Dear Logos

Dear Logos,

I've just spent the past four days tinkering around with your Andersen-Forbes syntactically tagged Hebrew Bible and I have to say: I love it. Honestly, I'm such a geek I have to force myself to take a day off on Sundays. This programme is seriously enriching the way I understand Biblical Hebrew and the way I deal with difficulties in exegesis. I couldn't imagine owning a Bible software programme without it ...

There are two things I'd love to see come out at some point in the future:

1. The database could do with having its semantic tags refined. I think if I had a sophisticatedly tagged semantic database I'd run the risk of never getting off my computer. And I used to hate computers at school! Oh, and given the subjectivity involved in all things semantic and syntactical, perhaps you could get different scholars to make their own contributions. You could then further refine your search engine by adding a button for toggling between different search modes, depending on what scholar we like best.
2. And while we're at it, why not create a poetically tagged database? Again, you could just ask someone like Fokkelman and a few of his competitors to tag the Bible according to colon, strophe, and stanza length, metrical counts, assonance, cases of metonymy and various types of parallelism. Then we could do things like search for cases where subjects and objects cross strophe boundaries, or where particular types of parallelism tend to accumulate. Ooh, I tremble at the thought of it ...

I'm sure that none if this would be particularly difficult to do. After all, Andersen and Forbes have only been working on their project since the '70s. In fact, if you ever do get these projects off the ground, I generously offer to receive a review copy of each programme.

Yours sincerely,

Phil.