Project Proposal:

“Lishma”: A Curated Open Project Exploring Syntactic Ambiguity and Biblical Exegesis through the Jewish  Calendar Year  

Submitted June 2022

Introduction

The proposed capstone “lishma: Monthly parshanut of Syntactic Ambiguities” is a pilot  for a project that aims to give broad access to a philological method of studying Hebrew  Bible, at variable levels of detail and complexity, to researchers and the general public.  The project is concerned with both products and processes. Ultimately, it aims to produce a robustly linked database of syntactic ambiguities and medieval Jewish biblical commentary as well as an online textbook, and to serve as a platform for collaborative  high-level digital Bible study and scholarship.  

The capstone itself entails the creation and curation of a platform for the exploration of  12 sample cases of syntactic ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible, to be “rolled out” monthly  for public interaction, according to the Hebrew calendar.  

Environmental Scan

Hebrew Bible study

Textual study is a central praxis in Judaism, with the Hebrew Bible as the foundational canonical  corpus followed by the Talmud and additional rabbinic writings. The late 20th century heralded a  burgeoning democratization of Hebrew Bible study, in both public and academic spheres, and  21st century technology has led to further development of digital resources to increase  accessibility of serious Hebrew Bible study. My capstone project draws particular inspiration  from the “gilyonot” of Nehama Leibowitz (1905 – 1997). Nehama personally distributed and  checked thousands of worksheets on a weekly basis, which she copied by mimeograph and  distributed by post to all who requested to be added to her list. She was particularly interested in

discourse, guiding students to explore how commentators were engaging with the text, and with  each other. “What’s bothering Rashi?” is a popular phrase used to summarize her approach.

 A gilayon of Nehama, from https://www.sefaria.org/collections/-גיליונות נחמה  

Nehama’s use of 20th century technology for “mass” (to scale) accessibility and interactivity  presaged the 21st century development of digital resources for Hebrew Bible study. The  following 3 digital resources are representative of this growing phenomenon. They are the ones I  personally use most, in my research, teaching, and personal study: Sefaria; alHatorah; TABS.  The first two platforms are primarily devoted to collecting and digitizing sources, and creating a  robust set of tools including links and search capabilities. TABS is devoted to making Bible  scholarship accessible to non-specialists by inviting academics to publish summaries of their  research. The website is primarily structured according to the traditional liturgical Torah reading  cycle, so that each week of the year new articles are published relating to the Torah portion  (parsha) within that annual cycle. All 3 of the specified websites are tied in various ways to the  Jewish calendar cycle.  

The project is based on courses in Ambiguity and Exegesis taught by Richard H. Steiner of  Yeshiva University (over app. 30 years), which I and many other students have found  influential in their subsequent studies and careers. These students, along with students who  have studied the material with me, will be the first group I will reach out to when the  platform is sufficiently ready to receive input. One of those students, Josh Weiner, has  already done some preliminary work on digital representation of the examples included in  this project, and the capstone builds upon his work.

Syntactic ambiguity

For native English speakers, the book title “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” can serve as a familiar  reference point to consider the topic of syntactic ambiguity. (Lynne Truss, Eats, Shoots &  Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Profile Books, 2003). This title is also  useful for showing how instances of syntactic ambiguity are often inter-related with semantic  and morphological ambiguities, and with questions of punctuation. A key resource for syntactic  categories and for the analysis of biblical Hebrew syntax in the project is Bruce K. Waltke and M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake,IN: Eisenbrauns, 1990. I will also make use of my class notes and handouts from Richard Steiner’s course in Syntactic  Ambiguity and Biblical Exegesis. At a future date, I hope to invite other students of Steiner’s to  contribute course material that they have saved and to dedicate a space for either preserving  these artefacts, possibly as scans or possibly in some other form. 

Photocopy of a course handout of R.S. Steiner, Biblical Syntax, Yeshiva  University, 1987, containing handwritten and typed sources, mimeographed, along with my  handwritten notes.

Crowdsourcing

My capstone project aims to use small-scale crowdsourcing to enable users to engage the  platform as producers as well as users. Such public crowdsourcing is common in scientific  research, especially in the gathering of quantitative data. See for example,  https://www.zooniverse.org/ and https://www.rand.org/. To date, there is not a significant  “Citizen Humanities” along the lines of “Citizen Science.”^[1] I hope to encourage public  contribution by reaching out to people who have studied the method of disambiguation used in  the project. For the capstone, I will primarily use my personal network to invite some of my former students and students of Prof. Steiner’s at Yeshiva University and other colleagues to  contribute. I may also post an invitation on the facebook group “Ask the Bet Midrash” (4.5k  members on 23 May 2022); this would need to be worded carefully, as the group does not support promotional posts.  

I hope that curating the project according to the calendar year will incentivize public  engagement, as there will be a restricted dedicated time period for receiving input on particular  passages.  [note: instead of restricting access temporally, I have posted two versions of the source sheet for each month–one with the sources alone, and one with my analysis of the sources, where interactive commenting is encouraged.  ST 19 Sept. 2023]

Resources

I have received approval for the following request to host the capstone project on Manifold:

I want to host my capstone project for my CUNY DH Masters Degree on Manifold:  “lishma: Monthly parshanut of Syntactic Ambiguities.” This project will present 12  cases of syntactic ambiguity in the Hebrew Bible, correlated to the Jewish calendar,  together with medieval Jewish commentaries related to the textual ambiguity. It will  provide an open space for commenting on the analyses.

I had opened a Googledoc (here) when I first intended to crowdsource the design of the  project. I hope to develop the project fully on Manifold, but I may find it necessary to return  to this Googledoc and additional Googlesheets to develop the different components of the  project.  [ST update: In the end, I produced all of the sourcesheets as Googledocs, which I then integrated into Manifold. I would love to re-format the presentation in the future, to be more user-friendly.]

The list of biblical passages follows, attached to the corresponding Hebrew calendar month.  Links to the primary texts are to www.alHatorah.org, with supplementary use of  www.sefaria.org.  

For each example, a text (“page”) will be created that will consist of

• The passage from the Hebrew Bible that contains the syntactic ambiguity and an  explanation of the tie to the Hebrew month.

• A list of excerpts from medieval Jewish Biblical exegetes who comment on the passage  in a way that is relevant to analyzing the ambiguity

• An analysis of the ambiguity. Where relevant, bibliographic material will also be  provided [ST: this has been reconfigured with separate versions of the texts: one with just the sources and one with analysis]