HebraWiki
The aim of the HebraWiki project is to write (or improve) Wikipedia articles related to Biblical and Jewish Studies at academic standards. Our articles are developed by the students of our faculty under the supervision of our instructors. The development process follows a standard multi-round editorial process supported by HebraWiki courses, workshops and online support. The best articles are published first in our homepage as a primary anchor in order to preserve authorship and the original status warranting scientific quality. The final version is uploaded to the Wikipedia as a copy from our homepage under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) licence.
The project website is available here.
Modelling Religious Mental Representations (MRMR)
The MRMR project, or Modelling Religious Mental Representations, financed by the National Research, Development, and Innovation Office (NRDIO, or NKFIH in Hungarian) runs between January 2025 and December 2028. We shall pose the following questions:
What data structures encode religion in the human brain? What mental software produces rituals, sacred texts, religious institutions, priests, totems and taboos? What process causes one to convert?
To answer these questions and many more, we shall first systematically collect data: from rabbinical sources and medieval Christan liturgies, from surveys and interviews. Hereby we can better understand even small details in the way people (of different historical periods, of different religions, of different educational background) perceive a religious phenomenon, for instance, rituals.
Then, we apply the ritual theory of Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley (1990) to these data. Their starting point is that a religious ritual is like a sentence: a person (the agent or “logical subject” of the sentence) does something to another entity (the patient or “logical object”). This model inspired by linguistics needs to be enriched. For example, introducing the past tense enables us to describe mythological events.
The more data we collect, the more sophisticated our model will be. Employing another framework from linguistics (Optimality Theory and the ICS Architecture) enables us to create a massively distributed computational representation of our religious observations, which resembles more to the structure of the brain, but also to contemporary artificial intelligence technologies.
While the cognitive science of religion (CSR) has been flourishing for 30 years outside Hungary, this project will establish the first Hungarian research group in CSR. Its unique profile is characterized by its focus on linguistics, computation, Judaism and the history of Christian liturgy.
The project website is available here.
Tracking Ancient Bible Publishers: Variant Editions Behind the Hebrew Bible (TAB-PUB)
The TAB-PUB (Tracking Ancient Bible Publishers) project investigates the variant literary editions that can be reconstructed behind the ancient textual forms of the Hebrew Bible. Combining textual criticism, literary criticism and digital humanities, it examines how ancient scribes revised, reorganised and transmitted biblical texts. The Book of Kings serves as the project’s central case study, while the textual history of the Pentateuch — especially the (pre-)Samaritan textual tradition — provides a comparative framework for interpreting these variant literary editions. Its results will be made available through open-access publications, presentations, structured research data and a searchable digital knowledge graph. By integrating text-critical and literary-historical analysis with digital modelling, TAB-PUB aims to offer fresh perspectives on ancient scribal culture, the transmission of biblical texts and the formation of scriptural authority.
The project website is available here.