The MiTAnIm Project

MiTAnIm: Migration and Transformation of Culturally Encoded Animal Imagery in the Septuagint and Its Ethiopic and Syriac Daughter Versions – Translation Studies and Digitized Textual Criticism Approaches for Hebrew Bible Studies

The MiTAnlm project started in August 2023 and is being funded by the SNSF for 5 years. It is a broad-based and thematically bundled research project focussing on "culturally encoded animal imagery" in the Hebrew Bible, which was translated in translation chains from a Semitic language (Hebrew) into an Indo-European language (Greek, from the 3rd century BCE on) and then further translated into two Semitic languages (ancient Ethiopian and Syriac, 4th–7th century CE) and into various Coptic dialects (Afro-Asiatic, 4th–13th century CE). The project team is planning to

1. actively address the socially important themes of ecology, gender, (religious) education, migration, digital sustainability, and religious diversity in the Hebrew Bible studies as well as
2. make current research findings accessible to the general public, including in collaboration with the BIBLE + ORIENT museum,
3. bring to fruition the new approaches to research on the Septuagint that have emerged from translation sciences, and to raise awareness of more complex modelling (particularly in view of Jewish-Christian contacts over the centuries, as reflected in the sources),
4. develop new technologies and methods in the realm of Digitized Textual Criticism for the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint and their Semitic and Coptic daughter versions. (This is the typical high-risk part of an SNSF Starting Grant).

Nesina Grütter, the principal investigator, holds a joint title PhD/ThD thesis (Old Testament & Semitics/Basel and Religious Studies/Strasbourg). Before joining the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Fribourg, she was engaged in teaching and research at the Institute of Old Testament and Biblical Archaeology at the Christian Albrecht University (CAU) in Kiel and at the Department of Old Testament and Semitics in the Faculty of Theology at the University of Basel.

The deputy project leader, Dr Matthias Müller, received his doctorate in Egyptology and Assyriology from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in 2004. In recent years, he has been a postdoctoral researcher in the projects Deconstructing Early Christian Metanarratives: Fourth-Century Egyptian Christianity in the Light of Material Evidence at the Norwegian School of Theology, Religion & Society Oslo, 2020-24, Crossing Boundaries at the Universities of Basel & Liège, 2019-2023, and the Museo Egizio di Torino and Egypt at the transition from the Byzantine to early Arab world, 6th to 8th centuries, 2016-18, at the University of Basel. He has conducted research on the linguistics of Egyptian-Coptic and Semitic languages, the philology of Egyptian-Coptic and language and cultural contact phenomena in antiquity and late antiquity. In the project, he will primarily analyse the Coptic translations of the selected texts but will also contribute to the general data processing and analysis.