Parallel Texts in the Hebrew Bible, New Methods and Visualizations
This work addresses the problem of identifying and analyzing textual parallels in ancient religious texts for scholars and researchers, but it is incremental as it applies existing computational methods to a specific dataset.
The authors developed an algorithm to detect parallel texts in the Hebrew Bible, presenting results online with synoptic visualizations and highlighting differences, and investigated similarity degrees in a case study of 2 Kings 19-25 and its parallels.
In this article we develop an algorithm to detect parallel texts in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible. The results are presented online and chapters in the Hebrew Bible containing parallel passages can be inspected synoptically. Differences between parallel passages are highlighted. In a similar way the MT of Isaiah is presented synoptically with 1QIsaa. We also investigate how one can investigate the degree of similarity between parallel passages with the help of a case study of 2 Kings 19-25 and its parallels in Isaiah, Jeremiah and 2 Chronicles.