Timothy Stanley

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On Deleting Digital Hashem

David Auerbach, "Deleting the Digital Name of God." - tabletmag.com/scroll/269413/deleting-the-digital-name-of-god. Interesting brief summary of debates about disposal of sacred digital texts in Jewish thought. Hashem is the Hebrew term which literally translates as "the name" and is typically read in place of the tetragrammaton or other name for God in a given text. Much depends on how the technology displays the name it seems. An unmentioned complication is that parts of the Cairo geniza cited above have been digitized. For instance, scholars at the University of Manchester recently collaborated with the Rylands Library collections. Details on the project and many of its 15,000 fragments can be viewed here. The Rylands library museum also displays a number of Torah scrolls where the name of God has been carefully cut out of the text in order to desacralize them. For those interested in the wider practice of ritual disposal across religious traditions, a helpful monograph on the subject can be found here: The Death of Sacred Texts: Ritual Disposal and Renovation of Texts in World Religions

Reading Room of the John Rylands Library