Work
Andersen has a wide range of research interests, so much so that he has been described as a polymath. As can be seen from his bibliography, he has published research in such diverse fields as archaeology, biblical studies, chemistry, computational linguistics, Hebrew orthography, morphology, and syntax, pseudepigrapha, Semitic languages, sociology, and theology.
Much of his most significant work has been the result of two academic partnerships he formed when he was teaching at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, California in the 1960s. The first was with David Noel Freedman, who was teaching at the San Francisco Theological Seminary. They teamed up commencing in 1965 to write three commentaries on the minor prophets in the Anchor Bible series, which was edited by Freedman. Andersen wrote a fourth commentary on Habakkuk by himself.
The other research partnership was with A. Dean Forbes, who was Project Manager for Computer Speech Recognition Research at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, California. Over a period of more than thirty-five years, Andersen and Forbes have carried out research in the field of computer-assisted corpus linguistics, developing a computer database of all the clauses in the Hebrew Bible. During the initial period of research from 1971 to 1979, Andersen transcribed the entire text of the Leningrad Codex of the Hebrew Bible into machine readable form. The orthographic words were then segmented into grammatical segments. A linguistic dictionary was generated by the computer, which included grammatical information on each segment.
This database enabled Andersen and Forbes to produce a series of computer generated keyword-in-context concordances, as well as analyses of the vocabulary of the Old Testament (see bibliography on computational linguistics). Their database has been licensed to Logos Bible Software and provided with a syntax search engine.
Another area of Andersen’s work arose out of his study of Russian. He became an authority on the book of 2 Enoch, a book of the Pseudepigrapha preserved in the Old Church Slavonic language (see bibliography on Pseudepigrapha). He made a number of trips to the Soviet Union, including a visit in January 1989 under an exchange agreement between the University of Queensland and the USSR Academy of Sciences. He spent much time examining ancient manuscripts in various libraries in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), including the Russian National Library (Saltykor-Shchedrin), the Library of the Oriental Institute, and the Library of the Academy of Sciences. He was able to shed light on a number of important manuscripts hitherto little accessed by Western scholars. One of these was the Karasu-Bazar Codex of the Latter Prophets, which may be the oldest extant biblical codex in Hebrew. Another was manuscript A, representing the shorter recension of 2 Enoch, the very existence of which had previously escaped the attention of Western scholars. He also made a visit to Bulgaria in 1986 and published an article on Pseudepigrapha studies there.
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