In many religious education classrooms, the meaning of a sacred text is treated as something stable and authoritative. A teacher’s job is to transmit that meaning to students. This study reports on a year-long intervention conducted in a sevent...
This paper explores emotional analysis in Hebrew texts, focusing on improving machine learning techniques for depression detection by integrating psychological feature lexicons. Hebrew’s complex morphology makes emotional analysis challenging,...
Every society possesses systems for accessing, preserving, and transmitting its traditions. These are meant to ensure that privileged knowledge entrusted to reliable custodians is passed on unchanged between generations for the preservation of societ...
The automated classification of Hebrew, a morphologically rich language (MRL), presents unique challenges, particularly when high-quality labeled data are scarce. This study investigates the interplay between handcrafted feature engineering and trans...
This article examines the complex linguistic phenomenon of Hebrew–Yiddish diglossia within Hasidic homiletic literature, particularly focussing on sermons from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While previous scholarship has emphasised He...
Although the fear of Yhwh has been presented as an intrinsic feature of the ancient Israelite religion, the fear of God(s) is not limited to the people of Israel in the Hebrew Bible, and similar ideas of fearing deities occur in various texts produce...
I compare the status of a sacred language in two very different religious traditions. In Judaism, the Hebrew language is the language of liturgy, prayer, and the Written Law. The traditional way of reading Torah passages involved translating them int...
The Hebrew Bible is not only an ancient religious text, but also imbues information about the lives of people. Beyond controversial matters in the text, links can be found to common humanity with ancient roots. This renders the text not only relevant...
The biblical prophecy in Ezekiel 28:11–19 records a dirge against the king from Tyre. While the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) identifies the monarch as a cherub, the Greek Septuagint (LXX) distinguishes the royal from the cherub. Scholarly debates arise...
This study introduces a novel approach to text alignment tailored for ancient languages, with a focus on Hebrew and Aramaic, aimed at enhancing text reuse detection. Unlike previous methods, our approach integrates multiple NLP components into a spec...
This paper considers a corpus of translations of blessings in bilingual Hebrew–English prayer books from 1940 to the present day, spanning the breadth of religious and sociocultural outlooks. I show how this little-studied body of Jewish text b...
Using Hebrews as a test case, we investigate how an author’s participation in his literary network influences his writing habits. Our theoretical framework is that no author writes in a vacuum: all authors recycle stylistic habits from their li...
The Epistle to the Hebrews contains several so-called “warning passages”. In these texts, the author of Hebrews warns the addressees that they may not tarnish their Christ-given identity through apostasy and leaving the Christ-believing c...
In this paper, we present our approach to adding the first layers of syntactic information to an open dataset containing the text of the Samaritan Pentateuch with linguistic annotations. The Samaritan Pentateuch, written in Samaritan Hebrew, is the s...
It is easy to underestimate Ruth. The story is short and sweet, in elementary Hebrew, about a loyal and obedient daughter-in-law, or so we have been led to believe. The book and its eponymous character are surprisingly complex. Although Ruth is an ex...
Background/Objectives: Accurate assessment of speech intelligibility is necessary for individuals with motor speech disorders. Transcription or scaled rating methods by naïve listeners are the most reliable tasks for these purposes; however, the...
Marsh’s Library in Dublin, Ireland, is an immaculately preserved library from the early eighteenth century. Founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh, the library has an extensive collection of Jewish and Hebrew books which includes Hebrew Bibles,...
This article will summarize and interpret archaeological data that may be used to illuminate the religion of ancient Israel, ca. 1200–600 BCE, while using a phenomenal approach. The resultant portrait will be compared with one drawn from the te...
The Inductive Bible Study method is a hermeneutical approach and process for studying the Bible. Focusing on the final form of the text and trying to minimize or eliminate presuppositions, it takes into consideration all relevant sources of evidence,...
This article compares the similar texts in historiography, legend, poetry, and law between the Hebrew Bible and Chinese classic works, emphasizing the mutual reflection and illumination of the two in terms of culture. This article holds that a litera...
There is an analogy between two types of liminality: the geographic or cultural ‘outside’ space of the Marrano Jew, alienated from his/her original religion and the one he or she has been forced to adopt, and, a philosophical position tha...
Many early Christian and late Second Temple texts describe deceit as impurity. In this article, I delineate the development of this discourse and argue that it derived its power from several characteristics: mixing deceit impurity with other types of...
Rhetorical questions are used in a variety of ways in the Hebrew Bible. These questions, as found in Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, and Judges, show a strong emotional component, often of anger, and are part of the linguistic structure of accusation and d...
In an Eastern Jewish community in 1467, there appeared a book in Judeo-Arabic entitled Kitāb maḥāsin al-ādāb [The Book of Excellent Conduct]. In its introduction, the author states that he is translating an earlier Hebrew wo...
This paper examines the appearance of published West Semitic spellings of the name of the deity commonly referred to as Asherah. In light of new evidence from the Bronze Age Amorite sources, as well as the complete publication of the inscriptions at...
Biblical Scholars working with ancient texts are engaged in the daily task of Bible translation. A commitment to Biblical Performance Criticism (BPC) can be transformative in the task of translation. It is argued in this paper that responsible transl...
This contribution discusses the ways in which the Hebrew prophets in Greek and Latin translations were received by Christians from the second to fifth centuries CE, preceded by an impression of the New Testament use of these prophets. Besides the vas...
Since the beginning of the 21st century, studies on “cultural trauma” have pushed Hebrew Bible exegesis in new directions. Although its initial focus was on the period of the Babylonian exile (6th century BC), after 25 years of research,...
For all its anthropocentric focus on human agency in history and creation, the Hebrew Bible’s valuing of nonhuman life and its diversity cannot be gainsaid among certain traditions. Such is the case in three major creation texts: Genesis 1, Psalm 104...
Social contract theory has long been at the center of political theory, and one of the inheritors of the social contract tradition, liberalism, reverberates through contemporary political life. And yet, an overlooked element of liberalism are the bib...
Background/Objectives. Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) capture patients’ perspectives about their health status, quality of life, and medical care outcomes. LIMB-Q Kids is a validated PROM designed to assess health-related quality of...
Studies of ancient Israelite religion have long assumed that texts played some role in its public expression. This role is often reconstructed using depictions in the Hebrew Bible and ritual texts from neighboring regions or the Bronze Age Levant. Ho...
Rites of Initiation in early medieval Ireland have been studied only with reference to contemporary texts; recourse to other sources, most notably the substantial corpus of extant high crosses, has not been made. Here it will be demonstrated that the...
Recent advancements in studying the Ars Notoria, notably through Julian Véronèse’s critical edition, have provided insights into its manuscripts and various interpretations. This progress sets the stage for exploring a less examin...
Racial ideas which developed in the modern west were forged with reference to a Christian worldview and informed by the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Up until Darwin’s scientific reframing of the origins debate, European and American race sc...
Hebrew and Arabic are Semitic languages that use abjad alphabets, a consonant-primary writing system in which vowels are featured as optional diacritics. The relatively predictable morphology of Semitic language renders abjad writing feasible, with l...
This paper explores how narrative texts in the Christian Bible, and especially the Hebrew Bible, can inform contemporary ethical discourse. To this end, the paper proposes a framework of re-reading and re-telling as an approach to ethical engagement...
We studied two fundamental linguistic channels—the sentences and the interpunctions channels—and showed they can reveal deeper connections between texts. The applied theory does not follow the actual paradigm of linguistic studies. As a s...
Folklore exists in all human groups, small and big. Since early modernity, scholars have provided various definitions of the phenomenon, but earlier texts may also reveal awareness and reflection on the specific character folklore. In this short arti...
Despite uncertainties and disagreements, there is broad agreement on the heuristic value of recognizing chronologically distinct language varieties within Biblical Hebrew. The distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew is based on the lin...
Sacrifice is a central but contested topic in the prophetical literature in the Hebrew Bible. Whereas some texts criticize the sacrificial cult vehemently, other texts express strong support for such a cult. Interestingly, and somewhat paradoxically,...
In this article, I look back over a decade of my own contributions to the field of Hebrew Bible and migration, to assess where these have been helpful, and where revisions are needed. I argue that boundaries are still an extremely important topic of...
This article explores the ethics of “speaking” the artistic languages or idioms of diverse cultures in the earliest Christian communities. This article presents a key New Testament text, the Song of Zechariah (the Benedictus in Luke 1:68&...
Scholars have defended the cruel behavior of the biblical god as being justified, due to the supposition of God being perfectly omnipotent and infallible. However, one cannot be obtuse to the depictions of Yhwh himself about his feelings and actions,...
In the present paper, I will examine Yosef ben Abraham Giqatilla’s philosophical poems on the Hebrew vowels that are included in his three early works on “punctuation:” the third section from the larger Ginnat Egoz (“The Nut Garden”), the longer vers...
The story of Judah and Tamar, Genesis 38, revolves around levirate marriage. Levirate marriage law, echoed in Ruth 4, is laid out in Deut 25:5–10. Both Lev 18:16 and 20:21 clearly refer to it, but seem to proscribe it, raising the issue of the...
The story of the Tower of Babel in Gn 11:1–9 gave rise to a rich literary tradition, in which the topos of the primeval language emerged. Whereas the interpretative tradition originating among the Jewish commentators upheld that the original language...
The recent test translation of Te Paipera Tapu (the Bible in the Māori language) has aroused considerable debate for its use in Genesis 1 of the names of atua Māori (Māori divine beings). These names of atua have been used instead of n...
Paleography is the study of ancient and medieval handwriting. It is essential for understanding, authenticating, and dating historical texts. Across many archives and libraries, many handwritten manuscripts are yet to be classified. Human experts can...
The erasure of mobile female-identified bodies amongst both biblical and migration scholars is being redressed, to a certain point. Building upon the work of both disciplines, this article attempts to provide a thorough feminist analysis of the mobil...
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