Monthly log

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This month began with a vacation, during which I began drafting the first two chapters of Leviticus in my Bible translation project. I have not yet gotten the two chapters into good enough shape to go live. One hold-up was that during the process I encountered a difficulty in translating the term ʾiššeh, which is "offering made by fire" in the ASV and WEB. I am working on writing up two pieces on this word: one a general survey of all the biblical uses of the term, with some observations, and the other a somewhat trivial bit about Baruch Levine's methodology in translating Numbers.

Meanwhile, I've also continued picking away at the long task of proofreading the OCRed textual notes to the American Translation of the Old Testament. Those textual notes, which are gradually becoming more presentable, are here.

One of my longer-term projects for this website is to produce a reasonably well-groomed electronic edition of The Bible: An American Translation, produced by the University of Chicago in 1923 (New Testament) and 1927 (Old Testament). That ongoing effort is here: bat-home-page. This month, I've been particularly working on revising the appendix of textual notes -- they are not quite in order yet, but quite a bit of progress has been made: bat-textual-notes. In the process of working on that, I found a note on Genesis which struck me as being not quite right, concerning a city known as Pai or Peor, or perhaps even, if the American Translation is to be believed, "Peo": city-of-peo. Not content to leave this trivial line of inquiry be, I continued with a look at 1 Chronicles 1:50's "Phogor" in the Septuagint: phogor-in-1-chronicles-1-50.

I wrote up a brief introduction to the little-known but still extremely important text-critical work of Benjamin Kennicott and his successor De Rossi: kennicott-benjamin. As for the textual criticism of the New Testament, I've written a short essay that seeks to deconstruct the concept of a "Majority Text" and provide a bit of a defense for the current critical practice of placing a large amount of weight on relatively few early manuscripts of the Greek New Testament: majority-text-concept.

I've been interested, off and on, in how textual change has occurred across copies of the New Testament. As a curiosity, I wrote up (with some images) a bit on the issue of OS vs. THEOS in 1 Timothy 3:16: 1-timothy-3-16. Though it's not anywhere near comprehensive yet, I've started up a list of editions of the Greek New Testament that can be found online: editions-greek-new-testament.

I've written up an essay translation-of-the-bible, which starts with a few ancient translations, but mostly surveys a number of English translations of the Bible. I also wrote a very short piece on the Vetus Latina or "Old Latin" family of translations.

In the early 20th-century Companion Bible, I discovered a major error, described here: 134-emendations. I found a typo in an ASV facsimile, and I found a whole collection of typos not in another ASV text, and memorialized these trivial facts here: asv-errata.

Following up on an observation by Michael Marlowe over a decade ago, I confirmed for myself that almost everyone involved in producing the New English Translation ("NET Bible") was a student or employee of Dallas Theological Seminary: dallas-theological-seminary-net.

While writing up a summary of 2 Maccabees, perhaps in February, I stumbled across a set of interesting typographical errors in an online edition of the KJV. I wrote up this little adventure: kingjamesbibleonline-org, concluding that the website kingjamesbibleonline.org isn't exactly what it claims to be. Unfortunately, I wound up getting distracted from my summary of 2 Maccabees, which remains to this day incomplete: 2-maccabees.

The kingjamesbibleonline.org text led to the discovery of a text associated with a project known as CCAT. Upon finding that there were loads of errors in it, especially in the Apocrypha, I launched a comparison of it with a facsimile of a printed text from Cambridge in 1900. That work, not yet done, is here: ccat-kjv-apocrypha-collation. Around the same time, I discovered the KJV text of Matthew Verschuur. However theologically dubious his project might be, there is no doubt that Verschuur's electronic text is extremely well proofread. I spent some time cataloguing and evaluating the differences between the CCAT text and Verschuur's, which you can find here: ccat-kjv-vs-pure-cambridge.

In the process of researching electronic texts of the KJV, it became clear that any serious research would require access to scanned images of actual physical KJV's. I've compiled a collection of over 100 facsimile's of the KJV, which can be found here: kjv-facsimiles-online. I do not know (2023-9-5) whether there is any longer list of KJV facsimiles available online.

At some point in this investigation, I began to focus on Blayney's 1769 edition(s) of the KJV. One of my earlier posts on this (still incomplete) is pce-v-scrivener, which might more accurately have been called "blayney-according-to-scrivener". While reading through Scrivener's excellent work on the history of the KJV, I decided to make a Scripture index for chapters 1-5, which can be found here: scripture-index-scrivener.

I also wrote up an evaluation of the thirty-odd places where, according to Norton, the "standard" current text of the KJV has departed from Blayney: where-is-blayney.

This month, I released a little essay and collection of links on the Encyclopaedia Britannica: encyclopedia-britannica-etc. In the American Translation project, I got a draft of Leviticus into decent shape by February 6.

This month, I released the a rough draft of the American Translation through Exodus, which you can see here. My plan at the moment is to take a brief detour into a large essay on copyright that I'm working up, and then return to working on the American Translation, while also releasing a new page of links mostly concerned with the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I'd also like to write up brief reviews of Harari's Homo Deus and Harvey Einbinder's The Myth of the Britannica.

For this month, my main project continues to be getting ready for the launch of the electronic edition of the American Translation, which (at least for the books completed by then) will be scheduled for January 2023. I've also beefed up editions-hb a bit so that it now begins with a nice collection of links to facsimiles of various editions of the Hebrew Bible.

From the beginning of November, I focused on (currently offline) work with the text of The Old Testament: An American Translation, published in 1927, cleaning up and reformatting text produced by OCR from a facsimile in order to produce what I hope will be the first electronic edition of this translation. As of November 12th, I had Genesis ready in the form that I intended. Exodus was completed by November 27th, by which point I had also put together a short explanation of some toy problems in personal finance for a young relative, which can be found here.

During the month of October, I worked occasionally on the website, almost entirely on the draft-bible project, where I've worked along from about Genesis 40 to Exodus 5. As of 1 November, it is now a mere two months until The Bible: An American Translation falls into the public domain.

This month, I finished migrating many of the notes I've accumulated so far in my life into this new obsidian-based website. There's definitely a lot of cleaning up of redundancy that will need to be done eventually, but for now I've at least got the material done. At the end of this month, I uploaded an 1872 copy of the Book of Common Prayer and allied materials to archive.org -- you can find a description here. I've also written up a short note on literary register as it relates to the translation of the Hebrew Bible.

My main ongoing project on this site is the draft-bible project, which is currently in rough draft form up to about Genesis 40.

Copyright

This page is released under the CC0 1.0 license.