Search the Community

If any of my brothers and sisters in Christ can help me with these statistics, I’d greatly appreciate it. My two questions are What is the approximate number of individual lexemes in Codex Ambrosianus/Old Testament Peshitta? (including the deuterocanonical books) What is the approximate number of individual lexemes in Codex Ambrosianus/Old Testament Peshitta, if only the books that are in both the Codex Ambrosianus and the KJV Bible are looked at? This well be more of an “apples to apples” comparison if only the books in the KJV Hebrew bible canon are looked at. Can you please quote your source on if you used Accordance to find these statistics yourself or if you found them via another source? I have often read/heard that Hebrew and Aramaic are very similar. I’m trying to find out just how similar these are in regards to the OT. The number I normally see for the number of individual lexemes in the Hebrew Old Testament is 8,679. I’m trying to statistically compare this with the Aramaic Old Testament. Thank you for your help, Brian P.S. I am not a scholar. I have close to a basic understanding of Aramaic. I am just starting Hebrew. So please no answers that are to technical. Although, I can look definitions up if I need to. An approximate number is fine.

I'd please like to request a function which produces statistics when comparing text versions in a manner that would be really useful for textual criticism. Let me give an example. I want to compare particular texts from the Judean Desert with the medieval Leningrad Codex in order to see just how similar they are. Accordance currently has a compare function, which highlights differences between texts. This function is great, but what I really want is a percentage figure telling me how similar, as a percentage, one text is from another. I'm not entirely sure how this could be done, but the results would be incredibly helpful for quickly calculating the stability of a textual family by measuring multiple extant documents from different time periods. Someone who has already undertaken a similar task, though I don't know by what methodology, is: Armin Lange, 'The Textual Plurality of Jewish Scriptures in the Second Temple Period in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls', in Nora David and Armin Lange (eds.), Qumran and the Bible: Studying the Jewish and Christian Scriptures in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Contributions to Biblical Exegesis and Theology, vol. 57 (Leuven: Peeters, 2010), 43-96.