Ethiopic Manuscripts for the Textual History of the Ethiopic Old Testament (THEOT) Project

THEOT is a project which has been formed to write a preliminary account of the textual history of the Ethiopic Old Testament, i.e., the books shared in common with the Hebrew Bible. The work will require a set of 25 to 30 manuscripts for each book of the Old Testament. Together, the manuscripts must represent the length and breadth of the manuscript tradition. This undertaking would have been impossible even 10 to 15 years ago, but recent developments in manuscript digitization and the digitization of older microfilm collections have now put us in a position to have the necessary array of manuscripts to complete the task. Delamarter is director of the Ethiopic Manuscript Imaging Project which has digitized over 7,000 manuscripts in North America, Ethiopia, Kenya and England, as well as an additional 1,000 Ethiopic manuscripts from microfilm. The THEOT team is finalizing the list of manuscripts to be used in the project, as well as the sample passages (comprising about 50 verses) to be collated from each book. In this presentation, we will discuss the personnel, organization of the project, software tools, and describe the history of the accumulation of the manuscripts that will be used.