Background Materials Revisited

Thanks for your responses. Let me say that the question was never meant to be an either/or, but a matter of primacy. I don’t limit myself to just one! Say, for example, that you were someone who was in to writing software for gathering data about and analyzing old texts like those, which would you put highest in your priority to get done? It takes quite a bit of time and effort to do produce good work, so it might be better to focus on one rather than the other. Both are definitely important, as are the DSS and other works. So, that is the spirit in which the question was asked. I guess I should have made that clear before.

Or to put the question another way, what materials from that area really needs to be focused on by software vendors and database developers? What needs to get the most attention, given a balance of importance and current availability of materials? Let’s take all the ones that Jim at Paleojudaica mentioned:

  1. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha
  2. Dead Sea Scrolls
  3. Josephus
  4. Old Testament Apocrypha
  5. Philo (But not mentioned, though as we know there are significant difficulties in tracing stuff back to the first century sometimes...)
  6. Mishnah

What does Lexel, Bibleworks, Accordance, Logos, you, et al. need to be working on most for scholarship in this regard?