Digital Latin Library

I recently learned from Hugh Cayless about the Digital Latin Library, a very useful resource for accessing digital editions of Latin literature. They also provide a number of helpful videos reflecting on the work of textual criticism in Latin literature.

Radiocarbon Dating, AI, and Paleography

Mladen Popovic et al. have published their long-anticipated article from the ERC project at the University of Groningen entitled The Hands that Wrote the Bible: Digital Palaeography and Scribal Culture of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The article describes the process of extracting new radiocarbon dates from a selection of Dead Sea Scrolls, digitally extracting quantifiable features of their scripts, and building an automated date estimation system called "Enoch." Roughly 80% of the resulting estimates agree with traditional, qualitative paleographical datings, but the results of both the radiocarbon dating and Enoch predictions suggests that several manuscripts throughout the series may well have been earlier than commonly supposed. This research moves the field forward considerably by adding quantitative, computational tools to aid paleographers that are not dependent upon conventional models for script development. In many cases, these new tools support previous approaches by grounding them in more secure dates derived from scientific analysis of the material remains instead of the handwriting style. But the results sometimes challenge conventional wisdom and have potential to help refine our understanding of Hebrew script development in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Congratulations to everyone involved for a job well done and a significant contribution to the field!

For a popular-level news report on the publication, see Science.

*Disclaimer: I worked with Mladen et al. on the project for several years during the foundational stages of the research, but I was not a co-author for this academic article.

Update on the Virtual Unrolling of Herculaneum Papyri

The Economist gives a useful update on progress virtually unrolling the Herculaneum scrolls, which is one of the more exciting technological advances in manuscript studies today.

Ezekiel Papyrus in Madrid

Sofia Torallas Tovar gives a good discussion of Ra 967, parts of which are on display currently in Madrid. They have compiled digital images of the entire manuscript, which will be nice to have for such an important manuscript.

Vince Beiler on the Firkovich Collections

Vince Beiler has put his Cambridge Ph.D. dissertation online for download. I got to know Vince recently in Cambridge, and he has been very generous with his time and sharing his expertise and resources on the Firkovich collections in St. Petersburg. These collections are fascinating and rich, yet hardly touched by modern scholars. There are sections of many different codices there, often as old and important as the Aleppo and Leningrad codices, but almost entirely unstudied. Because the library class marks for these manuscript sections are all mixed up, Vince has had to do a lot of careful work reconstructing the original manuscripts from the various class marks, which is an invaluable service to the field. For more details on the manuscripts and their relationships based on the Masorah, check it out:

The Small Masorah: Genealogical Relationships in 112 Early Hebrew Bible Codices Based upon the Masorah Parva 

Abstract 

This thesis, written by Vincent D. Beiler and entitled The Small Masorah: Genealogical Relationships in 112 Early Hebrew Bible Codices Based upon the Masorah Parva, examines the Tiberian Masorah parva in 10th–12th-century Hebrew Bible manuscripts. In order to integrate the vast amount of data available, select subsections of the Masorah of these 112 manuscripts were collated, amounting to ca. 43,000 Masorah parva notes. The database that arose from this collation was then mined for similarities and differences between the manuscripts, with the goal of providing a stemma of early Hebrew Bible manuscripts. 

In the main, the Masorah parva data indicate that there is a central cluster of manuscripts that are highly uniform, and then a larger number of manuscripts that diverge in various ways, both large and small, from the centre nucleus. These data confirm the centrality of the Aleppo Codex and highlight the value of a number of additional codices that have heretofore been largely overlooked. It is also shown that many of the codices that scholars traditionally have relied upon are perhaps not the optimal MSS with which to begin research of the Tiberian Masorah. 

Additional subgroupings of manuscripts are also noted, particularly (a.) for a cluster of N. African manuscripts, (b.) for a cluster of codices that resemble the Cairo Codex, and (c.) for the manuscripts of Samuel b. Jacob. 

It is also demonstrated that the collection of Bible MSS in St. Petersburg, previously known to many as a scattered collection of leaves, is perhaps more substantial than has been realised. This is because many of the classmarks can be matched with other classmarks of the Firkovich collections, resulting in Bible manuscripts of much more substantial length. These classmark matches number nearly 400 and are set forth here for the first time. 

CEHP Updates Blog

In case you haven't seen it yet, we have started posting updates about our progress on the Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter website blog. Not only will this be the first digital and eclectic critical edition of the Hebrew Psalms, but we are also piloting a crowdsourcing campaign that is yielding wonderful results.

Andrew Case's Video Series on the Text of the Hebrew Bible

Andrew Case has begun a multi-part video series introducing the issues and sources for the text of the Hebrew Bible. The parts I've seen are well-researched, balanced, and beautifully produced. So if you're looking for a nice introduction to the field, especially for lay audiences, check it out!

• Part 1 - Can You Trust the Hebrew Bible? Textual Criticism 
  
• Part 2 - The Masoretic Text - Textual Criticism