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Hello

Posted: Fri Jun 19, 2020 7:16 pm
by Mitchell Powell
Hello,

My name is Mitchell Powell, and I took some Biblical Hebrew back in college and have been picking away at it off and on in my free time since. From time to time, when Googling some obscure question, I've come across the old b-hebrew email archives, and thought it would be neat to take a look at its successor project.

Re: Hello

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 9:10 am
by Jason Hare
Welcome to the forum, Mitchell. What are you doing to get back into Hebrew? :)

Re: Hello

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 10:47 am
by Mitchell Powell
Hi, Jason. Lately I've been going through portions of Genesis, translating parts of the apparatus of Kittel's Biblia Hebraica from the Hebrew/Greek/Latin mixture they're written in into English. One thing I noticed a while back is that while there's a lot of available information out there on text-critical details of the New Testament, there's not nearly (at least on the internet) as much material about the textual criticism of the Hebrew Bible.

For example, online there's an "English Guide to the Various Readings" (http://www.bible-researcher.com/title.html), which is "A complete collation of Greek readings adopted by Stephens, Beza, Elzevir, Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford, Wordsworth, Westcott & Hort, Nestle-Aland, and Hodges & Farstad, compared with the text underlying the King James Version."

That kind of thing doesn't seem to exist in easily accessible form for the Hebrew Bible, which is understandable given some differences between the study of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but it seemed to me at the very least that a translation of the BHK apparatus would be useful to the sort of people interested in that kind of thing.

For people willing to read obscure PDF's and learn their abbreviations and Latin phrases, there's a huge wealth of information out there on the internet, but less so in a form where the average person could just look up the variants an individual verse or passage they're interested in.

Re: Hello

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 5:18 pm
by talmid56
Welcome, Mitchell!

Here are some OT Textual Criticism sites that may help.

Old Testament Textual Criticism, http://oldtestamenttextualcriticism.blogspot.com/

Evangelical Textual Criticism, https://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/

(Here’s a post from April 2020 about the variants in Isaiah 53:11, including the DSS readings:

https://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blo ... -5311.html)

TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism, http://jbtc.org/index.html#page=home
Online, electronic peer-reviewed free journal, with archives of previous issues going back to 1996

Emanuel Tov’s personal website, http://www.emanueltov.info/

All the best,
Dewayne Dulaney

Re: Hello

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 8:08 pm
by Mitchell Powell
Thanks, Dewayne. Ideally -- though I doubt I'll have the time or Sitzfleisch for it -- the end product would be arranged by passage with a translation of all of Kittel's notes, along with references to less outdated scholarship. The goal wouldn't be to actually produce anything original, but just to gather references to and summaries of the work that's already been done all over the place into a handy reference tool. So links out to Tov's papers, or academic blogs, or what have you could easily be folded in to something like that.

Re: Hello

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 9:19 pm
by talmid56
I would enjoy having such a tool myself, and would find it helpful. Supposedly the apparatus for the new BHQ will be somewhat more user-friendly. As I can't afford to buy it, however, I'll never know. Unless, of course, the German Bible Society makes it available online sometime. One can hope, anyhow.

Re: Hello

Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2020 11:57 pm
by Mitchell Powell
Well, there's a plan for the Oxford Hebrew Bible to end up online after a delay of several years from the printed volumes coming out. On the other hand, I think the OHB project was announced in 2006, and only one volume is done so far. The Gottingen Septuagint series is over 100 years in the making, and doesn't include the whole Septuagint yet, so I can only hope the OHB takes a somewhat faster pace.