Abstract
The Hebrew text of scripture forms a foundational piece of shared culture for Hebrew writers. Hebrew texts through the ages, whether medieval or modern, virtually all draw upon the Hebrew Biblical text in one way or another. The identification of these Biblical citations and allusions is generally a primary prerequisite for the analysis or publication of the text. The automation of this process has long been a desideratum among scholars; however, for many years, an effective solution proved elusive. To be sure, exact citations of Biblical prooftexts are trivial to identify: they are generally introduced with a stock phrase such as “as it is written”, and the exact reproduction of the Biblical texts allows for a quick and easy lookup to determine the source of the quote. However, the overwhelming majority of Biblical text reuse is not in the form of exact citations, but is rather found as a reworking and adaptation of the Biblical text, adjusting the text to fit the new context, while still maintaining a set of linguistic cues in order to keep the connection to the original verse. For instance, a case of Biblical allusion will often be based upon the reuse of a set of lexemes from a given verse, even as those lexemes are adjusted in terms of their tense, person and gender. Additionally, prefixes and suffixes may be added, dropped or altered; additional words may be interpolated; and the order of the lexemes may be altered as well. In this chapter, I present a new algorithm for the identification of Biblical allusions, designed to address all of these challenges.
