Exploring the Frontiers of Online Biblical Scholarship
The future of information exchange is online. Books will not go away, but their most useful form will be as components of online tagged and searchable databases. Any book worth paying for will have an online dimension or extension. The reference materials we depend on will be continuously updated. The act of identifying a needed resource will coincide in real time with the ability to download and peruse said resource.
And the more things change, the more they will stay the same. Nothing will replace a thorough familiarity with the texts and the realia which interest us. Nothing can substitute for the community effort that stands behind the best scholarship. The community, however, more and more, will be online.
It is sometimes said that the future of biblical studies, and the study of antiquity in general, will be spoken and written in English. Just for fun, let me prove the opposite. As far as I can see, some of the most impressive resources in development online are in German.
There are five sites in German that, so far as I know, lack an equivalent in the English speaking realm. In each case, the lack is grievous.
(2) www.isatex.de
(3) www.wibilex.de (on its way; now www.wilat.de)
(4) bildi.uibk.ac.at
(5) www.bible-orient-museum.ch/
Site number one is
the Karlsruher Virtueller Katalog (KVK).
It was first conceived as a union catalog of German language libraries, but now
includes many other European language libraries. It is not free of glitches, but
is continually expanding. It includes COPAC, the British union catalog, which
is useful on its own. If a few more libraries were added to it, like those in Israel, the
best elsewhere (the Regenstein, HUC, Robarts, the PIB, Harvard, Yale, and so
on), it would come close to a one-stop shop. It even has online booksellers in
the mix should you want them, amazon.de, of course, not amazon.com! The various
amazons seem to share information more and more, so in the end it might not
matter. Question number one: Why don’t we have anything like this in English?
Site number two is the Informations-Stelle für Alt-Testamentliche Exegese (ISATEX). So far the coverage is uneven, but it has many excellent features. It’s great to find in one place master lists of courses and syllabi, webpages, and email addresses of individual scholars; research projects short and long-term with links; museums; and so on. Question number two: German-speaking people have all of the above and more. Why don’t we?
Site number three is the Wissenschaftliche Bibellexikon im Internet (WiBiLex) edited by Michaela Bauks und Klaus Koenen. This is a project of the Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, the same people who bring us the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS). It has just begun, but the sample articles are very promising. More than 2000 articles are planned. This spring the free access encyclopedia will be fully launched with 230 articles from more than 100 authors. Question number three: Wikipedia is pathetic in the field of Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and so on, so it’s not as if an equivalent exists in English. Why isn’t there an up-to-date multimedia online lexicon of the Bible in the language of the empire?
Site number four: the Bibelwissenschaftliche Literaturdokumentation Innsbruck (BILDI). It actually comes with the choice of an English interface. Many of us have access to ATLA and/or JSTOR and so on, so this site may seem superfluous. The bibliographical information is encoded in a format that seems designed to discourage cutting and pasting, which is stupid. But they have the basic principle right. All important bibliographical information in the field should be available free of charge to anyone who wants it. Punkt. Question number four: you know it already.
Site number five emanates from the Bibel+Orient Museum, a sister institution of the Department of Biblical Studies, Freiburg University, Switzerland (where Othmar Keel teaches). It comes with the choice of a German or French interface. Two online projects of the museum are of particular interest. An online course on the “The World of the Bible” is in development. A demo version is available. The quality and graphics of the section on “Bodies of Water” in Palestine/Israel, for example, is superb. For a peek, go here. The 12 week course will be divided into the following modules:
- Geographie
- Archäologie
- Wirtschaft und Soziologie
- Politische Geschichte I: Palästina und Ägypten
- Politische Geschichte II: Palästina und Vorderasien
- Politische Geschichte III: Palästina und der Westen
- Ethnographie I: Israeliten, Aramäer, Ammoniter, Moabiter
- Ethnographie II: Judäer, Phönizier, Philister, Edomiter, Araber
- Religionsgeschichte I: Polytheismus
- Religionsgeschichte II: Monotheismus
- Religionsgeschichte III:
Abrahamitische Religionen
- Die Bibel im Umfeld der altorientalischen Literaturen
The other project is an online catalog of photos and classificatory data of artifacts held by museums and private collectors around the world. The databank contains to date ancient near eastern stamp seal collections of iconographic significance.
There are plenty of excellent resources online in other modern languages. In modern Hebrew, for example. I’m not qualified to provide an overview, since my grasp of Israeli Hebrew is far from perfect. In a future post, I will describe resources online in English that I have found helpful.
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