2026-2027 Faculty Research Grants

Oliver Glanz (Old Testament). 

Syntax Analysis for the Dead Sea Scroll Corpus.

The Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) constitute one of the most significant textual discoveries of the twentieth century, profoundly shaping research in biblical studies, Second Temple Judaism, and the history of ancient languages. While substantial progress has been made in digitizing and morphologically annotating the DSS corpus—most recently through the successful Creating Annotated Corpora of Classical Hebrew Texts (CACCHT) project converting Abegg’s DSS data into the Text-Fabric environment—no complete syntactic analysis of the corpus currently exists. This project aims to fill that gap by generating the first comprehensive phrase-level syntactic annotation of the entire DSS corpus using machine learning. Building on our recently published work on identifying phrase boundaries in the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) with transformer-based models, which achieved an accuracy of approximately 95% prior to expert correction, we will adapt and extend this model for the unique challenges posed by the DSS. Unlike the SP, the DSS corpus is fragmentary, multilingual (Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek), and includes both biblical and nonbiblical materials. Accordingly, the model must be retrained to function effectively on incomplete and linguistically diverse textual data. The resulting dataset will follow the established ETCBC syntactic conventions, enabling demarcation of phrase boundaries, so that phrase types, and phrase functions can be established. This will allow, for the first time, systematic syntactic research on the DSS, probabilistic reconstruction of fragmentary clauses, and rigorous comparative linguistic analysis across biblical and non-biblical corpora. By integrating advanced machine learning with established linguistic standards, this project will significantly enhance the analytical infrastructure available for Dead Sea Scroll research, biblical studies and digital humanities scholarship.