Transcribing Hosea

Posted on Dec 30, 2018

As outlined in the last post, we are using as a base English translation a translation of Hosea by Charles Foster Kent published in Student’s Old Testament: Sermons, Epistles and Apocalypses of Israel’s Prophets (1910).

A transcription of this has just been committed to the GitHub repository as a USFM.db file, and a .usfm file and .rtf file (for opening in a word processor) have also been committed.

This is a faithful transcription of the version Prof. Kent published into USFM, but there are some important caveats we should mention:

In his original published version, Prof. Kent changes the order of some of the verses to illustrate his opinion on the likely original order. We have reverted to the standard order.
We haven’t transcribed headings, side notes or footnotes. The book version is very close to being what we would today consider a study bible, albeit one focussed on textual and scholarly issues rather than the theological or pastoral aspects of the text. It has a large volume of notes and textual analysis which we haven’t even attempted to transcribe.

Now we have our English base text, and the next step is to update it. The next post will set out some of the principals we are using to guide our steps.