I will present two case studies oriented toward advancing research on texts that have already been read closely by many people, namely the poetic Book of Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. The first case study evaluates various proposals for how to find literary context for a psalm. Most individual psalms are short and contain general language, which makes them difficult to contextualize. Scholars have used three factors to group like psalms together: superscriptions, forms, and canonical placement. I evaluate how similar each pair of psalms is at the level of content, using vocabulary as a proxy, in order to evaluate the usefulness of each of these approaches for finding a psalm’s literary context.
The second case study looks at the use of alliteration in the Book of Psalms, using a rigorously quantitative methodology alongside a critical eye and ear to distinguish artistic soundplay from the results of chance and a limited phonemic inventory. In addition, I will present computational techniques for measuring the amount of alliteration in a corpus.