Periodic Reporting for period 2 - TEXTEVOLVE (A New Approach to the Evolution of Texts Based on the Manuscripts of the Targums)
Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-08-31
TEXTEVOLVE studies Jewish Aramaic paraphrases of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Targums. They are important because they provide a unique insight into what Jews believed God was saying to them through their sacred texts at transformative moments in Jewish history. But like many ancient texts, we do not possess the author’s original copy of any Targum. Rather, in most cases we have multiple copies preserved in much later manuscripts, all of which differ one from another. It is therefore necessary to reconstruct the ‘evolution’ of the text in order not only to recover the earliest possible form of the text, but also to consider the importance of changes made by later copyists for our understanding of the place of the Targums in Jewish culture, theology, and praxis throughout time. TEXTEVOLVE therefore aims to:
1) develop a new methodology for textual studies using techniques from evolutionary biology; and,
2) apply this methodology to an important corpus of Jewish texts, called the Targums.
The more manuscript copies of any given text one has, the more robust this analysis can be, so TEXEVOLVE also aims to:
3) expand the corpus of available texts by recovering manuscripts that have become ‘lost’ in un-catalogued or poorly catalogued collections; and,
4) subject recently discovered manuscripts, particularly those from the so-called ‘European Genizah’, to thorough textual analysis for the first time.
1) develop a new methodology for textual studies using techniques from evolutionary biology; and,
2) apply this methodology to an important corpus of Jewish texts, called the Targums.
The more manuscript copies of any given text one has, the more robust this analysis can be, so TEXEVOLVE also aims to:
3) expand the corpus of available texts by recovering manuscripts that have become ‘lost’ in un-catalogued or poorly catalogued collections; and,
4) subject recently discovered manuscripts, particularly those from the so-called ‘European Genizah’, to thorough textual analysis for the first time.
The first phase of the project has focussed on augmenting the existing corpus of Targumic literature by: 1) finding further copies of Targumic literature in un-catalogued or poorly catalogued collections; and 2) analysing recently and newly discovered manuscripts. Previously unknown or unstudied manuscripts of Targum Onkelos, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the Fragment Targums, Tosefta Targum to the Pentateuch, the Targums to Job and Chronicles, and much more besides, have been identified and are now being analysed by the TEXTEVOLVE team. The team has now begun developing automated collation software and exploring how the machine reading algorithms of OCR can accelerate the rate at which we capture and analyse this textual data.
TEXTEVOLVE is well on track to produce results that will go beyond the state of the art in terms of both primary sources and methodology.
The boundaries of any historical discipline are determined by the primary sources available for study. By finding manuscripts that are currently unknown to the scholarly community and also by analysing previously un-studied manuscripts, TEXTEVOLVE has already proved its potential to move the discipline beyond the current state of the art. By the end of the project, we expect to have made a wealth of new primary sources available to the scholarly community.
Traditional approaches to texts that are extant only in multiple variant copies have sought to reconstruct the earliest possible form of the text recoverable by expunging or correcting secondary variants. TEXTEVOLVE, by contrast, adopts the guiding methodological principle that secondary changes also deserve consideration in their own right because they can tell us something about the ongoing function of the texts in the communities that transmitted them. It seeks to apply computer-based methods from the biological sciences to study this textual evolution, drawing an analogy between the way texts that have been repeatedly copied by hand change over time and evolutionary patterns in the natural world.
The boundaries of any historical discipline are determined by the primary sources available for study. By finding manuscripts that are currently unknown to the scholarly community and also by analysing previously un-studied manuscripts, TEXTEVOLVE has already proved its potential to move the discipline beyond the current state of the art. By the end of the project, we expect to have made a wealth of new primary sources available to the scholarly community.
Traditional approaches to texts that are extant only in multiple variant copies have sought to reconstruct the earliest possible form of the text recoverable by expunging or correcting secondary variants. TEXTEVOLVE, by contrast, adopts the guiding methodological principle that secondary changes also deserve consideration in their own right because they can tell us something about the ongoing function of the texts in the communities that transmitted them. It seeks to apply computer-based methods from the biological sciences to study this textual evolution, drawing an analogy between the way texts that have been repeatedly copied by hand change over time and evolutionary patterns in the natural world.