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Elyonim veTachtonim: Electronic inventory of angels, demons and ghosts in the early rabbinic literature
What's in the name?
A passage in tractate bMegillah 11a-b conveys a tradition of three kings who have “ruled over the whole firmament” (Heb. shloshah malkhu bakipah):
Ahab, Ahasuerus and Nebuchadnezzar. These emperors, however, are
surpassed in proficiency and the range of power by king Solomon about
whom it is said that “he ruled over the denizens of the upper world as
well as of the lower (Heb. al haelyonim veal hatachtonim)”. The phrase itself came to function as a merism denoting the totality of the supernatural creatures, both good and evil.
What's inside?
Elyonim veTachtonim is also the code name for the project aimed at reconstructing the comprehensive inventory of the entities of various classes in
the early rabbinic literature [ERL]. Since the task is laborious, the
sources vast and the human resources scarce, the project expands
gradually but slowly.
What's the purpose?
First of all, the database serves the function of a specialized thematic
concordance and as such provides the means for a quick localization and
juxtaposition of all the appearances of a given entity.
Second, the detailed division into separate units allows the
introduction of the quantitative methods of analysis, some of which are
already published in the "summaries"
sheets of the database. Third, the manipulation with the hashtags and
filtering commands makes it possible to discern some particular
regularities like the correlation between the given entity, topic and genre. This is just a small fraction of the potential applications, and the larger the database the more diverse the purposes.
Digital Mishnah
The Digital Mishnah
Project will provide users with a database of digitized manuscripts of the Mishnah
from around the world, along with tools for collation, comparison, and analysis. This demo
provides fully marked up transcriptions of several major witnesses of tractate
Neziqin (Bava Qamma, Bava Metsi'a, and Bava Batra), and
illustrates basic functionalities. In addition the transcribed witnesses include several
Genizah fragments, with an emphasis on those fragments that join other fragments to make up
larger manuscripts
Manuscript witnesses are referred to by the catalog number in the Sussmann Thesaurus
(S+0+Sussmann no.). Printed editions are provisionally given serial numbers.
Last update: 7/17/2014.
The browse function presents metadata and a rendering of the transcription that which can be viewed with their metadata and approximately as laid out in the original text.
The compare function allows for the detailed comparison of witnesses. At its core it runs a set of texts through CollateX, which aligns matching words ("tokens"). The Digital Mishnah site remerges this output with the original textual data and represents the results both as an alignment table, and as a text with critical apparatus. The user can determine the passage, the witnesses, and the order. Because we anticipate that a number of users will prefer a parallel-column ("synoptic") presentation, the collate page shows an arrangement of the selected passage arranged in parallel columns by witness in the user-specified order. Note: The previous version of this set of functions is at collate.
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