Bronson Brown-deVost
Scripta Qumranica Electronica (2016–2021) Critical editions of the Qumran scrolls have now become accessible to all following the completion of the Discoveries in the Judean Desert series, though a number of problems with those editions are well known. More importantly, however, the limitations of the print format itself as a medium for presenting critical editions and for engaging text have begun to gain wider recognition. With the hope of presenting a new path forward to overcome these problems and limitations, the Scripta Qumranica Electronica (SQE) project aims to construct and make publicly accessible a standardized environment for the production and dissemination of digital Dead Sea Scrolls editions. SQE is financed through the Deutsch-Israelische Projektkooperation (DIP) and is composed of an international team of researchers, computer scientists, and administrators centered in Israel and Germany. With the aid of digital image analysis provided by our computer science team at Tel Aviv University, the SQE project will culminate in the online publication of several scholarly digital editions of specific compositions found among the Dead Sea Scrolls: the Damascus Document (Göttingen), the Book of Samuel (Göttingen), Serekh Ha’Edah (Haifa), 4QInstruction (Haifa), Serekh HaYahad (Haifa in collaboration with Paris), and a module for the Dead Sea Scrolls biblical compositions with a multi-dimensional classification scheme for all variants found in them (Tel Aviv). We intend to publish on the web both the editions themselves, and also the suite of web accessible tools employed in their creation. These online tools will, in turn, facilitate the future production of digital editions for other Dead Sea Scrolls manuscripts and compositions. By means of computerized analytical tools and the new possibilities afforded by digital visualizations of data, SQE seeks to expand upon traditional methods of scrolls studies and to bring them into the new millennium. This aim will be achieved through the production of online workspaces for the reconstruction of ancient manuscripts and for textual analysis of the compositions they contain. The backbone of the project is two large specialized databases: the image and cataloguing database, which is curated, updated, HeBAI 5 (2016), 307–315 ISSN 2192-2276
DOI 10.1628/186870316X14805961757430 © 2016 Mohr Siebeck
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and maintained by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), and the textual and linguistic database, which was created for the Qumran-Wörterbuch Projekt (QWB) housed at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. The IAA’s Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library became accessible to the public in December of 2012 under the leadership of Pnina Shor, curator and director of the IAA’s Dead Sea Scrolls Project. This website and corresponding database, funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, with the additional support of the Arcadia Fund, represents the efforts of the IAA to create new high resolution, multispectral images of the Dead Sea Scrolls and to make them publicly available along with scans of the older PAM plates. Google R&D, Israel, sponsored the development of the website and enables it. The access that the project has provided to images of the scrolls, both old and new, has already proven to be an invaluable resource for researchers. The QWB project has a long prehistory and was recently approved as a longterm project of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in 2002. It was resituated in the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen in 2006. Ingo Kottsieper is responsible for the creation and development of the innovative linguistic database that stands at the core of the QWB project, which is directed by Reinhard G. Kratz and Annette Steudel. This unique and extensible database contains transcriptions of the Dead Sea Scrolls along with lexical, morphological, and bibliographical data. It has already been used fruitfully for numerous projects on a controlled basis. The integration of the QWB database within the SQE project will now provide public access to this important resource for the very first time. The coordination of data from these two repositories will enable SQE front-end web applications to provide a new suite of innovative and powerful tools for Dead Sea Scrolls and related research. These tools will address the need for a common platform to digitally reconstruct physical manuscripts and to analyze text. The use of computer software in the service of manuscript reconstruction has steadily gained ground in the last decade. Dead Sea Scrolls scholars are increasingly using image processing programs and even word processing solutions to simplify taking measurements, to test new joins and fragment arrangements, and to evaluate the feasibility of textual reconstructions. Such software is even now being used to simplify some facets of the so-called Stegemann method as well. Much of this work is currently being done in an ad hoc fashion with whichever tools are most readily accessible. SQE intends to greatly simplify this situation by providing a standardized and adaptable workspace, a “digital scrollery,” that will encompass and extend beyond current techniques of digital manuscript reconstruction.
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The SQE digital scrollery aims to include features that aid in material reconstruction proper: that is, the arrangement of fragments irrespective of textual concerns, but rather based upon damage patterns and other physical features, including fiber patterns in papyrus manuscripts. This facet of the project will greatly benefit from the guidance of Steudel, a world expert in material reconstruction. Based upon the results of material reconstruction, or upon other factors if material reconstruction proves too tenuous, the digital scrollery workspace will allow for the specification of manuscript constraints such as scroll length, column widths and heights, and margins in order to create a template upon which individual scroll fragments can be situated. It will be possible to pin manuscript fragments and constraints to each other in various ways to allow for dynamic adjustments and rearrangements, greatly streamlining the process of experimentation. The process of evaluating manuscript reconstruction will be further enhanced by the ability to insert reconstructed text composed by the user or derived from any number of text editions already stored within the QWB database. SQE’s digital scrollery will be greatly enhanced by access to the IAA images and cross referenced fragment cataloguing between the IAA database and QWB. The IAA’s imaging project has produced numerous images of each fragment at various wavelengths and with various lighting schemes. What is more, at the IAA, Oren Ableman, with the assistance of volunteers, goes over each new plate that is currently being imaged in order to correctly identify each individual fragment. This work has already resulted in his identification of several previously unknown fragments. The usability of the IAA images will be further extended by the computer science team at Tel Aviv, headed by project leader Nachum Dershowitz and Lior Wolf. The team is working towards the ability to link the transcribed text of a fragment from the QWB with coordinates on the IAA images so that it will be immediately evident how a transcription does (or does not) correspond to the writing on a given scroll fragment.1 This feature can serve several further purposes, for instance: to automatically generate script charts; 1 T. Hassner, L. Wolf, N. Dershowitz, G. Sadeh, and D. Stökl Ben Ezra, “Dense Cor-
respondences and Ancient Texts,” in Dense Image Correspondences for Computer Vision (ed. T. Hassner and C. Liu; Cham: Springer, 2016), 279–295. G. Sadeh, L. Wolf, T. Hassner, N. Dershowitz, and D. Stökl Ben Ezra, “Viral Transcription Alignment,” in Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2015), Nancy, France (ed. T. Hassner and C. Liu; Cham: Springer, 2015), 711–715; T. Hassner, L. Wolf, and N. Dershowitz, “OCR-Free Transcript Alignment,” Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR 2013), Washington, DC (Piscataway: IEEE, 2013), 1310–1314.
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to suggest readings for damaged letters; and even to create a kind of font for visualizing reconstructed text. The project plans to link corresponding images of fragments so that a user may, for instance, flip a fragment over to see its back side or easily scroll through all images of any given fragment – vastly simplifying usage of the PAM plates. In addition, it should be possible to subtract the background from all scroll images, so that it will no longer be necessary for researchers to wonder if they are looking at black ink or a dark shadow. The computer science team at Tel Aviv also plans to build upon the algorithms for suggesting manuscript joins that they created for the Friedberg Genizah Project (https://fgp. genizah.org) in order to assist in the joining of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.2 The SQE project also aims to create a workspace for analyzing and visualizing parallel text. Such parallels may be as simple as two manuscripts with nearly identical versions of the same composition, but they are often more complex. What is more, quotations and allusions abound within the Dead Sea Scrolls and these too are manifestations of parallel text that should be made accessible. The textual information stored in the QWB database stands at the heart of this aspect of the project. Its vast array of inputted manuscripts, variant readings, and relational data will greatly facilitate the juxtaposition of manuscripts containing the same or similar compositions. Kottsieper has recently enhanced the QWB database to enable Noam Mizrahi of Tel Aviv University (with the assistance of Einav Fleck and Oded Essner) to add an array of classifiers that denote the precise nature of each variant in the biblical scroll corpus. This feature is foundational for Mizrahi’s subproject within SQE, which aims to provide a descriptive accounting of the relationship between the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic tradition. Similarly, the ability to define relationships between any number of elements, irrespective of their content, will allow for cross language correspondences to be mapped. This will make it possible to compare, for instance, the Hebrew text of a composition with its Greek or Latin translations. 2 L. Wolf, N. Dershowitz, L. Potikha, T. German, R. Shweka, and Y. Choueka, “Automatic
Paleographic Exploration of Genizah Manuscripts,” in Kodikologie und Paläographie im Digitalen Zeitalter 2 – Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2 (ed. F. Fischer, C. Fritze, and G. Vogeler, with B. Assmann, M. Rehbein, and P. Sahle; Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 3, Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2011), 157–179; L. Wolf, R. Littman, N. Mayer, T. German, N. Dershowitz, R. Shweka, and Y. Choueka, “Identifying Join Candidates in the Cairo Genizah,” International Journal of Computer Vision 94 (2010): 118–135; R. Shweka, Y. Choueka, L. Wolf, and N. Dershowitz, “‘Veqarev otam ehad el ehad’: Zihuy ktav yad vetseruf qit’ei hagnizah beemtsa’ut mahshev (Identifying Handwriting and Joining Genizah Fragments by Computer),” Ginzei Kedem 7 (2011): 171–207.
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The SQE digital editions are being prepared by teams in Göttingen and in Haifa at the same time as the above mentioned tools and platforms are being developed. What this means is that the development of specific SQE software tools is being driven forward by the unique needs of each edition in an iterative fashion. Likewise, some of the preparation of digital editions must still be done with older tools and techniques. Nevertheless, the hope is that a full featured SQE research platform will appear concurrently with publication of the digital editions. The SQE critical editions both promote and contribute to the discussion of the “third way” of editions in Digital Humanities,3 and they will stand as exemplary implementations of this approach. Each edition will both showcase certain features of the SQE platform and at the same time represent significant advancements in Dead Sea Scrolls research, for each edition has been carefully selected with an understanding of the specific methodological problems it involves, and of its relevance for further scroll editions. The publication of these digital editions may be accompanied by a print edition as well, as is currently being done with the QWB, but it is the digital editions that represent a paradigm shift in the field. These editions will provide the ability to present data in any number of ways to the end user, and their dynamic nature is intended as much to allow for future extensibility as to engender further research. The team at the University of Haifa consists of project leader Jonathan Ben-Dov, collaborator Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra (EPHE, Paris), Eshbal Ratzon, and Asaf Gayer. This team has been working on the cryptic texts from Cave 4 as part of a project funded by the Israel Science Foundation. The outcomes of that project will be integrated into SQE together with the newly-developed editions of Serekh Ha’Edah, Serekh HaYahad, and 4QInstruction. At the 2016 IOQS meeting in Leuven, Ben-Dov, Stökl Ben Ezra, and Gayer presented a new reconstruction of the entire Rule of the Congregation in a cryptic copy from Cave 4.4 That reconstruction encompasses new frag3 See T. L. Andrews, “The Third Way: Philology and Critical Edition in the Digital Age”
(http://www.academia.edu/2510270/The _Third_Wa y_Ph ilol ogy_and_Critica l_Editi o n_in_the_Digi t al_Ag e ); see also M. J. Driscoll and E. Pierazzo (eds.), Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories and Practices (Cambridge: Open Book, 2016); and P. Sahle, Digitale Editionsformen, Zum Umgang mit der Überlieferung unter den Bedingungen des Medienwandels (3 vols; Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 7–9; Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2013). 4 This has now been published as A. Gayer, D. Stökl Ben Ezra, and J. Ben-Dov, “A New Join of Two Fragments of 4QcryptA Serekh haEdah and Its Implications,” DSD 23 (2016): 139–154.
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ment joins which, in turn, are based on both material and textual considerations. The special image processing techniques they used to enhance the analysis of papyrus grain will be integrated into the digital scrollery. Additionally, their reconstruction uses a specially designed font that matches the ductus of the script in the surviving fragments. With this font they were able to test various speculations for reconstruction and ultimately arrive at a plausible suggestion. This feature will also become part of the digital scrollery. In addition to the work of the other team members, Ratzon has already directly joined multiple fragments in cryptic script from the calendrical scroll 4Q324d, which had been treated atomistically in the edition of DJD XXXVI.5 The result of these joins, as they currently stand, is a multicolumn manuscript containing some marginalia. The many fragments from several manuscripts of Serekh HaYahad and of 4QInstruction (or Musar LeMevin) present numerous editorial challenges, both with respect to manuscript reconstruction and to textual development in the manuscript tradition. The SQE tools for manuscript reconstruction and for comparative textual analysis will greatly help in this endeavor. Stökl Ben Ezra brings to the Serekh HaYahad edition his experience from preparing a recent edition and translation of it with accompanying commentary for La Bibliothèque de Qumrân.6 Under the direction of Ben-Dov, Gayer is currently writing a dissertation at Haifa on a topic related to 4QInstruction, and the SQE edition will benefit from his familiarity with this composition. The team at Georg August University in Göttingen consists of project leader Kratz, Kottsieper, Shani Tzoref and her research assitant Jan Fritzsche (both at the University of Potsdam), Peter Porzig, Bronson Brown-deVost, James Tucker, and programmer Martin Schröter. Each researcher within the team has significant experience working with the scrolls as material artefacts and dealing with issues surrounding textual reconstruction. They will be responsible for editions of the Damascus Document and of the Book of Samuel. The preparation of a new edition of the Damascus Document in Göttingen will benefit from the unique possibility of using the late Hartmut Stegemann’s handwritten notes. Editing of the composition will involve a large amount of work reconstructing manuscripts from the Cave 4 fragments. But this project will also benefit greatly from the careful analysis of parallel text, 5 E. Ratzon and J. Ben-Dov, “A Newly-Reconstructed Calendrical Scroll from Cave 4 in
Cryptic Script,” JBL (forthcoming).
6 D. Stökl Ben Ezra. “La Règle de la Communauté (1QS, 4Q255–4Q264),” in vol. 3B of
La Bibliothèque de Qumrân (ed. K. Berthelot, T. Legrand, and M. Langlois; Paris: Cerf, forthcoming).
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by which the Cairo Geniza manuscript and the Qumran manuscripts can be compared and recensional differences highlighted. In addition to this, the phenomenon of intertextuality will be an important aspect of the Damascus Document edition. The relationship between the Damascus Document and Serekh HaYahad has recently been addressed both by Kratz and by Steudel.7 Similarly, Tzoref has worked on textual quotations in the Damascus Document,8 and will be presenting a paper (co-authored with Porzig and Tucker) at the 2016 national SBL highlighting some features of the currently available SQE search tools. The published editions of 4QSama are well-known to be problematic, and the reconstruction of that manuscript is particularly difficult to establish in places. Kottsieper and Steudel, together with Philippe Hugo, have written on some of the problems with the paleography and the manuscript reconstructions of 4QSama in the published editions.9 Brown-deVost has addressed practical and methodological issues related to textual reconstructions for 4QSama in a forthcoming review article.10 Now, a combination of the tools provided by the digital scrollery and the parallel text workspaces will provide much needed clarity to these issues on a large scale, even if they might at times demonstrate that no solution to a given issue is demonstrably better than another. What is more, the text of Samuel is famously fraught with versional or recensional difficulties, some of which have recently been discussed by Kratz.11 This is complicated by the fact that manuscript evidence in various languages must be accounted for, especially the various Septua 7 R. Kratz, “Der ‘Penal Code’ und das Verhältnis von Serekh ha-Yachad (S) und Dam-
askusschrift (D),” RQ 25 (2011): 199–227; A. Steudel, “The Damascus Document (D) as a Rewriting of the Community Rule (S),” RQ 25 (2012): 605–620. 8 S. Tzoref, “Use of Scripture in The Community Rule,” in A Companion to Biblical Interpretation in Early Judaism (ed. M. Henze; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 203–234. 9 P. Hugo, I. Kottsieper, and A. Stuedel, “Notes paléographiques sur 4QSama (4Q51) (le cas de 2 Sam 3),” RQ 23 (2007): 93–108; and “Reflections on Epigraphy and Critical Editing of 4QSama (4Q51) Col. XI,” in Textual Criticism and Dead Sea Scrolls Studies in Honour of Julio Trebolle Barrera: Florilegium Complutense (ed. A. Piquer Otero and P. A. Torijano Morales; JSJSupp 158; Leiden: Brill, 2012), 115–131. 10 B. Brown-deVost, review of R. Müller, J. Pakkala, and B. ter Haar Romeny, Evidence of Editing: Growth and Change of Texts in the Hebrew Bible, JHS (forthcoming). 11 R. Kratz, “Nahash, King of the Ammonites, in the Deuteronomistic History,” in Insights into Editing in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East (ed. R. Müller et al.; CBET; Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming), “Bibelhandschrift oder Midrasch?: Zum Verhältnis von Text‑ und Literargeschichte in den Samuelbüchern im Licht der Handschrift 4Q51 (4QSama),” in The Books of Samuel: Stories – History – Reception History (ed. W. Dietrich; BETL 284; Leuven: Peeters, forthcoming), 153–180; and “Textual Supplementation in Poetry: The Song of Hannah as Testcase,” in Textual Supplementation in the Hebrew Bible (ed. O. Saul and J. Wright; forthcoming).
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gint traditions and the early translations of the Old Greek. The SQE platform will develop new tools and methods of computer aided textual comparison to address this particular need for cross-language text analysis. The production of digital editions for the SQE project will greatly benefit from a number of related and supporting efforts. As noted briefly above, Mizrahi (with the assistance of Fleck and Essner) will be continuing work on an SQE subproject based primarily upon QWB data with the goal of better accounting for types of textual variation found among biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.12 This subproject will result in enhanced data for the biblical manuscripts in QWB and extended functionality for the analysis of parallel text within the SQE project. The team at the IAA is composed of the aforementioned curator and director Shor, along with Ableman, Orit Rosengarten, Beatriz Riestra, and Itai Ben-Shlush. Shor, Rosengarten, and Riestra are overseeing the IAA’s production of new scroll images, and Ableman is working on the IAA’s fragment identification and cataloging for their own database records. In addition to multispectral imaging in 12 wavelengths – 5 in the visible spectrum and 7 in the near infra-red – and 28 exposures using lighting from both sides together, from each side separately, and from raking lights, the IAA has also begun to experiment with other types of imaging technologies such as reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) and micro computed tomography (microCT scanning). With respect to cataloguing, Ableman has already discovered and placed several previously unaccounted manuscript fragments, some of which will make their way into the SQE edition of Samuel. The new digital scroll images will provide the bedrock for visual computer analysis, and the cataloging data will provide vital information about each fragment and new readings that will expand the horizons of scroll analysis. The computer science team at Tel-Aviv University, comprised of Dershowitz and Wolf, bring their extensive experience working with the Friedberg Genizah Project (https://fgp.genizah.org) to the SQE with a primary focus on computer aided analysis of the scroll images provided by the IAA. The team has already developed preliminary algorithms for several important tasks: the matching of transcribed text to its location on an image; automated suggestions for fragment joins; and fragment matching. All of these methods of computerized image analysis and more will facilitate the data curation needed for successful operation of the SQE digital scrollery. 12 Some of his results were recently presented in the lecture, “Text, Language, and Legal
Interpretation: The Case of Exod 12:9 according to 4QpaleoGen-Exod-l (4Q11),” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the European Association of Biblical Studies, Leuven, 18 July 2016).
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The sum result of all the efforts outlined above is a rich interlinking of image and textual data. By drawing upon a host of multidimensional relationships, the editions produced by the SQE will stand as unique and advanced models for what digital editions can accomplish when they break free from the domination of the printed page over the conditions of the primary data.13 In this way the project finds relevance for the wider scholarly community and represents a significant and timely contribution to the vibrant discussion of digital editions in the humanities. Importantly, the dynamic nature of interaction with the curated data and with the editors’ discussions in these editions will allow readers themselves to choose the level of sophistication with which they wish to engage the SQE editions. This will certainly further the cause of access to the scrolls, for through these editions the non-specialist and even the interested public will be able to interact at their own level in meaningful ways with the images of the scrolls and the text they contain. The digital editions produced by SQE will demonstrate the features of a new online platform for Dead Sea Scrolls editing, and will also be significant scholarly contributions in their own right, but they do not represent the sole outcome of the project itself. It is the intention of the SQE project to provide the public with free access to its tools for collaborative Dead Sea Scrolls research. End users will be able to import the project’s data into their own digital workspaces and manipulate the fragments and text as they see fit. They may then share their own personal editions with others or even enter into collaborative efforts with groups of users. Since all interactions within the workspaces can be logged, it will remain simple for people working in groups to identify who is responsible for each edit made to the joint editions. This dynamic, extensible, and collaborative platform will ultimately set the stage for the next generation of Dead Sea Scrolls research. Bronson Brown-deVost Georg-August-Universität Gottingen Theologische Fakultät Platz der Göttinger Sieben 2 D-37073 Göttingen Germany
[email protected]
13 See P. Sahle, Das typografische Erbe, Vol. 1 of Digitale Editionsformen: Zum Umgang
mit der Überlieferung unter den Bedingungen des Medienwandels (Schriften des Instituts für Dokumentologie und Editorik 7; Norderstedt: Books on Demand, 2013), 70.
