Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database

Blurb from the website:

The Semantics of Ancient Hebrew Database is an international, cooperative research project involving a growing number of centres with coordination provided by Leiden. The currently participating centres include the following universities: Azusa Pacific, Bonn, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Florence, Harvard, Oxford, Leiden, Leuven, Paris, Rome, and Sydney.

The project's aim is to store in a computerised form all the information that a scholar, translator, preacher or layperson could require about the meaning and interpretation of ancient Hebrew vocabulary. The data will be systematically arranged, evaluated by experts in the field, and encoded so as to make consultation and cross-referencing easy and maximally productive. Both the quantity of data included and the possibilities of comparison and cross-reference will go far beyond that which any standard Hebrew dictionary can offer; the contributions of modern linguistics and computer technology will be exploited to the full. Such information lies at the foundation of all good biblical scholarship, whether this takes the form of commentaries on the Bible, historical works or biblical theology.

The following url takes you to the words that are currently available:

http://www.divinity.cam.ac.uk/CARTS/SAHD/words.htm

Online Critical Pseudepigrapha

From the webpage:

The mandate of the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha is to develop and publish electronic editions of the best critical texts of the "Old Testament" Pseudepigrapha and related literature.

http://ocp.acadiau.ca/

Thus far there are only two books with completed apparatuses (2 Baruch and the Testament of Job), but two more are in the making, and there are 25 texts without databases that are accessible.

Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine

From the webpage:

The Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine project seeks to collect and make accessible over the Web all of the previously published inscriptions (and their English translations) of Israel/Palestine from the Persian period through the Islamic conquest (ca. 500 BCE - 640 CE). There are about 15,000 of these inscriptions, written primarily in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin, by Jews, Christians, Greeks, and Romans. They range from imperial declarations on monumental architecture to notices of donations in synagogues to humble names scratched on ossuaries, and include everything in between.

There are approximately 1,500 inscriptions currently in the database, with more added regularly.

http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/Inscriptions/index.shtml

Digital Nestle-Aland Greek NT

The Nestle-Aland Greek NT is in the process of being digitized. Currently an incomplete version is available with lots of features. For example, pointing the mouse over a word brings a list of mss in which the word occurs as well as links to definitions

http://nestlealand.uni-muenster.de/

Demetrios Database of LXX Greek

The Demetrios Database of LXX Greek provides lexical information (parsing) for political, legal, and administrative words in the LXX. Full access to the database is currently restricted to members, but the website promises to extend this to all. At present anyone can view a subset.

http://www.reading.ac.uk/demetrios/

Concordia database of Classical Inscriptions

The Concordia database provides online access to a number of Greek and Latin inscriptions.

http://concordia.atlantides.org/

Chicago Homer

The Chicago Homer is a marvelous online database that allows one to search the following Homeric works: Iliad, Odyssey, the Theogony, Works and Days, Shield of Heracles, and some of the Homeric Hymns. It is possible to search the texts in Greek or by transliteration or lemmata, by frequency, word type, inflectional categories, line ranges, and narrative speech/speakers.

http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/homer/

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Free online access to Byzantine tradition of John

UBS has released an electronic version of the Byzantine tradition of the Gospel of John. Besides the text the site has a witness list and apparatus information.

http://arts-itsee.bham.ac.uk/itseeweb/iohannes/byzantine/index.html

two websites for pdf books

The following sites offer full downloads of books, some at no charge and others for a fee. Please be sure to observe any copyright restrictions. (Thanks to Thiophilus for calling this to my attention.)

http://www.ebookee.com/

http://search.4shared.com/q/BBQD/1/pdf/cambridge+companion

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Electronic Resources Relevant to the Textual Criticism of Hebrew Scripture from E. Tov

Emanuel Tov has a webpage with urls to lots of resources for textual criticism. Since many are on a subscription/payment basis and others are to websites that are no longer active (his page was created in 2003), it is somewhat "slim pickins.'" Nevertheless you may find some useful nuggets.

http://rosetta.reltech.org/TC/vol08/Tov2003.html

Some of the categories are: I. source texts (e.g., Hebrew Bible [e.g., Leningrad and Aleppo codices], Samaritan Pentateuch, versions (e.g., LXX, Symmachus, Vulgate, various Targumim), modern translations, critical apparatuses; II. morphological analyses (e.g., Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, Targumim and Peshitta); and III. tools (e.g.,BDB, HALOT, Liddell-Scott, BAGD).

Many of the websites have digital images of their respective texts.

SIL Apparatus

SIL has updated the previous set of fonts for the Hebrew and Greek apparatuses (i.e. the Gothic symbols for, e.g., MT, LXX, etc.). The new version are in Unicode, which makes it well worthwhile to update. The url is:

http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ApparatusSIL

While you are there, why not browse the other font packages on offer? Backstep a couple of pages or use this url:

http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_software_catalog.asp?by=cat&name=Font

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

open access: Bible Study Textbook Series

From the homepage of: http://www.collegepress.com/storefront/node/238

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Bible Study Textbook Series

Many of you are familiar with the Bible Study Textbook Series (The Old Green Commentaries). These were very popular several years back and many of you have requested copies of these timeless treasures. Because reprint cost are so high we have chosen not to reprint but instead, we are offering them electronically for free. These commentaries are being made available for your personal use. Feel free to download them to your computer. These files are very large and may take a while even with high speed and DSL services. If using dial up service please be aware the your download times may be extensive and you may encounter problems during the download. If you have problems downloading these files you want to consider using a download manager.
Thank you for your interest in College Press.
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If my quick glance at Genesis, Vol. 2, is indicative of all of the volumes in this series, the series is conservative in its orientation, that is, the commentaries do not utilize any of the "higher" critical methods such as form- or redaction-criticism.

Friday, September 3, 2010

CBA joins SBL in providing open access books

This just in from the Sept '10 SBL newsletter:

"SBL welcomes The Catholic Biblical Association of America as a new publishing partner in the International Cooperation Initiative (ICI) Online Books project. Joseph Jensen, CBA Executive Secretary, advised SBL of the decision August 27. CBA has provided PDF files of their most recent publications and we will begin to make them available in September."

And a reminder that you can join SBL for a pittance.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Claremont Colleges Digital Library (Nag Hammadi texts online)

Claremont Colleges Digital Library has several open-access points of interest for Church History and New Testament folks, especially their archive of the Nag Hammadi codices.

The url for the home page is:
http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/claremont-colleges-digital-library.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Awol-TheAncientWorldOnline+%28AWOL+-+The+Ancient+World+Online%29

The url for the Nag Hammadi collection is:
http://ccdl.libraries.claremont.edu/collection.php?alias=nha

Here's an example (Codex 1, papyrus page 9):