Colby Goettel and Professor Kevin Tew, Information Technology

Introduction

Fundamentally, everything in IT is problem solving. I believe it is what has driven all of us into this field, what keeps us going. This project is rooted in problem solving and that’s the direction this paper will take: what the problem was, how it was solved, and what future work is still needed.

The end goal of this project is to create a more idiomatic version of the Bible. Modern typesetting techniques will be used to better display information so that the meaning is clearer and more readily apparent.

Methedology

The authors of the Hebrew Bible communicated information in the physical structure and layout of the Hebrew script. The information in the physical structure and layout of the Hebrew script is lost when translated into plain, English prose, such as in the King James Version of the Holy Bible. Specialized typesetting and rendering software procedures are needed to preserve the Hebrew physical layout, structure, and meaning in modern English translations.

This need becomes especially apparent in poetic verses. Biblical Hebrew poetry has a unique form and it quite different than English poetry. Hebrew poetry is not based off rhyme or meter, but parallelism. Mimicking this form is complex and not very straightforward. Here is a short example from Isaiah 53 : 5 showing some of the complexities of Biblical Hebrew poetry:

When reviewing this example, don’t worry about what the Hebrew means, just remember that it’s read from right to left. And pay attention to the spacing, that’s key.

The lines are indented at different levels (the 5 counts) and the lines are broken into parts (hemistichs). To make matters worse, the level of indentation can vary and there can be zero or more hemistichs.

With that in mind, here’s what’s known:

• Each line is indented at least once, but sometimes more. These indentations need to be vertically consistent. When a new line appears in the middle of a line due to length, the new line needs to be indented as much as its parent line. This also means that new lines must appear and lines cannot bleed off the page.

• Each line can contain multiple sections, but sometimes none. These sections need to be spaced out.

• Not every verse starts on a new line; sometimes the verse starts in the middle of a line.

Results

Macros were written in LATEX that allow easy input of poetic verses. For instance, for the first example in Isaiah, the input is:

\pvab{He was wounded for our transgressions}{He was bruised for our iniquities.}

The macro pvab stands for Poetry Verse (pv), indentation level 1 (a), number of hemistichs 2 (b). This shorthand allows for easy data entry and quick maintenance, meaning that when new verses are input, it’s easy to enter; and when the overall structure needs to be changed, only the macro needs to be changed, not every instance of “pvab” in the Bible.

Discussion

The most immediate piece of future work is abbreviating the macros, possibly by creating another layer of abstraction. For instance, in the main file there are macros pvaa, pvab, pvac, pvad, pdba, pvbb, etc. This could easily be simplified (and should) before more poetic text is input. By doing this sooner rather than later, the amount of maintenance will drop drastically.

All future work on this project is tracked using GitHub’s issue tracker and can be found at http://github.com/cgoettel/bible/issues

Conclusion

This was an enriching project that allowed me to become more intimate with Hebrew, Hebrew poetry, and typesetting methods. These growth areas have already served me well and will continue to do so in the future.

If any future work is performed on this project by anyone else, please do so by filing a ticket and making a pull request through http://github.com/cgoettel/bible. Thank you.