Passing Down a Corpus of Reminders For the Peshiṭta and the Harklean Bibles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Among the many Syriac manuscripts that have come down to us are types of companion volumes known in Syriac as a ‘booklet’ (kurrāsā) of ‘terms’ (shmāhe), used as guides to the Syriac biblical versions and the Greek Fathers. Modern scholars sometimes refer to these volumes as the Syriac ‘Masora.’ The largest category of these ‘shmāhe booklets’ are large codices that constitute something akin to a shared ‘curriculum’ of excerpted biblical sample texts, in addition to an assortment of tracts. As it turns out, a central part of this ‘curriculum’ included reminders of how to read and interpret certain biblical passages. This article will present the first survey of these hundreds of glosses as they appear across every known model ‘shmāhe booklet.’ The resulting survey helps us better envision what the compilers of these intriguing volumes hoped to pass down and how their work relates to that of later biblical commentators such as Bar ʿEbroyo.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".