1,000,000 Views

I just noticed that this blog surpassed 1,000,000 total views last month! I am astounded at how much interest the rather arcane topic of Old Testament Textual Criticism has maintained over the 15 years that I have run this blog. As strange as it may sound, the texts and manuscripts of the Old Testament are a fascinating field of study with an appeal even outside the halls of academia. I haven't posted much original research here, but rather used it as a platform to keep up on current developments in the field and to keep track of useful online resources that I want to be able to find easily. The most popular page/post by far has been my list of Online Digital Manuscripts and Images, with nearly 50,000 views. A huge thanks to those who regularly check in on the blog, and I am happy that others find these resources as useful as I do.

DNA and Codicology

Scientific American has an interesting article on developments in the study of DNA in relation to manuscripts and codicology: How DNA forensics is transforming studies of ancient manuscripts.

T'OMIM: Tanakh Observable Matches of Intertextual Mimesis

David Smiley has archived his T'OMIM: Tanakh Observable Matches of Intertextual Mimesis database on Zenodo. He provided the following description via Agade:

_______________________________________

A new dataset is now available that may be of interest to anyone working on inner-biblical allusion, synoptic parallels, or intertextuality more broadly. T'OMIM (תאומים, "twins" in Hebrew) is an open-access collection of labeled parallel passages in the Hebrew Bible, hosted on Zenodo.

Scholars have been cataloging parallelism and intertextual relationships since antiquity. But none of that accumulated work has existed until now in a structured, machine-readable format. T'OMIM was built to fill that gap.

The dataset pairs two corpora of known parallels. The first contains 554 narrative verse pairs drawn from the Chronicles synoptic tradition. The second contains 256 poetic half-verse pairs identified in the biblical parallelism literature. Both corpora are available at two levels of granularity: verse-level paired texts with source citations, and word-level tokens that carry the full ETCBC morphological annotation (part of speech, verbal stem, gender, number, person, lexeme, English gloss, and syntactic structure). Every word in every parallel passage is fully parsed.

For those working computationally, the word-level data can feed directly into natural language processing workflows. For scholars approaching these texts without a programming background, the verse-level files are structured as simple tabular data and can be opened in Excel or any spreadsheet application. Each row is a pair of passages, with columns for the source reference, the text, and the scholarly citation from which the parallel was drawn.

British Library Papyri Images

In 2023, the British Library suffered a cyber attack and has not been able to recover their site. Thankfully, Hugh Cayless just brought to my attention that all of the images as they appeared on the website in June 2021 have now been compiled and made available on Archive.org (also for download). This is a great resource for those trying to find images of BL papyri and ostraca. It's a bit difficult to navigate, but if you know the number of what you are looking for you, you can try to change the URL to bring it up. 

Scriptural Vitality Book Panel

The Oxford Interfaith Forum has posted a video recording of a book panel reviewing Hindy Najman's new book on Scriptural Vitality.

Digital Edition of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets

Elvira Martín-Contreras has put up a great website for a digital edition of the Cairo Codex of the Prophets. It has often been thought to be one of the earliest Masoretic manuscripts based on its early colophon, though this may actually be a colophon copied by a later scribe, rather than the original. 

RIP Takamitsu Muraoka

Martin F. J. Baasten has announced on Agade the sad news that Japanese Semitist Takamitsu Muraoka passed away yesterday. He will be remembered for his immense impact on the study of the Semitic languages and lexicography, providing critical resources and tools that remain standard reference materials in the field.