developments have paved the way for some excellent new fonts for Hebrew and Aramaic.2 Traditional Hebrew and Aramaic fonts have faced two difficulties. First, before the creation of UNICODE, they had to use font-specific values to represent each desired glyph, requiring users who share Hebrew or Aramaic text to use the same font.3 Second, before the creation of “smart fonts,” the placement of vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols was difficult and generally left much to be desired aesthetically. For example, a font could only place a given vowel or cantillation mark in a limited number of discrete places in relation to the consonant around which it was placed. For each such placement, a different value had to be chosen to represent that position internally, and the user had to use a different keyboard input, forcing the user to shoulder an undesirable amount of work, leading to inconsistency among users. Moreover, matters became nearly unmanageable when there were multiple glyphs required around a particular consonant. Recently, some strikingly beautiful Hebrew and Aramaic fonts have been created that overcome these traditional typographic pitfalls by representing the data according to the UNICODE standard, which now includes Hebrew, and making them “smart fonts,” so that the glyphs representing vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols are combined in intelligent and aesthetically pleasing ways around the consonants. They take advantage of some of the freedom ancient scribes had when fitting these vowels, cantillation marks, and other symbols together. I particularly commend SBL Hebrew, produced by John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks at the behest of the Society of Biblical Among the various scripts used in different times and places for Hebrew and Aramaic, this paper focuses specifically on Aramaic square script and includes the ways in which it was augmented by the Massoretes. 3 See, for example, de Moor, J. C. “Coding Proposal Submitted to ‘Bible et Informatique’.” In Bible and Computer: The Text: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium, Association Internationale Bible et Informatique, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique), 2–3–4 Septembre 1985, 179–92. Paris: Champion, 1986. 2
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Literature, and Ezra SIL, produced by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.4 Both of these fonts are powerful and aesthetically pleasing. Figures 1 and 2 show Gen 1:1–3 in SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL, respectively. Figures 3 and 4 show Ps 27:13, one of the most troublesome verses in the Hebrew Bible from the perspective of displaying all of the Massoretic marks, in SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL, respectively, in order to show that these two Hebrew fonts look good even when the Massoretes complicated matters the most.5
Figure 1. Gen 1:1–3 using SBL Hebrew.
“SBL Hebrew Font;” available from http://www.sbl-site.org/ educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLHebrew.aspx; Internet; accessed 11 October 2008; “Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font;” available from http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=EzraSIL_ Home; Internet; accessed 11 October 2008. 5 For a description of the upper and lower puncta in Ps 27:13, see Israel Yeivin, Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah, trans. and ed. E. J. Revell (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1980), §79. 4
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Figure 2. Gen 1:1–3 using Ezra SIL.
Figure 3. Ps 27:13 using SBL Hebrew.
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Figure 4. Ps 27:13 using Ezra SIL.
At the same time as these advances in the handling of complex scripts for desktop computers, the mobile market has been expanding rapidly, leading to a rise in demand for software on-the-go. These handheld devices, however, have sought to meet their tight constraints on speed and storage by excising anything in the operating system that might be extraneous. As such, handheld devices generally do not include complex script support, with some not even supporting UNICODE at all. Thus, those wishing to display Hebrew and Aramaic texts have not been able to take advantage of these developments in complex script handling. Vocalized texts have not heretofore been able to be presented in an aesthetically-pleasing fashion. The remainder of this paper presents the way in which I have been able to overcome these limitations in complex script support on two handheld platforms, namely Windows Mobile and Palm, and have been able to display Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all the beauty that recent UNICODE-based smart fonts have allowed. Thus far, this includes the Hebrew Bible with all of the vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols contained in the MichiganClaremont-Westminster database, an abridged BDB dictionary, and the non-biblical Qumran texts with all of the editorial symbols contained in the database produced by Dr. Martin Abegg, Jr.
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POSSIBLE APPROACHES There are at least three possible approaches one could take to make use of these new Hebrew and Aramaic fonts despite the lack of complex script support on mobile platforms. Inadequate Possible Approaches First, one could write an algorithm that would take as inputs the dimensions of each glyph along with an ideal location for each zero-width glyph—namely vowels, cantillation marks, and some symbols—around its consonant.6 Then, for each non-zero-width glyph—namely consonants and some symbols—the algorithm could determine the placement of each zero-width glyph around the non-zero-width glyph by placing each zero-width glyph as close to its ideal spot in relation to the non-zero-width glyph while retaining some minimum amount of space between each pair of glyphs. This approach has the advantage of being highly flexible. The algorithm could handle any desired combination of glyphs with somewhat reasonable results. However, there are two serious drawbacks to this approach. First, it would forfeit the tremendous amount of time and effort put forth by the developers of Hebrew and Aramaic “smart fonts” into the placement of particular combinations of glyphs. To be sure, many combinations of glyphs would look good under this approach. However, there are many combinations of glyphs that the human eyes of the creators of these fonts will have placed better than a straightforward algorithm could do. Second, this approach would lead to inconsistency. Users who view Hebrew text in, for example, SBL Hebrew on their laptop will recognize that the Hebrew text in SBL Hebrew on their handheld device looks different. Since the creators of these fonts have done such a good job with the placement of the glyphs when they are in combination Yannis Haralambous describes one such algorithm in “Tiqwah: A Typesetting System for Biblical Hebrew, Based on TEX.” In Bible and Computer: Desk and Discipline: The Impact of Computers on Biblical Studies: Proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium, Association Internationale Bible et Informatique, Amsterdam, 15–18 August 1994, 445–70. Paris: Champion, 1995. 6
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with one another, it is worthwhile to try to match their placement of the glyphs. The second approach thus would seek to replicate all of the rules embedded in these “smart fonts” in one’s application. This would avoid both of the difficulties in the aforementioned approach since the glyphs would be combined in precisely the same manner as designed by the creators of the fonts. However, there are two serious drawbacks to this approach. First, this represents a tremendous amount of duplicated effort. The creators of the fonts have written a non-trivial number of rules governing the combining of glyphs. Replicating these rules already embedded in the fonts would require a great deal of coding effort. Second, this approach does not easily accommodate the addition of a new font. For each UNICODE Hebrew “smart font” one wished to support, one would have to code an entirely new set of rules regarding the combinations of the glyphs in that font. A Successful Approach Finally, there is a third approach, an approach that avoids the weaknesses of the former two approaches. Here is the approach in outline form, using the presentation of the Hebrew Bible in SBL Hebrew as an example. The outline of this approach is quite straightforward. First, one false renders the entire UNICODE Hebrew Bible under Windows using Microsoft’s complex script library Uniscribe, allowing Uniscribe to determine precisely which glyphs from SBL Hebrew should be used and the precise placement of each. One then makes additional calls to Uniscribe to gather this information concerning the glyphs it used and the placement of each, and one stores this information in a private database. This private database is then utilized on the handheld platforms to place each particular glyph in its appropriate place. Thus, this approach takes advantage of the work done by the creator of SBL Hebrew and takes advantage of Microsoft’s work in handling complex scripts. The application developer does not have to redo the work already embedded in the “smart font” and does not have to write general complex script support for the mobile operating system to deal with “smart fonts,” yet the resulting Hebrew Bible on the mobile platform appears identical to its counterpart under Windows. The results, in my opinion, are outstanding. Figures 5 and 6 show screenshots from a Windows Mobile 6 emulator of the Hebrew Bible using SBL Hebrew,
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beginning at Gen 1:1 and Ps 27:13, respectively. For the sake of variety, Figures 7 and 8 show screenshots from a Windows Mobile 6 emulator using Ezra SIL, beginning at Exod 15:1 and Isa 40:1, respectively.
Figure 5. Screenshot from a Windows Mobile 6 emulator beginning with Gen 1:1 using SBL Hebrew.
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Figure 6. Screenshot from a Windows Mobile 6 emulator beginning with Ps 27:13 using SBL Hebrew.
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Figure 7. Screenshot from a Windows Mobile 6 emulator beginning with Exod 15:1 using Ezra SIL.
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Figure 8. Screenshot from a Windows Mobile 6 emulator beginning with Isa 40:1 using Ezra SIL.
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Issues with the Successful Approach There are a five types of issues with this approach that make it not quite as straightforward as the outline above. First, there are issues related to storage space. Second, there are issues related to data representation. Third, there are issues related to the scaling of fonts. Fourth, there are issues related to data input by the user. Fifth, there are issues related to searching. Each will be discussed in turn. The first issue with this approach is one of storage space. This approach requires that information be stored on the mobile device regarding where each individual glyph should be placed in relation to the previous glyph for each supported font. Thus, the storage space scales linearly with the size of the text and also scales linearly with the number of fonts supported. One can cut back on this storage space by requiring SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL to agree on a common sequence of UNICODE values. The two generally choose glyphs that are analogous to one another, and one can tweak them in the few cases when they do not. For example, when there are multiple zero-width glyphs surrounding a single non-zero-width glyph, one or both of the fonts often adds a thinspace or a hairspace. If they do not match, one can choose either representation and adjust the offsets for the glyphs used by the other font. By so doing, the size of the file still grows linearly with the number of fonts, but the constant is smaller, yielding a smaller overall size. While size is much more limited on handheld devices than on personal computers, this is not a major obstacle to displaying a Hebrew Bible using this approach. There are not many Hebrew Unicode “smart fonts” that have been produced to this point, and they will probably not proliferate faster than Moore’s Law will accommodate additional storage space. At present, having an entire Hebrew Bible supporting both SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL requires on the order of ten megabytes, a fairly trivial amount even by mobile standards. Moreover, if UNICODE Hebrew “smart fonts” do proliferate before mobile operating systems embrace complex script support, users will probably be satisfied with just a subset of these fonts supported, anyway. The second set of issues with this approach relate to data representation. Both SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL use glyphs for
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which there is no corresponding UNICODE value. In general, each of these fonts transforms UNICODE input into a set of glyphs from the font. In some cases, a one-to-one function maps these UNICODE input values to the particular glyphs, but that is not true in all cases. Not all of these other cases are problematic but some of them are. There are other glyphs in these “smart fonts” for which there is no corresponding UNICODE value. Between SBL Hebrew and Ezra SIL, there are nine cases like this when displaying the Hebrew Bible. For example, SBL Hebrew contains a glyph consisting of a hateph-patah with a medial meteg. The meteg can, of course, go to the left or right of the hateph-patah, but it can also go in middle of it, and the creators of SBL Hebrew created a new glyph for this case.7 One learns via function calls to Uniscribe when this glyph is used just as with any other glyph, but how does one represent that information in the database stored for use on the mobile device? There is no perfect solution that allows one to remain tied tightly and neatly to the UNICODE standard. Thus, I represented these glyphs with values drawn from one of the private use areas in the UNICODE standard. This does, of course, hamper the prospects of exporting the texts to another program, but since no other program on the mobile device could display the text properly, anyway, this is not entirely problematic at this point. Nonetheless, future development would hopefully allow for some means of exporting to other programs, even if it were simply to copy some text in order to email it to someone not using a mobile device. This would have to be accomplished either by writing additional code to map the The following nine glyphs in SBL Hebrew and/or Ezra SIL are used when displaying the Hebrew Bible as encoded in the MichiganClaremont-Westminster database, but they have no corresponding UNICODE value: final kaph with shewa, final kaph with qamets, lamed with holem, lamed with dagesh and holem, he with raphe, taw with raphe, final mem with hireq placed for the perpetual qere in the word for “Jerusalem,” hateph-patah with medial meteg, and hateph-segol with medial meteg. 7
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stored text back entirely to standard UNICODE values or by including the original UNICODE text along with the modified version simply for this purpose. The latter option would be simpler but comes at the expense of more storage space. Matters are a bit more complicated in the case of the Palm platform, which does not even support UNICODE and does not support fonts with more than 256 glyphs. For the Palm, we had to break the Ezra SIL font into multiple fonts and create mappings between UNICODE values and the appropriate values in these newly created fonts. Third, there is the issue of the scaling of fonts. Ideally, the user should be able to set the font size to a value that is appropriate to that user’s particular device and preferences. However, when false-rendering under Windows, one has to choose a particular font size at which to determine the placement of each glyph. One solution would thus be to allow a certain number of pre-defined font sizes available to the user. One would then false-render under Windows at each of those font sizes and store all of the information about the offsets. However, this is quite undesirable. The size of the database scales linearly with the number of font sizes one allows. Moreover, having a small number of available font sizes unnecessarily limits the user. Instead, one can false-render under Windows at one font size and save the offset values for that font size. One can then scale each of the offsets based on the particular font size chosen by the user. This does introduce one possible source of error, the only way in which the text might be displayed differently on the mobile device in comparison with a personal computer. The information returned by Microsoft’s Uniscribe library about the placement of each glyph is discrete. Thus, when scaling it, round-off errors might occasionally cause a glyph to be placed one pixel over, whether left or right, from where it would have otherwise been placed. This is mostly mitigated by false-rendering under Windows using a massive size for the font. Using a massive font size minimizes the discretization effect when scaling. Of course, if one makes the font size too massive, then that impacts the size required to store this information in the database. Thus, when false-rendering under Windows, I use the largest possible font that allows me to capture every offset from one glyph to the next in just one byte of storage. This is much larger than any user is
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likely ever to want, thus making it rare that glyphs are misplaced by a single pixel while keeping storage space to a minimum. The fourth issue surrounding this approach relates to Hebrew and Aramaic input by the user. This approach I have presented relies on the fact that in this field, one deals primarily with closed corpora of texts. Thus, this approach works for presenting texts that can be processed in advance; it does not work for miscellaneous texts a user may wish to input. The fifth and final issue with this approach deals with searching. One of the greatest benefits of the digitization of texts is the ability to perform searches on the text. With this approach to displaying Hebrew and Aramaic text, one can no longer effectively search the text using a brute-force algorithm. This problem may be more of a blessing than a curse, however, as a brute-force algorithm is slower than a variety of other searching algorithms, which might require some pre-processing of the text and additional storage space but are much speedier than a brute-force approach.8
CONCLUSIONS In general, the approach advocated here allows for an aestheticallyappealing display of Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all of the marks one might desire, whether they be vowels, cantillation marks, Massoretic symbols, or modern editorial symbols. Indeed, it is the first time Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all of these marks have been presented in such an aesthetically-pleasing fashion on handheld devices. At present, I have implemented this approach with the font Ezra SIL on Windows Mobile and Palm and also with SBL Hebrew on Windows Mobile as part of contract work I did in the summer of 2007 for Olive Tree Bible Software, a
For techniques for searching under tight time, memory, and disk space constraints, see Witten, I. H., A. Moffat, and T. C. Bell. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 21999. 8
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company that specializes in Bible software for mobile devices.9 However, the usefulness of this approach is not limited to these platforms, these texts, or even these languages. These same general techniques could be used to display texts in a wide variety of languages requiring complex scripts on an equally wide variety of platforms lacking complex script support. This approach can be used with other languages of interest to biblical scholars, such as Syriac, that have complex scripts. Whenever there are advances in the handling of complex scripts on one platform, these advances could be reflected across a whole host of other platforms.
BIBLIOGRAPHY “Ezra SIL Hebrew Unicode Font.” Available from http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id= EzraSIL_Home. Internet. Accessed 11 October 2008. Haralambous, Y. “Tiqwah: A Typesetting System for Biblical Hebrew, Based on TEX.” In Bible and Computer: Desk and Discipline: The Impact of Computers on Biblical Studies: Proceedings of the Fourth International Colloquium, Association Internationale Bible et Informatique, Amsterdam, 15–18 August 1994, 445–70. Paris: Champion, 1995. de Moor, J. C. “Coding Proposal Submitted to ‘Bible et Informatique’.” In Bible and Computer: The Text: Proceedings of the First International Colloquium, Association Internationale Bible et Informatique, Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgique), 2–3–4 Septembre 1985, 179–92. Paris: Champion, 1986. “SBL Hebrew Font.” Available from http://www.sbl-site. org/educational/BiblicalFonts_SBLHebrew.aspx. Internet. Accessed 11 October 2008. Unicode Consortium, The. The Unicode Standard 5.0. Edited by J. D. Allen et al. Fifth edition. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison Wesley Professional, 2006. I would like to thank Olive Tree Bible Software (www.olivetree.com) for its support of this work, and I would specifically like to thank Drew Haninger and Stephen Johnson of Olive Tree Bible Software for their support with this project. 9
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Witten, I. H., A. Moffat and T. C. Bell. Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images. Second edition. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann, 1999. Yeivin, I. Introduction to the Tiberian Masorah. Translated and edited by E. J. Revell. Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1980.
THE HEXAPLA PROJECT: TRADITIONAL SCHOLARSHIP MEETS MODERN TECHNOLOGY ELIZABETH ROBAR CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, ENGLAND, UK Origen’s Hexapla is one of the great literary works of the ancient world that remains invaluable for scholarship of various kinds, foremost textual criticism and the study of the Septuagint. The available critical edition, however, is now over one hundred years old, and in the years since a wealth of material has been found with better (and even previously unknown) readings. The Hexapla Institute was founded in 2001 to produce a new critical edition, but it set its sights beyond a traditional print edition. It aimed also at an online edition, one with all the advantages of electronically edited texts: complex search and analysis capabilities, multiple display formats (including the ability to view the continuous text of any known manuscript), and a storage and retrieval system to enable collaboration with future scholarly projects. But accomplishing such a goal was far beyond the competence of traditional scholarship and its usual companion, the publisher of printed books. The online system imagined would involve work as complex and, at times, as laborious as the text-critical work itself. The Institute did not early realize the magnitude of their task. What follows is the story of that gradual realization and the various successes and failures accompanying it. From a review of the history, we hope to offer suggestions to other projects with similar ambitions, namely, the marriage of traditional scholarship with modern technology. We cannot pretend to construct a comprehensive set of guidelines, but we hope to make a small step in identifying the more significant challenges that we faced, and that other projects seem likely to face in their turn. 79
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Academic defense of the project When, in the third century CE, Origen gathered the main contemporary versions and revisions of the Greek Old Testament text into a six-column document (thus, “Hexapla”), he drastically altered the future transmission of the Septuagintal text. His fifth column was a conglomerate of all the texts known: the Old Greek supplemented by the Hebrew, mostly by intermediary of the three Jewish revisers (Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion). In subsequent history, this amalgamation was reproduced as the new version of the Greek Scriptures, replacing the former standard, the Old Greek. The replacement was so comprehensive that it is no longer possible to reconstruct the oldest text with any confidence unless, in some measure, one first reconstructs the Jewish revisions, essentially, the entire Hexapla. Once each of the revisions is understood, the supplements to the fifth column can be identified and the Old Greek itself reconstructed. This Old Greek is one of the best witnesses to the oldest Hebrew (and thus vital for textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible), along with the world of early Jewish Hellenism. The texts of the three revisions provide a unique door into early Jewish-Christian apologetics and exegesis. For multiple fields of study, unraveling the Hexapla is highly to be desired. Theoretical defense of the project Such is the traditional rationale for reconstructing the Old Greek and the three revisions. But the advent of electronic text editing has fiercely challenged the supremacy and even value of the (eclectic) critical edition: might it not be better to provide the readers with all possible readings—without predisposing them according to the editor’s own bias—and thus enable them to choose that which is most appropriate for their own needs?1 The eclectic edition can indeed be a double-edged sword: it provides the illusion of a single, uninterrupted “original” text, and consequently it can mislead as to the true manuscript evidence. On the other hand, it provides a For the seminal reading on the debate, see Kathryn Abram’s helpful 2002 essay, “Electronic Textuality: A Bibliographic Essay,” available online at http://www.mantex.co.uk/ou/resource/elec_txt.htm. 1
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wealth of scholarship and skilled editorial insight in a compact and accessible format. Without a reconstruction provided by the editor, each reader is essentially compelled to create his own, but without the benefit of any expertise but his own. The naive reader may be misled by a critical edition, but the scholar will understand its true nature and purpose and will make full use of the apparatus—which provides all the data necessary to be able to agree or disagree with every editorial decision, and, if so desired, even to reconstruct a new critical text. And even the naive reader is likely better served by a naive understanding of the skilled editor’s critically reconstructed text than by a naive understanding of a single manuscript of unknown character. Consequently, in spite of concerns raised in the field of electronic text editing about the propriety of eclectic critical editions, it still seemed the best presentation of hexaplaric scholarship for the print edition. (The online edition, unhampered by the printed text’s limitation to a single display format, would be able to display either eclectic or diplomatic texts.) Initial distribution of the work The actual task of reconstructing a new critical edition of the Hexaplaric fragments was enormous. More manuscripts, patristic sources, and new editions of several Church Fathers and catenae had become available since Field’s 1875 edition. Collating and evaluating all the fragments required skills in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Armenian, not to mention acquiring physical access to the various manuscripts. The Hexapla Institute distributed the burden, on a book-by-book basis, to text-critical scholars across the world who would individually prepare the critical text and apparatus for their assigned books. A graduate fellow was tasked with collecting their data, entering it into a central repository, and from that repository producing first the print edition, and then the online edition. The assumption that a graduate fellow alone could accomplish everything required in the field of information technology nearly proved fatal. This paper will focus not on the
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nature of the text-critical scholarship,2 but rather on the interaction of traditional text-critical scholarship with the information technology necessary to meet the project’s goals.
INITIAL DATABASE PROPOSAL To ever have an online edition, the members of the Hexapla project knew they would need a database. To that end, they developed an XML schema that all contributors would hand-code, as demonstrated below for Aquila’s reading in Gen 1:1. 1 Gen 1:1