Apologies from the Editor: I had intended to post this quite literally years ago. Just before the outbreak of COVID, this product was announced and demonstrated. Dr. Leeor Gottleib of Bar-Ilan University created the Equivalent Project which resulted in this incredible new(ish) tool for Accordance. This is from their blog post in January 2020.
Newly available with the release of Accordance Version 13.0.3, the Targums WordMap database is the product of the Equivalent Project – a research initiative headed by Dr. Leeor Gottlieb of Bar-Ilan University – which strives to identify and link the contents of ancient biblical translations back to their equivalents in the Hebrew Bible, thus creating a comprehensive synopsis and thesaurus of equivalents of the ancient translations of the Bible.
Utilizing Accordance Software’s Targums texts, (the most advanced digital Targum editions available with morphological tagging), the Targums WordMap provides users with powerful and previously unavailable cross-textual search capabilities. For example, a user can easily search for any word in the Hebrew Bible and create a comprehensive list of equivalent translations in the Targums. The results could also be narrowed by specifying which Targum texts to include in the search. Users can also create a detailed synopsis of the texts with precise alignment of all words and their equivalents.
For example, here you can see the comparison of the various versions of Genesis 3:15. Some versions are quite a bit long, so the line has to wrap, but here in one pane you can see all the Targumic versions aligned and in comparison to one another. It is an incredibly powerful tool and we are grateful to Dr. Gottlieb’s incredible and continuing work on this project and Accordance for making the tool available.
Follow the links above or check out the YouTube video below, demonstrating the tool.