Scripture and Ancient Sources Indexing

We at PI have spent the past several years collecting information on Scripture and ancient religious sources to serve our religious book publishing clients. We noted first that there wasn’t a single resource that covered all the possibilities, from Jewish,  Christian, and Muslim writings to Buddhist and Hindu writings.

Our Sources

We began our research in this area with the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) style book. This book is a good starting resource but does not cover all of the “territory” and is of course restricted to biblical and other related Near Eastern sources. We have also found the Wikipedia lists on these sources informative as a secondary source.

Since we ended up “jumping in” to providing indexes for citings in religious texts, we also did quite a bit of learning as we went, with guidance from individual author clients. Our main challenge was in ascertaining what category of writing some sources belonged in, so we made a practice of keeping samples of sources indexes from specific books to work on consistency in assigning sources to categories of writings. We did note that authors sometimes had their own differing preferences for what category an ancient writer might belong to, especially Christian writers.

The Booklet

As a result of our experience, in 2018, we created our own booklet that distills the knowledge base we’ve developed in creating this type of index. This spring and summer of 2020, we took the experience we’ve garnered since the first edition of our Scriptures & Ancient Sources: Indexing Best Practices and updated to a second edition. We’ve added two appendices this time around: Christian Orthodox canon book order, and more detailed information on using Dead Sea Scroll sources.

You are welcome to download our second edition here for free. We still consider this a work-in-progress, so if you do use it and see a different organization for sources or additional information on non-Near Eastern sources, we’d love to see your insights in the comments. We will continue to update and share Scriptures and Ancient Sources: Indexing Best Practices as we gain new knowledge.