After a recent decision in the courts, we are delighted to announce that our NEH grant has been officially reinstated with a new completion date extended to 2028. This means that both Brent and Drew will once again be able to devote time to move the project into its final stages. We are very excited about this great news and looking forward to the next steps. Even so, we haven’t been entirely inactive during the period of interruption, so we wanted to offer an update on progress to date.
 
Transcriptions
 
Thanks to the hard work of our dedicated transcribers and reconcilers, we are very near completion of all of the necessary transcriptions for Psalms 1–50! We have completed 95% of the major Hebrew and Greek codices we initially set out to transcribe. We just added in images of two more early Hebrew codices, so we will soon have final transcriptions for practically every Hebrew witness from the 11th century and earlier, as well as every major Greek codex from the 5th century and earlier. These data have never been collected and available in one place before.
 
We have also been hard at work transcribing all of the ancient fragments that are extant for Psalms 1-50 in Hebrew and Greek. Drew did fresh editions of all of the Dead Sea Psalm Scrolls, yielding many new identifications and readings that we plan to publish in article form in the months ahead. We have also incorporated 32 of the most important Cairo Genizah manuscripts, for which we are working on finalizing transcriptions. We are also very near completion of transcriptions for an additional 26 early Greek fragments, covering basically every fragmentary Greek manuscript up through the 4th century. Again, this is a first in presenting all of these data to the scholarly community in one place in easily accessible form.
 
We have also received a report from our colleagues on the Digital Kennicott project that they are almost ready to send us their reconstructed transcriptions of all of the 127 late-medieval manuscripts that were collated fully by Kennicott in the 18th century. If that works out, we will be able to incorporate well over 200 manuscript witnesses to the Psalms, which we think would qualify CEHP for the title of an editio critica maior! 
 
Perhaps the biggest remaining challenge is incorporating all of the Hexaplaric material from the Göttingen Hexapla Database. We are strategizing on how best to do that work now and would welcome the assistance of interested volunteers.
 
Collation
 
With parallel work done by our software developer, Troy Griffitts, along with Dennis Voltz of the University of Münster’s Service Center for Digital Humanities, Drew is proud to announce that we have essentially solved the problem of cross-linguistic transcription alignment for our purposes. We have developed AI tools that accurately align the transcriptions in various languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin, and Syriac) with strong quality control measures to ensure that none of the data gets corrupted in the process. With this development, we will save hundreds, if not thousands, of hours that would have been spent manually aligning these texts, and we are now in a position to begin the final collations as soon as the last transcriptions are finalized. This means that completion of a fully functional Digital Edition is not far off.
 
Sample Editions
 
While testing the new AI-assisted Collation Editor, Drew produced a full sample edition of Psalm 3. We actually have sample editions now from different stages for several psalms (Pss 1, 3, 22), but if you want to see the most current vision for the apparatus, click on the “Ps 1:1” box on the edition page and select Psalm 3. The biggest question we’re wrestling with now is whether to distinguish all major semantic differences in the versions (which bear on the questions of translation technique and the history of reception/interpretation) or to ignore all translation differences to create a streamlined apparatus of only genuine Hebrew variants. Right now (and you can see this illustrated in the Ps 3 sample edition), we’re looking to be rather exhaustive in recording translation variants, even if we aren’t convinced they go back to a Hebrew Vorlage. We think this information is potentially interesting and important information to retain, and it is easier to remove it at some point than it is to create it and add it in after the fact. That said, we are curious to hear what our potential readers would prefer! Let us know in a comment below.
 
HBCE Edition
 
The primary goal of the NEH grant has always been the production of a printed edition of an eclectic text of Psalms 1-50 for HBCE. We envisaged the Digital Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter as a means to that end, though it has grown into its own beast with its own unique contribution to the field. Now that we are nearing the final collation editing process, we will be using the data and apparatus to streamline the production of the HBCE volume. But we also still have a lot of work to do sorting through the evidence, coming to conclusions on the various readings, and writing the textual commentary. This will be a huge challenge in itself. If you are the praying type, keep us in your prayers!
 
Looking Ahead
 
We’ve had preliminary conversations with Johannes Schnocks in Münster about the possibility of continuing the work on the Digital Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter to include Psalms 51-150 (if not even more!). So while the rush to finish the transcriptions for Pss 1-50 winds down, we will still have opportunities for those who would like to keep transcribing. If we have enough interest, we may start tasking people with transcribing Pss 51-150 in the various manuscripts in anticipation of possibly expanding the edition. So, if you want to get involved or stay involved, do reach out and let us know!

The judge has now officially ruled in favor of the ACLS-AHA-MLA in their class-action lawsuit against the NEH et al. See details here. We're still trying to sort out what eventual ramifications this might have for the continuation of the project and work on the edition.

I wanted to update you on the CEHP project. Thanks to a generous research grant through the University of Münster, it has become possible to continue working on the project through the end of 2025. Brent and I will use this time to submit several major grant proposals in hopes of procuring long-term funding and bringing the project to full completion. We are also using this time to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the collation process across multiple languages, which will make that part of the project go much faster.

 

In the meantime, we are able to resume managing the transcription work. Thankfully, with the completed assignments submitted by around 100 volunteer transcribers and the dedicated work of our expert reconcilers (if you have completed a transcription assignment, please confirm that your name has been added to the Team page, so we don’t miss anyone), we now have approved project transcriptions for almost all of the major manuscripts we originally intended to include, plus most of the oldest St. Petersburg codices. We have also begun adding in several additional early Greek fragments. And now, with the help of Ben Outhwaite and Kim Phillips from Cambridge, we have started to include all of the most important manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah. We also hope soon to receive 127 additional transcriptions of later medieval manuscripts reconstructed from the old Kennicott collations by our colleagues on the Digitizing Kennicott project. With this wealth of data, we can now say that we are producing the first editio critica maior (large critical edition) of the Hebrew Psalms, in addition to being eclectic and born-digital.

 

If you are interested in taking on another transcription assignment this fall, please reply here or email me to confirm, and I will set up an assignment for you. If you haven't done transcribing in the past but would like to get involved, please fill out our Google form to register your interest. Most of the assignments will be working with Cairo Genizah fragments, which are slightly more complicated (because they are fragmentary), but mostly have the same features as the other Masoretic manuscripts we have already transcribed. If you would prefer to work on early Greek fragments, please let me know, so I can give you an appropriate assignment. Once we have the assignments sorted out, Caleb Punt will post your assignment on the Forum and confirm with you by email.

 

Thanks again to all of you who have contributed, and I look forward to working with many of you again this fall.

Yonat Shimrom has published a nice article on NEH funding cuts for grants in the area of religion that features our CEHP project.

Dear Volunteers and Friends of the Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter Project:

We write you with heavy hearts. We have just learned last week that our federally funded grant through the National Endowment for the Humanities to produce the Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter was summarily terminated without warning by the US federal government. The long and short of this terrible news is that Drew’s position at Duke University must end because there is no longer funding for it, and Brent’s research leave to work on the project is immediately over as well.

This is obviously a major blow to the project and its timely completion. We wanted you to hear it from us, first, before learning of it some other way. We will appeal the decision with the NEH, but we do not expect the appeal to be successful. We are presently considering alternative funding sources, but we have no clear immediate prospects for continuing the research at its previous pace. Drew will need to be seeking regular employment elsewhere, and Brent will be occupied once again full time with teaching and service responsibilities. It seems that the work on the CEHP will, therefore, slow down considerably; indeed it may be on a long hiatus barring some unexpected benevolence.

We are, again, very sorry to report this news. We could never thank each of you enough for all you’ve done for this project and for us. We are forever grateful and we remain committed to bringing this work to completion as opportunity allows. We are convinced it is of great importance for biblical studies, Bible translation, and larger communities of faith, and we also wish to honor the work our volunteers and supporters have done. Indeed, one of the things that makes us most upset about this termination is that it is not just a cancellation of two researchers at a university somewhere. It is a cancellation of the work of some 200 volunteers drawn from across the world—indeed from every continent on the planet except Antarctica. Thankfully, none of that transcription work will be lost, but for the foreseeable future we will be considerably limited in our ability to manage new transcription work and construct the edition itself.

So please accept our heartfelt thanks for your help and service. We welcome your prayers and any suggestions or advice you might offer as we ponder our next steps. If you wish to stay involved with CEHP and help us continue toward our shared goals, we would be happy to know that as well.

Yours sincerely,

Brent and Drew