Introducing BEREL: BERT Embeddings for Rabbinic-Encoded Language

We present a new pre-trained language model (PLM) for Rabbinic Hebrew, termed Berel (BERT Embeddings for Rabbinic-Encoded Language). Whilst other PLMs exist for processing Hebrew texts (e.g., HeBERT, AlephBert), they are all trained on modern Hebrew texts, which diverges substantially from Rabbinic Hebrew in terms of its lexicographical, morphological, syntactic and orthographic norms. We demonstrate the superiority of Berel on Rabbinic texts via a challenge set of Hebrew homographs. We release the new model and homograph challenge set for unrestricted use

Paul\u27s Witness to Biblical Monotheism as Isaiah\u27s Servant in Acts

The influence of the book of Isaiah on Luke and Acts has been widely discussed and generally admitted.\u27 It has also become a consensus that Luke used the Septuagint (LXX) Isaiah rather than pre-Masoretic Hebrew texts. The Greek translations of Luke\u27s time had already applied and modified the theology of Hebrew Isaiah in usually small but sometimes significant ways.\u27 It is also important to realize that the Lukan author was not aware that the especially influential section, Second Isaiah;\u27 was a separate writing by a later author. Rather, Luke read the canonical Isaiah as a unified biblical book

Arabic Codes in Hebrew Texts: On the Typology of Literary Code-switching

In the late 1950s, Iraqi Jews left or had to leave Iraq for Israel. In the course of their encounter with a new society, with Hebrew as the national language, most Iraqi Jewish authors found it impossible to continue writing in Arabic in Israel and had to face the literary challenge of switching to Hebrew. As bilinguals, Iraqi Jewish novelists have employed Arabic in some of their Hebrew literary works, including code-switching. Conversational Code-switching is traditionally divided into three types: intersentential code-switching, intrasentential code-switching and tag-switching. This paper focuses on the typology of code-switching in literary texts. It investigates Arabic codes used in three Hebrew novels written by Iraqi Jewish novelists. The paper suggests three main types of literary code-switching in view of the mutual relationship between author, text and reader. These are Hard-Access, Easy-Access and Ambiguous Access codeswitching

Bible Works 10 (Resource Review)

A review of BibleWorks 10. Copyright 1992-2015 BibleWorks, LLC. Programmed by Michael S. Bushell, Michael D. Tan, and Glenn L. Weaver. $389. USB Flash Drive / Download. Version 10.0.5.420

Textual crossroads and transregional encounters: Jewish networks in Kerala 900s-1600s

A Hebrew letter sent from Cochin to Alexandria in ca. 1520 sought legal advice on intracommunal conflicts between a minority group of impoverished but “pure” Jews, who “out of jealousy and hatred” outcaste the majority of Cochin Jews on grounds of non-Jewish slave origins. Similar allegations are recorded much later in 1687 by a Dutch Jewish trader, Mosseh Pereyra de Paiva in his "Notisias dos Judeos de Cochim". This time the allegations are embedded in a legend of a lost Jewish kingdom in Cranganore (Kodungallur). The lost kingdom is mentioned in several Hebrew texts composed in Europe since the 1500s, contrasting it with Calicut. Recorded exclusively by European Jews and missionaries, the legend emerges as a narrative countering Arab-Muslim dominance over the Indian Ocean trade networks and acting upon the realignment of Jewish networks with the growing influence of Christian Europe in maritime South Asia. Centuries-old business partnerships with Arab Muslims and local Māppiḷa merchants are gradually suppressed in Cochin, giving way to new alliances with European— Jewish and Christian—traders. These new alliances are not merely reflected in narrations of an imagined Jewish history in Malabar, they are also shaped by the same narrations. The legends of a glorious Jewish past and unfortunate destruction are woven into interreligious textual networks across regions. By contextualizing these Hebrew texts in maritime Malabar, the paper presents a historical analysis of intra- and intercommunal conflicts and exchanges at the maritime crossroads of early modern Cochin

Pro-angelology in the Ugaritic texts and the Hebrew Bible: a comparative study of the nature and roles of lesser deities

The present study aims to investigate whether or not there are affinities between the Ugaritic texts and the Hebrew Bible with regard to the nature and roles of divine beings ranked as lesser deities.The first chapter investigates that the Ugaritic and biblical Hebrew texts contain evidence of polytheistic backgrounds of the divine assembly, which entails that it consists hierarchically of the higher deities and other lesser deities who are associated with these higher deities.The second chapter examines that the lesser deities in the Ugaritic and biblical Hebrew texts are understood as having a kinship relation to their master god(dess).The third chapter scrutinises that whilst diverse titles are employed to indicate the divine messengers in the Ugaritic texts, they are simply expressed as [???? (?????)] in the Hebrew Bible, which is also attested in the Ugaritic texts.The fourth chapter observes that whilst the lesser deities appear as the warrior deities with a diversity of titles in the context of the divine warfare in the Ugaritic texts, the lesser deities in the Hebrew Bible are represented also as warrior deities through various titles.The last chapter arranges the miscellaneous roles of the lesser deities into the categories of mediator deities, guardian deities, chanter deities, and servant deities represented in both Ugaritic and biblical Hebrew descriptions.Through the striking parallels displayed between the lesser deities of the Ugaritic texts and the Hebrew Bible, this research concludes that the Hebrew religious tradition has shared the same theological conceptions as Ugaritic religion

A comparative dynamical analysis of Hebrew texts

Three Hebrew texts, one of them the Hebrew bible, are investigated using dynamical analysis. First, the average mutual information for each of the texts is determined. The first minimum occurs at T=3 in all three cases, suggesting that 3-letter words are sufficient to study the dynamical properties of the texts. Using 3-letter words as the state space for each of the text, we construct a Markov chain model and compute the relative measure–theoretic entropy for each of the texts and use this tool as a means of comparing the information content of the three texts

Optimizing the neural network training for OCR error correction of historical Hebrew texts

Over the past few decades, large archives of paper-based documents such as books and newspapers have been digitized using Optical Character Recognition. This technology is error-prone, especially for historical documents. To correct OCR errors, post-processing algorithms have been proposed based on natural language analysis and machine learning techniques such as neural networks. Neural network's disadvantage is the vast amount of manually labeled data required for training, which is often unavailable. This paper proposes an innovative method for training a light-weight neural network for Hebrew OCR post-correction using significantly less manually created data. The main research goal is to develop a method for automatically generating language and task-specific training data to improve the neural network results for OCR post-correction, and to investigate which type of dataset is the most effective for OCR post-correction of historical documents. To this end, a series of experiments using several datasets was conducted. The evaluation corpus was based on Hebrew newspapers from the JPress project. An analysis of historical OCRed newspapers was done to learn common language and corpus-specific OCR errors. We found that training the network using the proposed method is more effective than using randomly generated errors. The results also show that the performance of the neural net-work for OCR post-correction strongly depends on the genre and area of the training data. Moreover, neural networks that were trained with the proposed method outperform other state-of-the-art neural networks for OCR post-correction and complex spellcheckers. These results may have practical implications for many digital humanities projects