The Septuagint and the Possibilities of Humanities Computing: from Assistant to Collaborator

The Septuagint is in many ways a remarkable collection of texts. It represents the first known attempt to
translate the Hebrew Bible into an Indo-European
language, namely Hellenistic Greek. As such, it functions
as an invaluable source for understanding pertinent
linguistic, translational, text-critical, socio-cultural, and philosophical-theological issues that led to its creation and reception. Spanning in its inception from the first translations in the early- to mid-third century BCE to the later revisions in the second century CE, it gives scholars
an insight not only into the development of the Greek
language, but also into the influence of a Semitic language
on its vocabulary and possibly even its syntax. Furthermore, being one of the rare cases where both a translated Greek
text and the Semitic source text are extant, it also offers
a rich source of insight into contemporary translation
techniques and philosophies, albeit influenced by its
hagiographic status, and helps in establishing the
possibility of a clearer understanding of other Greek texts
that are generally deemed to be translations from Semitic originals. Last, but not least, is its reflection of the culture
and ideology of diaspora communities in the eastern
Mediterranean metropoles, which led to the emergence and shaping of two important religious groupings.
The Septuagint is also amongst the ancient texts to
receive early concerted applications of Humanities
Computing approaches. The most prominent project in this line is the Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint Studies (CATSS) project, which was called into life through the initiative of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies in the early 1970s. Located at the University of Pennsylvania’s emerging
Center of Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT), this
project sought the use of computing resources
towards three goals: (1) a morphological analysis of the
Greek text, resulting in a tagged electronic text, (2) the
comparison of Hebrew and Greek texts, resulting in an electronic parallel aligned Hebrew and Greek text, and the recording of published critical variants, resulting in an electronic Greek texts, with variants encoded. All these texts are now freely available (upon the signing of a user agreement/declaration) at the CCAT’s gopher and form the basis of most, if not all, current Septuagint
projects and studies making use of computing.
Departing from this pioneering, indispensable, and
foundational application of Humanities Computing
approaches to the study of the Septuagint, this paper will present an appraisal of the Humanities research
questions presently asked of these texts, on the one hand, and of the potential of applying Humanities Computing in answering them, on the other. Beyond the widely agreed proposals of transforming such resources into
established formats, e.g. Unicode for character encoding
and TEI XML for text encoding, I will seek to discuss
concrete problems and possibilities in pursuing
Humanities Computing applications to the Septuagint, while generalising some of the insights within a wider context. The wider question will be: What should be done to and with electronic text(s) of the Septuagint
in order to enrich it as a resource for answering the
philological, historical, socio-cultural, and theological questions currently asked about it?
One of the aims of this paper will be to tease out the current disciplinary boundaries between traditional
Humanities approaches and emerging Humanities
Computing ones and to identify important developments in their relationship. An important presupposition in
this discussion will be the understanding that Humanities Computing, as a hybrid discipline, will only be truly
successful if it reflects a thorough understanding of both Humanities research questions and Computing approaches and develops a balanced negotiation of models and
concepts that successfully bridge between the two. The direction of proposing research questions has to be
pursuit in both directions – both ‘how can one exploit Computing approaches to answer Humanities questions?’
and ‘How do Computing approaches alter the Humanities questions we ask about a research object?’ have to be asked. To push further the metaphor in the name of the aforementioned CATSS project: It is a matter of using
computing approaches as collaborators, rather than as mere assistants.
There are a number of issues in the case of the Septuagint that complicate straightforward conceptual models. To choose but one illustration: Both the textual bases of
Hebrew source text and Greek translation text are disturbed
not only by the textual variants on each side, but also by the fact that the Septuagint texts soon encountered
rival Greek translations, in some cases clearly influencing later revisions. Furthermore, the Hebrew source text for the Septuagint clearly departs occasionally from the Hebrew Masoretic Text. Moreover, the Septuagint also includes a number of apocryphal books, some of which were probably written directly in Greek. It is evident that the conceptual model to deal with this scenario cannot just consist of the juxtaposition of two clearly delimited
texts. But how does one model such a complicated
picture and how does one approach such a picture by computational means? This paper will attempt to propose some answers to this question. It will seek to do so by sketching an ontology and incipit model to accommodate the complication.
As an example of the wider context dealt with in this
paper, I will discuss another, more general current
development in Humanities research projects, not
least influenced by contemporary communication
technologies: the collaborative nature of the research
undertaken. While the negotiation of consensus remains a crucial achievement and necessity in such endeavours,
what are we to do with disagreement? How do we
encode minority opinions and use them as a resource in computational approaches? If the underlying arguments
are important: How do we record them for both
agreements and disagreements?
Selected Literature
Septuagint
Jennifer Dines, The Septuagint, Understanding the Bible and Its World, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2004.
Natalio Fernández Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the Bible,
translated by W. G. E. Watson, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000.
CATSS
Computer Assisted Tools for Septuagint/Scriptural Study.
Robert A. Kraft, “How I Met the Computer, and How it Changed my Life”, SBL Forum (Spring 2004)