Text database Hebrew Old Testament

A linguistically annotated and segmented database of the Old Testament is accessible to researches via the web. Created by Professor Eep Talstra and his WIVU team, this database holds the complete text of the Hebrew Bible in the original languages of Classical Hebrew and Aramaic, in such form that it is possible to search for occurrences of grammatical patterns. The Workgroup Informatics at the Free University of Amsterdam (WIVU) is part of the faculty of theology.

DANS has built a website containing a query interface to the WIVU database. This work has been done in the form of a KDP (Small Data Project). The website will be officially launched in the autumn of 2008. This WIVU database is also available as part of the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible (SESB), published by Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft and Nederlands Bijbelgenootschap, and produced by Logos Research Systems Inc.

The technology for this database has been provided by EMDROS which is a front-end on a regular relational database, such as MySQL. This front-end implements the query language MQL. This language is suitable for querying text for patterns that are hiererarchical chunks of objects, such as words, phrases, clauses. MQL in itself is not tied to linguistic applications, it is a generic language to deal with hierarchical structures in linear streams.

The ground work for MQL has been done by Crist-Jan Doedens in his Ph.D. thesis Text Databases. One Database Model and Several Retrieval Languages. 1994. Language and Computers, Number 14. Editions Rodopi Amsterdam. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA. ISBN: 90-5183-729-1.

The driving motivation behind this WIVU project is the interpretation (exegesis) of the biblical text. Wherever there is a grammatical peculiarity, the question arises whether there is some non-standard meaning involved. By means of systematic querying after similar patterns throughout the whole text, it is possible to make better-founded assertions about the meaning.
The new WIVU website has the potential to draw researchers to this valuable resource. At the moment, the website is not a collaboratory. Yet the opportunity to share interesting queries, especially queries that settle a philological query, might prove valuable.