Putting Moses in The Matrix: Academic Biblical Studies in a “Post-Development” Digital World

Digital Humanities Forum: Return to the Material. University of Kansas. September 14, 2013: http://idrh.ku.edu/dhforum2013 Eric Welch is at Penn State University.Despite its place as one of the oldest disciplines in the academy, the field of biblical studies has led the way in the adoption of digital avenues for scholarly analysis and the lay consumption of biblical texts. Beginning in the late 1970’s digital pioneers began the process of digitizing the text of the Bible. As texts in the original languages of Greek and Hebrew were digitized, grammatical data was organized in large databases that ultimately enabled complex and sophisticated searching of the biblical text. Three decades later the development of software for biblical research has grown into a small industry, the products of which are a foundational element of modern biblical scholarship. This paper will demonstrate the ways in which the ubiquity of digital resources has facilitated a return to the material in the field of biblical studies. First, this paper explores the implications of conducting digital research in a field where a number of powerful digital tools already exist. Specifically this paper will illustrate how research in a “post-development” world has reinvigorated the scholarly exploration of the biblical text itself as an object of study. With the new dimensions of textual research afforded by digitization scholarly workflow is improved and research design is fundamentally changed, opening the door to questions never imaginable by scholars of the past. Moving from the theoretical to the practical, this paper will then illustrate how software dramatically shortens the feedback loop in research, allowing for low risk experimentation with rapid results. As an example, the author will demonstrate how he recently used grammatically tagged primary sources, linked secondary sources, and graphic statistical feedback to analyze a poem in the book of Zephaniah for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. The field of academic biblical studies offers a powerful long-term view of digital research in the humanities. There is little doubt that digital biblical research has flourished due to the large market for religious texts in digital form; however, the success of digital biblical scholarship has important implications for humanities research beyond the study of religion. The drawn out lifespan of digital analysis in biblical studies demonstrates the remarkable potential for scholarly innovation as a field moves from developing tools to employing them as a natural part of the research process. Even in a traditional field such as biblical studies, in which a finite corpus of texts has been subject to careful analysis for over 2,000 years, the return to the material in digital form is constantly producing new and exciting insights