Hebrew Text Stripper

 Hebrew Text Stripper

This is a pilot web-app created by David M. Carr, Union Theological Seminary using OpenAI ChatGPT. It has been initially tested and debugged against manually-stripped files, but it is to be used at your own risk. Help improve the tool through using the comment box below to report problems or additional wished-for features.

This web-app builds on work regarding text density and scroll carrying capacity in my article “Background and Aims of a Scroll Approach to the Formation of the Bible” Advances in Ancient Biblical and Near Eastern Research 3 (2023):9–79 (open access at https://doi.org/10.35068/aabner.v3i2.1035; ls per cm figures on last column of spreadsheets of pp. 67-70) and (with Asaf Gayer) “Text Density, Scroll Carrying Capacity and Pre-Biblical Sources: How a Hellenistic Period Shift in Text Density is Relevant to Hypotheses about the Formation of the (Hebrew) Bible.” ZAW 136 (2024):1–27 (spreadsheet comparing text density is stored at this link; column E is characters per square cm).

Input a figure for letter spaces per linear centimeter (e.g. 31.2 ls per cm is a figure calculated from the Berlin 13446 Ahiqar Papyrus) and/or input a letter spaces per square cm figure (e.g. 1.34 for Ahiqar).

Then there are two work-flows.
1) Fetch and strip - you specify different verse ranges, line by line in the “Fetch by Bible Reference” field and then click the “Fetch and Strip” button. Note: the Hebrew text here is sourced from the superb Sefaria database that can be located at https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Tanakh. Many thanks to this foundation for provision of this and many other resources to support study.
2) Paste your own Hebrew text - you use Accordance or another Hebrew text source to copy a given text range or ranges (e.g. specify Hos 1:1-14:8; Amos 1:1-9:15 or Gen 1:1-2:3; 5:1-32 and then copy text) and then paste that text into the “Input text” field before clicking the “Strip text” button. Note that there will be a minimal difference between character counts for files generated from a program like Accordance and the ‘fetch and strip’ workflow, mostly reflections of very slight textual differences between the Accordance text and the text drawn from the Sefaria database.

The webapp will strip the text and output it as a stripped text at the bottom of the page that can be copied and pasted elsewhere. The app also will generate a count of characters (including one space between each word) and figures projecting hypothetical scroll length (based on the letter spaces per linear cm figure inputed) and cm2 hypothetical space covered by characters (based on the letter spaces per square cm figure inputed).