  The systematic study of ancient texts including their production,
transmission and interpretation is greatly aided by the digital methods that
started taking off in the 1970s. But how is that research in turn transmitted
to new generations of researchers? We tell a story of Bible and computer across
the decades and then point out the current challenges: (1) finding a stable
data representation for changing methods of computation; (2) sharing results in
inter- and intra-disciplinary ways, for reproducibility and
cross-fertilization. We report recent developments in meeting these challenges.
The scene is the text database of the Hebrew Bible, constructed by the Eep
Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC), which is still growing in detail
and sophistication. We show how a subtle mix of computational ingredients
enable scholars to research the transmission and interpretation of the Hebrew
Bible in new ways: (1) a standard data format, Linguistic Annotation Framework
(LAF); (2) the methods of scientific computing, made accessible by
(interactive) Python and its associated ecosystem. Additionally, we show how
these efforts have culminated in the construction of a new, publicly accessible
search engine SHEBANQ, where the text of the Hebrew Bible and its underlying
data can be queried in a simple, yet powerful query language MQL, and where
those queries can be saved and shared.
