They’ve reproduced photos of papyri scrolls recovered over the ages into a computer database. Duke Divinity researchers Brent Strawn and Drew Longacre will then produce a scholarly archetype of the Book of Psalms, by which they mean the earliest recoverable version of this biblical text.
 
Strawn, the D. Moody Smith Distinguished Professor of Old Testament and the principal investigator, and Longacre, a research associate, won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant in September 2023 to compile what they are calling a “Critical Edition of the Hebrew Psalter.”

 
Archeologists over the years have found a few hundred copies of the psalter, some complete, with all 150 Psalms or lyrical poems, and some just fragments. Among the oldest scrolls are 40 fragments discovered in caves near the Dead Sea between 1946 and 1956. There are about 150 medieval manuscripts and many Greek scrolls and codices. 
 
All those manuscripts differ from one another in minor and major ways, mostly due to scribal edits or errors.
 
But most editions of the Psalms found in Bibles today rely on a single manuscript, commonly known as The Leningrad Codex, the oldest extant complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, likely written in Cairo around the year 1008 and housed at the National Library of Russia since 1863. Variations from that single manuscript are usually footnoted under the main text.
 
Strawn and Longacre’s project is an attempt to reconstruct the best readings of the Psalms from all the versions that have been unearthed so far. 

Caleb Punt, a Th.D. candidate at the Divinity School, manages the student volunteers transcribing the manuscripts.
 
“We've got a niche topic here, Old Testament, Hebrew Bible—textual criticism in particular, so to see how many people out there are invested in the project and are willing to volunteer their time and their expertise has been really fun and inspiring as well.”

The project, in its first phase, encompasses the first 50 of the 150 Psalms in the Book of Psalms, a book called Tehillim in Hebrew, meaning “praise songs.” Other scholars have already been selected to complete the remaining 100 psalms. Strawn has editorial oversight for the entire 150 Psalms.
 
Bible scholars have already completed a critical edition of the New Testament books, but none exists for the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible texts.
 
Strawn explained that the idea is to come up with a superior reading of the Psalms reconstructed from the disparate sources he and his team are drawing from.
 
“We presume that the originals are lost to us, that we just don't have the ability to get back to them fully on the basis of the manuscript data we have,” Strawn explained. “But we have enough manuscript data that we can get to the earlier recoverable form.”
 
Students working on transcribing ancient copies have to pay attention to every tiny mark, letter, vowel, and space on the image and transcribe an identical copy using a Hebrew keyboard.
 
To make sure the students are doing it correctly, each page of every manuscript is assigned to two different transcribers. Then they are compared by a third person known as a reconciler.
 
“The reconciler is an expert, who knows the language well and is more familiar with manuscripts,” said Longacre.
 
Students such as Rachel McKelvy, a third-year master of divinity student, said it took a bit of nerve to volunteer, but she’s glad she did.

“There's a learning curve getting used to the online software we are using—especially because I'm a humanities student, so the techy side of things isn't always my strength,” McKelvy said. “But then once you get into it, you kind of know what to look for, and it's easier to get into a flow.”
 
The work is especially rewarding because it’s allowed her to deepen her fluency in biblical Hebrew and also provided her a more informed understanding of what scholarly research is like. McKelvy, who plans to serve a United Methodist Church in her native Alabama after she graduates, said she is considering studying for a Ph.D.

The volunteer transcribers already named on the website will be named in the final book format of the project, as well.
 
That’s exciting for Xu, who is thinking of pursuing a Ph.D. Xu envisions herself as a pastor/scholar. She said she wants “to be a bridge between academia and the church.” Having online tools into biblical texts is key to allowing lay people too to get a feel for the field of textual criticism.
 
“This experience,” she said, “makes me want to do more about textual criticism for the Hebrew Bible.”