Religion

This is a tough one. I don't really intend to write all kinds of tracts about deep religious feelings, etc, like so many home pages have. I'm not even sure if I have deep religious feelings. However, it is true that I've done a lot of work and research on matters that are religious in nature, at least in historical and cultural terms, so I do need a section for them.

My Hebrew education has enabled me to help out the Unicode project in encoding Hebrew and related languages. Not that they didn't already have most of it right, but there are always details that still need fine-tuning, and so I've proposed characters and so on. I've also been helping to work on the encoding of Samaritan writing (the Samaritans are still around, and they use a much older version of the Hebrew alphabet). In so doing, I found myself learning a whole lot about the Samaritans and their culture, and that led to some other fun stuff to research.

I wrote up a page describing some of the differences between the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch and the Masoretic (Jewish) version—for people who don't have the patience to deal with the full detail of my comparative text! There are more essays on the subject of religion I should probably write, but for now I'll just stick with links to the one really useful project I did about it.

Links

• The Torah: Jewish and Samaritan Versions Compared. My masterpiece of comparison. The Masoretic (Jewish) text of the Pentateuch in one column, and opposite it, a column of the Samaritan version, with differences highlighted in boldface. Check it out.
• Overview of the Samaritan Pentateuch, particularly its differences from the Masoretic version.