Parallel Texts in the Hebrew Bible, New Methods and Visualizations

What it is about

An open method for finding parallel passages inside the Masoretic Text (ETCBC data, SHEBANQ). The Bible is cut into chunks (fixed word windows, or sentences, half-verses, verses, chapters); every pair is scored either by SET similarity (Jaccard overlap of lexeme sets, ignoring order) or by LCS/Levenshtein similarity; chunks above a threshold are joined into cliques. 165 settings were tried; a simple criterion (number of cliques against the length of the longest clique) finds the sweet spot between missing parallels and huge drifting cliques. Verse chunks with SET ≥ 85 recover the known parallels (Samuel–Kings–Chronicles, 2 Sam 22 / Ps 18, Ezra 2 / Neh 7, Ps 60 / 108) but miss parallels that share order rather than words (the name list of 1 Chr 1 vs Gen 5) or retell freely. A case study shows that Isaiah 36–39 is much closer to 2 Kings than Jeremiah 52 or 2 Chronicles are (182 vs 68 vs 84 sentences with similarity ≥ 80).

Ideas

I1. Run SET (lexeme Jaccard) over Torah verses from our trees to list inner-Torah parallels: Exod 20 / Deut 5 (the Decalogue), Exod 25–31 / 35–40 (tabernacle command and fulfilment), Lev 11 / Deut 14, the repeated census and offering lists of Num 1–7. Tune the threshold with the cliques-to-longest-clique criterion.
I2. For each parallel pair, align word by word (LCS on lemma sequence) and list the differences as pluses, minuses and substitutions: a ready set of minimal pairs for the grammar (e.g. וְלֹא / לֹא, זָכוֹר / שָׁמוֹר).
I3. Use the parallels as a consistency gate: the same Hebrew in two places should get the same tree and the same prag reading; count where it does not.

For Mova

I1 is a small Rust tool over torah-wlc-macula (lemmas from MISC), deterministic with BTreeMap; I2's pairs serve as examples in Syntax: the clause and the sentence and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md. I3 is a test for tools/macula and tools/macula/src/prag.rs. The paper itself is CC BY-SA: the method is reimplemented from the description, nothing copied.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 1603.01541

@misc{naaijer2016parallel,
  title = {{Parallel Texts in the Hebrew Bible, New Methods and Visualizations}},
  author = {Naaijer, Martijn and Roorda, Dirk},
  year = {2016},
  eprint = {1603.01541},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.01541}
}

References

25 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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Roorda, D. 2015a. SHEBANQ software. Github. https://github.com/ETCBC/shebanq. Snapshot archived at Zenodo: : http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.33091. ↗
Roorda, D. 2015b. LAF-Fabric software. Github. https://github.com/ETCBC/laf-fabric. Snapshot archived at Zenodo : http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.33093. ↗
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