I am delighted to announce that our pentateuch.digital pilot project has just received a UC Davis Academic Senate Large Grant of $24,000 which will support work from a graduate researcher and developer to scale it up to include all the most widely-agreed-on Pentateuchal building blocks (P, non-P, D) as we apply for more big-ticket funding from the NEH. The pilot phase, competed early 2022, was done with the help of three brilliantly talented people on a shoestring budget. I directed the project in my spare time with Yale MDiv Katie White, UC Davis PhD Aron Tillema, and developer Dan Jutan who the great Digital Humanist @laurenfklein connected us with.
Here is the abstract for the proposed project, which we plan to have up and running by the end of 2024.
Why does the Bible—a font of Western literature with a literary style that has never quite been recreated—repeatedly and flagrantly contradict itself? It creates the effect of contradiction because it tells multiple versions of its foundational story at the same time in its first five books (=the Torah AKA Pentateuch). This way of telling multiple stories at once by interweaving them is something for which modern readers do not have good parallels or precedents because it does not appear in any other Western literature.
For the first time, this project puts the tools of digital humanities in the hands of ordinary readers to let them encounter the Bible in a new way, by visualizing these component stories on their own, letting them compare their shared elements and rearrange them to test out different possibilities for the Pentateuch’s creation. It will allow students and scholars to explore for themselves, in an experimental, hands-on manner, how the core of a major sacred text was composed, how it resembles other sacred texts of its time, and consider what was distinct about the literary and cultural values of ancient Israel and early Judaism that produced it. The project will also create the first sustainable open-access literary edition of the Pentateuch, with themes and compositional elements tagged in the widely used TEI format and posted on Github.
sethlsanders 