10 July 2025

Of course, both quotations from Acts 1:20 is connected to an LXX verse, here to Psalms 68:26 (described by number 4234) and Psalms 108:8 (described by number 4988). Unfortunately, ISBTF's LXX-NT database does not have any further details on which words are involved, so it is the researcher's task to identify the words manually.

I am working on a set of scripts that makes it possible to automatically obtain all the given information provided by ISBTF's LXX-NT database, save the entries in BRST format, load them in bibref and analyze them, finally, compare them with my database, and eventually fix or extend my database if possible. Technically, I started to learn how to build a Python module over the archived LXX-NT database. This has been achieved recently in the GitHub project isbtf-lxx-nt-tools. Its folder isbtf_lxx_nt contains a simple submodule tools.py which can be imported from a usual Python program by issuing from isbtf_lxx_nt.tools import *. Also, to exploit the bibref's project advantages, I added another submodule (also called tools.py) for the bibref project (it is located in its folder py/bibref). The two modules, together with a main script, are able to retrieve 202 head entries from ISBTF's LXX-NT database, from which 199 are semantically correct (not just syntactically). The current results are shown in the folder generated-brst of the isbtf-lxx-nt-tools project. For the curious, here is a snapshot of the GraphViz/BRST/SVG/HTML export of the current state.

At the moment, the verse Acts 1:20 is not included in the identified entries, and also, several other entries may look strange, because the scripts do not yet identify the correct positions inside an Old Testament verse. Some of these problems will be covered, hopefully soon. But it must also be noted, that ISBTF's LXX-NT database has a slightly different structure than the concepts in bibref. First of all, bibref works on letters and not words: bibref does not assume that such things like words exist (because the original manuscripts do not contain spaces, nor punctuation). This makes things in bibref more flexible. Also, in bibref, there is no strict border of Bible verses (because originally there was no verse numbering in the Bible at all, no chapters, only books). Therefore, while bibref can handle long passages like Romans 3:10-18 as a single entry, in ISBTF's LXX-NT database this is split into different entries for 3:10, 3:11, 3:12, etc., 3:18. I find bibref's approach more exact and scientifically more useful.

Of course, I do not want to belittle ISBTF's work on all of they did during the decades. It was clearly a huge work of many researchers. Also, it does not only focus on the correspondence of the Greek texts, but it gives an outstanding overview on other translations of the Bible text too.

Update 2025-07-11. By adding a simple substring check for the OT quoted texts, now there are 203 entries that are syntactically correct (3 is not correct semantically, because the NT introduction overlaps the NT quotation text), and 57 new entries (of 72 total now) contain a verbatim match between NT and OT fragments. See the new snapshot here.

Update 2025-07-14. Another significant change is to find the OT passages exactly, inside the given verses. A first approach to fix the NT quotation text and consider all substrings of the OT verse given, is unfortunately quite slow: for each entry a 5-10 minutes of computation is required. This can however be speeded up remarkably by doing the same computation dynamically (see the new bibref command nearest12, it is currently available only in the command line version). This ensures the computation to be extremely fast (it is usually below 1 second). Now, the 131 additional entries can be identified very quickly. In total, processing the 203 entries takes no more than 4 minutes on a recent PC. (ISBTF's LXX-NT database consists of 358 entries.) See the new snapshot here.