Genesis Phase 2 Overview

Here I’ve collected a few thoughts in general on the process so far during the initial Phase 1 and 2 work on Genesis.

• Archaic language will be removed and/or changed to modern speech unless it serves to indicate the royal speech of a declaration (usu. by the LORD).
  • Practically, most cases are being reworked for modern language.
• All wording changes will be properly documented to show that they came from a PD source, or are otherwise ineligible to be forbidden under copyright law.
  • Practically, due to the nature of Phase 2, no changes are being marked; they will either come from the DRA, GNV or in rare cases, WEB or other PD sources. As such they will not be marked and may assumed to be from the PD.
• Changes in markup (ex. colon to semicolon) and the addition of quotes will not be recorded as changes.
• I pray thee will be kept as 'I pray' or 'I pray you' at least in those cases where the Hebrew indicates it should be kept.
  • Practically this is rarely replaced with ‘please’ or some other form of language, but sometimes kept, depending.
• “unto” will be kept for when the LORD is speaking, and possibly for some other kinds of royal declarations and in all other cases people speak “to” each other.
  • It turns out in practical use this is also used for cases where it is an otherwise indirect ‘to’ i.e. ‘Abraham gave all his possessions unto Issac,’ because it was likely not a single act of transference but a process.

Practically there is an element of laziness which has crept into the work such that the first 20 or 25 chapters have had a lot of attention, and the latter half (or so, of Genesis that is) has received somewhat less attention. This is being countered by doing an extra pass after the primary phase 2 pass for readability, with a wider range of PD sources.

I would also justify this by reminding myself that I am not out to change the KJV to DRA wording for the sake of doing so, but to resolve difficult passages into simpler English.

Some unexpected issues which arose during the work. First, organizing the plan of attack was a bit of a chore. I eventually came up with a five phase system described in this post on the blog.

Another problem is consistency in editing. An example is “I pray thee”. In earlier chapters I had just removed it, or sometimes left it, then later around Genesis 37 decided to keep it in as ‘I pray you’. “Behold,” and “As it came to pass” and similar are other somewhat monotonous presentations I would like to change, but I am worried about an underlying consistancy. In this vein also is ‘unto’; for the most part I simply changed it to ‘to’ but now I feel there are many instances where it should remain ‘unto’.

Keeping archaic language as royal speech is another issue. In general there should be a list of consistent policies for editing; so here or in a future post I will make an attempt to codify these in “Editing Guidelines” above.

The app is going away. We did a webpage which worked just as good as any app. However, ultimately DokuWiki was chosen to continue the majority of the NSV (and likely NCB) project with before formatting in publishing software for a print version. Ultimately, the app is a waste of time and what we need is a book or web-copy which people can “just read”, more or less.

I would say that moving into phase 2 has reinvigorated the project. Things are progressing more quickly now.

Now that we know there is a public domain Rashi and a public domain Mishneh Torah is there any worthwhile reason to meander through a “stage two” only to go through the text a third time, adding Rashi and Rambam?

Perhaps not.

Perhaps the process of stages can be congealed into a process of steps. The following seems to be a faster path to where we are heading right now:

• Step 1, Start with a copy of the KJV + Rashi in commentary, and reword the archaic English with Rashi in tow.
• Step 2, Compare against GNV, DRA and other public domain sources in order to get the best reading possible.
• Step 3, bring in commentary by the Rambam, making wording changes if required.
• Step 4, Final read through for consistency. Maybe do some search and replace, formatting, etc.
• Step 5, ongoing – bring in as much commentary from outside as possible and begin to analyze, document and codify things like where the Noachide Laws are, put in rebuttals to various missionary tactics, and so forth (This will be the 'yearly release version').