34 Theological librarianship • Vol. 12, No. 1 april 2019

overlapping elements. MQL is a powerful language, but it does require some effort to learn. Yet, as easy as the major Bible programs have tried to make searching, it is still difficult to learn how to get the most out of a Bible program. Furthermore, any accommodations for ease of use will also make sacrifices for power and malleability. MQL will do much more than even the most convoluted search in other Bible programs. The SHEBANQ syntax analysis is also available as an Accordance module. Another open source tool, CATSS, has its Septuagint and lexical data available online, though in plain text Betacode format, which requires some knowledge of computer programming for use.81 There are other free tools for the Biblical languages online.82

Those considering computer tools should consider licensing concerns. Porter accurately addresses the issues involved in computer tools for the New Testament in his first two chapters.83 For example, he points out that there are many errors in the text, and when it comes to much more involved analysis where there are many disagreements, it is not clear who decides what is an error and what is not. As Bible programs encode more and more interpretive decisions, this becomes a more significant problem. There is one strength of open source texts: there is (or can be) a clear procedure for discussing differences of opinions and opening tickets for errors in the metadata. Second, open source tools are only limited by the user. For the Bible programs, many questions that a user can ask cannot be answered because of the constraints of either the user interface or the nature of the database underlying the software. With open source texts, if the user can create the algorithms, she can run the query. This is what makes the difficult learning curve of MQL worth the effort: there is no limit to the tool if one learns how to use it! One final note about Bible Software is the consideration of ownership. When a user buys a physical book, it is hers until she loses it, sells it, or destroys it. When she buys commercial Bible software, however, it is hers to use only as long as she maintains the operating system that came out when she bought it, or continues to pay a few hundred dollars every few years to upgrade to the latest version. If any of these companies should ever close, as Bibleworks did recently, or should a company decide that older licenses will no longer be honored, legacy users could be at risk of losing everything. Materials that are protected under a digital rights management system are never owned by the user; they are only rented by the user. This becomes even more disheartening to realize when some modules are more expensive in digital form than they are in print. Computer tools are a great resource for analyzing Hebrew, but the total cost is much more than the initial sticker price.

Resources for the Later Stages of Hebrew

Mishna

Mishnaic grammar contributes to the study of Biblical Hebrew both in its demonstration of the continuation of Hebrew as well as in displaying grammatical features that are important for elucidating some grammatical forms of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Bar Kokhba letters. The dictionaries by Jastrow and Even-Shoshan are adequate for covering the unique vocabulary of the Mishna.84

In terms of grammar, the biggest problem in studying the Mishna is the quality of the texts. Most of the printed editions of the Mishna have gone through a process of editing to try to make Mishnaic Hebrew read more like Biblical Hebrew. Therefore, individual manuscripts are primary tools for the study of Mishnaic

81 Aaron Christianson has made a very valuable tool in the Python computer language that takes Betacode Greek and Hebrew and turns it into Unicode text. See https://github.com/ninjaaron/betacode.

82 See for example Crosswire (http://crosswire.org), Davar4 (http://www.davar3.net/faq.html), and StepBible hosted by Tyndale House Cambridge (https://www.stepbible.org/).

83 Stanley E. Porter, Linguistic Analysis of the Greek New Testament: Studies in Tools, Methods, and Practice (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2015).

84 Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature; Avraham Even-Shoshan, Milon Even Shoshan (Jerusalem: ha- Milon he-Ḥ adash B.ʻA.M., 2006).