A computer data base being developed locally will greatly increase the availability of crucial research materials to scholars and students of the Bible, the Dead Sea Scrolls and related literature.
The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) is collaborating with Brigham Young University and the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation in Jerusalem to produce a comprehensive electronic data base of the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) and related materials on CD-ROM.When completed, the data base will constitute the first major contribution of the Latter-day Saint community to the larger world of Christian and Jewish scholarship on the Bible and related literatures, according to Noel B. Reynolds, president of FARMS and the project's director.
"It will eventually be linked to a comparable data base of Book of Mormon materials for students of the Book of Mormon," he said.
FARMS anticipates that the first edition of the data base will be available in approximately two years. "Progress on the project is contingent on funding, the cooperation of key people and success in resolving any technical problems that may arise," said Reynolds.
The idea for the data base began during discussions between members of the board of the Dead Sea Scrolls Foundation, in particular Truman Madsen, BYU faculty member and former director of BYU's Jerusalem Center, and Weston Fields, executive director of the foundation.
"They recognized that such a data base could aid scholars in the study of the scrolls, and when Madsen pointed out the software development resources at BYU and in Utah County, he was asked to make contacts here to see if such a project could be developed," said Reynolds.
The data base will eventually contain all essential materials scholars will need for DSS research and will make them available instantaneously and in a fully indexed and linked format on screen. It will also give each scholar full access to materials now scattered among many locations.
"Even more importantly, the data base will make it possible for scholars to answer questions about these texts almost instantly, and for the entire set of texts," said Reynolds. "The kinds of searches and comparisons of words and phrases that can take weeks or months when done without a computer can be performed in fractions of a second with the electronic data base."
The data base will be built around computerized transcriptions of the scrolls, which are about 80 percent available now and will become available in their entirety during the course of the project. "Transcribing the scrolls is the most demanding stage of scroll studies because of the deteriorated condition of most of the scrolls," said Reynolds.
The most important components of the data base a concordance, the transcriptions of the scrolls, their translations and photographs. The transcriptions will appear on the screen line by line in the same format as the original scrolls. Translations will be linked to the tran-scriptions, also in a line-by-line format, and each column of transcribed text will be linked to a photograph of that section of the scroll.
In addition to these primary components, the data base may contain Old Testament texts in Greek and Hebrew, the Greek New Testament, the Pseudepigrapha, the Apocrypha and other related documents from the biblical period, said Reynolds.