Faculty Research Grant 2022-2023

Oliver Glanz (Old Testament).

Towards a Syntactical Database of Ancient Biblical Greek Texts.

The proposed project aims to develop a computer-assisted syntax analysis for the scholarly editions of Biblical Greek texts: Rahlfs’s LXX (critical edition of the Greek OT) and the SBLGNT (SBL’s critical edition of the Greek NT). Such analysis is now possible after successfully converting these texts into the TextFabric (TF) format (2021-2022: https://github.com/CenterBLC/LXX, https://github.com/CenterBLC/SBLGNT). We have received important recognition in the scholarly community for making these foundational texts available as TF apps. Advanced morphological analysis and lexical studies are now possible. However, the methodological developments in Biblical studies have advanced into the field of distributive valence and distributive syntax analyses that require flexible and robust data models. The TF framework allows for such robust flexibility (http://etcbc.nl/category/text-fabric/). Therefore, this project wants to accomplish the next logical step: adding syntax analysis to the TF version of the LXX and SBLGNT. This will open new research possibilities for biblical scholars and linguistics that are central to discovering the meaning of Greek words and phrases that semantic studies cannot easily discover. It also allows a better understanding of Hebrew phrases as syntax-based Greek valence studies can shed light on the meaning of those Hebrew source terms and source formulations that are not well distributed in the Hebrew Bible. The syntactical analysis will be available as extra features of their respective TF apps. Following an open-source, open-data strategy, the code developed and the data produced will be made freely available on GitHub for any researcher to use.