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Interactive Tools and Tasks for the Hebrew Bible: From Language Learning to Textual Criticism

What it is about

A position paper in three parts on "digital intertextuality" around the ETCBC corpus. (1) Bible Online Learner (Bible OL), a web tool that turns the annotated Hebrew Bible into exercises: built on persuasive-technology models (Fogg's functions — reduction, tunnelling, tailoring, suggestion, self-monitoring; Laurillard's instant corrective feedback; a "RAMP" model of relatedness, autonomy, mastery, purpose), with text display and exercises generated from queries (SHEBANQ queries can be uploaded as drills) and learner statistics. (2) Commercial tools (Logos) for textual criticism, good but costly. (3) A proposed "textual corpus criticism": weighing variant readings with Carr's categories of aural, graphical and memory variants (memory variants change order or wording yet stay meaningful), a tool for translation shifts between Hebrew and the Septuagint, and a Joshua 24 case. The ETCBC clause-type codes (e.g. a wayyiqtol continuing a wayyiqtol, WayX with explicit subject, WXQt for waw + subject + qatal) are used to show the text's structure.

Ideas

For Mova

I1 belongs to the Torah course and parse database (13. Biblical Hebrew in Mova: the tools §10). I2 is a column for tools/macula and an input to tools/macula/src/prag.rs, described in 09-discourse.md (mainline and background). I3 goes into 01-script.md (look-alike letters) and 12-biblical-mishnaic-modern.md if witness comparison is taken up.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 1603.04236

@misc{winthernielsen2016interactive,
  title = {{Interactive Tools and Tasks for the Hebrew Bible: From Language Learning to Textual Criticism}},
  author = {Winther-Nielsen, Nicolai},
  year = {2016},
  eprint = {1603.04236},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.04236}
}

References

7 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. In due time hopefully projects will offer open access to high-quality scholarly corpora online following the new trend of copyright-free access to books and resources in the humanities. 26 For other introductions on textual criticism, see [Tov, 2015: 1-2], [Wolters, 1999: 19-20, n 1], and [Wegner, 2006]. 27 For other projects and resources see [Tov, 2003], and for the use of computers in general, see [Tov, 2008]. 28 In 2015, Brill set the price for access to the online version at 2,700 Euro, see the Brill site at [http10] 29 The project was the Oxford Hebrew Bible, and [Heidel, 2013] is the general editor of the critical Bible. Each book will be published in a separate volume, except for single volumes of Minor Prophets, Megillot, and Ezra-Nehemiah. See further information at [http11]. The price of so many specialist volumes will be exorbitant. find
  2. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities ISSN 2416-5999, an open-access journal Given the challenge of the costs of printed and even online resources, my main interest is to address the issues raised by [Tov, 2011] on the pros and cons of electronic tools. I will proceed in an eclectic manner, based on my own experience with digital resources for the PC. I have been a dedicated user of Logos Bible Software since 2003, and especially of the resources published by the German Bible Society. I leave it to others to extoll the merits of Accordance, Bible Works, and other popular resources. 30 I will first address the resources for the study of the manuscripts in Hebrew, namely, the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), and Samaritan Pentateuch (SP). find
  3. The primary aim of textual criticism is to help learners work with the earliest fully extant manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the Codex Leningradiensis from 1008 AD, which is available in the printed editions of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) from 1977, and now printed in its fifth edition as [Elliger, Rudolph and Schenker, 1997]. Learners have open access to this text in Bible OL and SHEBANQ. Even if this edition is the sole scientific edition available, [Tov, 2011: 248] rejects its apparatus “as unsatisfactory for text-critical analysis since it provides far too little information and is much too subjective.” However, not only is the printed scholarly BHS edition a reliable reproduction of our primary Hebrew manuscript, but it also contains a critical apparatus that provides manageable information to get a student started in textual criticism without too many scholarly filters. The BHS gives access to the MT, so named after the Masoretes, or tradents, who studied, copied, and preserved the Hebrew text between 500 and 1100 AD, and gave us our present text in Tiberian Hebrew. 31 Adolf Schenker initiated a new project for the German Bible Society in 2004, the Biblia Hebraica Quinta (BHQ), which will give access to earlier pre-Tiberian witnesses and include references to the famous Aleppo Codex rescued out of a fire in 1947, as well as the Yemenite codex of the Writings, Cambridge Add. Ms. 1753, and fragments found in the Qumran caves and in the Judean Desert. This edition is clearly an improvement and will no doubt be the best option for advanced students in the foreseeable future, even if this edition also is rejected by Tov as “merely a selection of textual data” [ibid]. 32 find
  4. Computer-literate students have a helpful solution for accessing the BHS thanks to the important contribution of the German Bible Society. From 2004 to 2012, it marketed three versions of Stuttgart Electronic Bible Study (SESB) with an introduction by [Hardmeier, Talstra, and Salzman, 2009]. Logos Bible Software now offers some of the tools in a small product containing the indispensable critical apparatus of the SESB edition alongside the apparatus for the Greek New Testament UBS edition. 33 This interactive access to the study of the BHS with its text critical apparatus provides learners a viable alternative to the costly and unwieldy printed editions. Students can also benefit from a digital integration of other scholarly resources for textual criticism from Logos in a state-ofthe-art user interface that greatly enhances intertextuality for the Hebrew Bible. Last, but not least, it uses the ETCBC database and therefore is a helpful expansion to learning and research through open access resources like Bible OL and SHEBANQ. find
  5. The challenge for the student of textual criticism is, of course, that not only do we not have the first manuscripts of the original authors (the autographs), but the gap between the original compositions [Tov, 2015: 35] lists products which are by now out of the market (SESB) or of marginal relevance (e.g., Gramcord and WordSearch); see further references on [ibid: 37] and his excursus on CATSS [ibid: 110-111]. For a review, see [htpp12]. 31 Hence [Anstey, 2006] more precisely establishes the phonology and grammar of Tiberian Hebrew. 32 Several facsimile editions have been published, see [http13]. The goal is to complete the BHQ by 2020, one hundred years after the first edition was published by Rudolph Kittel, see [http14].33 The Core Bundle of the Stuttgart Scholarly Editions would be competitive if it not only offered the SESB 2.0 with Apparatus, WIVU Introduction and Constituency Trees, but also the Nestle Aland 28 with apparatus, but the latter is missing, see [http15]. Logos’ Academic Discount Programs minimizes the expenses for students at western institutions, but outside the West students can only acquire these tools through donations and subsidized resources. find
  6. Journal of Data Mining and Digital Humanities ISSN 2416-5999, an open-access journal and the final editions may span up to two thousand years or more. Because our scholarly BHS/BHQ editions of the codices date from the tenth century AD and onward, our problem is how to bridge the gap back to the earlier and potentially more reliable evidence on the text, and how to make this evidence accessible. The task of textual criticism initially is to evaluate the reading variants that the experts have assembled and classified; however, this evidence mostly confirms the dominance of the MT tradition from around 100 AD. The real challenge of textual criticism starts with the earlier Hebrew manuscript evidence emerging from the Judean Desert dating from 250 BC to 135 AD, found primarily during the period 1947-1961. Among the DSS manuscripts were some 200 samples of the Hebrew Bible. After some initial delay virtually all were published by the mid-1990s. The standard study edition by [Martinez and Tigchelaar, 1998] is available from Logos, but the translation and comments on the scrolls are not in (see [Abegg, et al., 1999]). 34 The evidence from these finds varies greatly, and the early excitement over the confirmation of the MT is long gone: some manuscripts support the MT, while others reflect the SP, or other ancient translations. The Hebrew text of the SP is in general considered to be a sectarian expansion in support of Samaritan theology, yet eight of the DSS scrolls arguably support an earlier Pre-Samaritan text. 35 find
  7. This kind of evaluation of the Hebrew witnesses is a second task that must be integrated into a new textual corpus criticism. The question is to what extent deviations in the Hebrew texts are evidence of revisions in earlier stages of the text, or whether alternative theories on the formation of the text would explain these data better. 2.3 Tools for the Study of the Translations For the study of the text of the Hebrew Bible we also rely on ancient translations of it: the Greek Septuagint (LXX), the Syriac Peshitta (S), the Latin Vulgate (V), and the Aramaic Targums (T). Studying an ancient text through the lens of translations is an indirect approach, which represents a kind of mediated textuality for ancient texts. The many translations testify to the fact that the Hebrew Bible has had a special status as a canonical and holy text through time and in different cultures. The evidence from translations is diverse. The LXX is in itself a challenging version. The most deviation from the Hebrew text can be found in the Greek translation of the book of Jeremiah, which is roughly one-seventh shorter than the MT. Two fragmentary Hebrew DSS manuscripts, the 4QJer b,d , confirm the shorter text of the LXX against the MT, and other scrolls confirm details of the LXX. This fact pushes evidence from the LXX version to the forefront of textual criticism. As for resources, the standard study edition of [Ralph and Hanhart, 2005] is available in Logos, but not the English translation of [Pietersma and Wright, 2007]. There are almost limitless scholarly resources for the study of the LXX, 36 but the most important are the 24 volumes of the Göttingen Septuagint 1931-2004, available through Logos. 37 It is also of great help that Logos has published Tov’s The Parallel Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Texts of Jewish Scripture (2003). This work is an interesting case of a resource that started as a database and never was printed, but is now available as an For references to the DJD series, see [Wolters, 1999: 20 n. 2] The SP is reprinted in [Von Gall, 1993] and now translated in [Tsedaka and Sullivan, 2013], and recently discussed by [Anderson and Giles, 2013], but this is not available as a Logos resource. 36 See most recently [Tov, 2015] for LXX lexica (33-34), grammar (34-35), translations (35), editions (35-36) and concordances (107-108). 37 See the references to the publications at [http16]. It provides the most authoritative critical apparatuses to date and the volumes include evidence from contemporary Jewish and Christian sources. It was initiated by Ralph in the 1920s and has for the last decades been edited by scholars like John William Wever. find

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