Submittedhekhal.org . submitted to Aries (Brill) · 2026
Scaffolding Matters More Than the Schema: A Design and Case-Study Report on Targum, a Controlled-Vocabulary Translation Engine for Esoteric Primary Sources
We describe Targum, a controlled-vocabulary translation engine for the esoteric and contemplative primary-source corpus, and report case-study findings from three benchmark passages across two scripts and three traditions. Targum is a layered pipeline (reference resolution, multilingual morphology, hard-constraint glossary, retrieval over a curated scholarly corpus, hermeneutic frame controllers, schema-validated generation, drift audit, registry check, citation verification, and editor sign-off) built over the editorial infrastructure of the Hekhal cross-tradition reference. The architectural design separates the engine (deterministic pipeline) from the scaffolding (per-corpus glossaries, frame controllers, scholarly summaries, and lexicon registries that the engine consumes at generation time). Across three case-study benchmarks (Ibn Arabi Tarjuman al-Ashwaq XI.13-15; the kuntu kanzan Akbarian hadith; Pseudo-Dionysius Mystical Theology I.1) we find that the engine's distinctive value over standard PD translation is realized when the corpus scaffolding is built, and that schema enforcement alone, without a post-LLM existence check against actual infrastructure on disk, produces a failure mode we call vacuous compliance: structurally valid output referencing infrastructure that does not exist. Independent adversarial review of one scaffolded output judged it editor-grade. We argue for a design discipline we call registry-grounded translation: every schema-shape commitment must be paired with a post-LLM existence check against the actual infrastructure.
Preprinthekhal.org . target: Aries · 2026
Frame as Citable Parameter: A Reception-Lens Experiment on Plotinus VI.9.11 with the Targum Engine
Computational translation of esoteric primary text presents a problem orthogonal to general-purpose machine translation: the doctrinal content of mystical, contemplative, and apophatic literature is conditioned by the hermeneutic frame the translator brings to the source, and human translation history demonstrates that translators rarely declare the frame they are operating under. We present a single-passage three-reception experiment with the Hekhal Targum engine on the closing of Plotinus's Enneads VI.9.11. The same Greek source is rendered three times under three frame controllers (kataphatic-apophatic, zahir-batin, and a deliberately misapplied PaRDeS as anachronism control), with all other variables held fixed. Four findings: orthographic disposition of the closing monou pros monon tracks frame with each capitalization choice tied in audit trail to a specific frame relation; apparatus density (range cards, cross-references, footnotes) varies systematically by frame and is itself a frame-tracking metric; the deliberately misapplied frame elicits register-decorum awareness from the engine (controller suppressed in body, misapplication flagged in audit trail, cross-tradition resonance surfacing only as homology in apparatus); cross-run experimental design caught a hallucinated MacKenna citation that single-run verification would not have detected. The experiment articulates the methodological position that hermeneutic frame is a tunable, citable parameter of computational translation rather than a hidden default, and that frame-disclosure can be an empirical contribution rather than a philosophical posture.
Preprinthekhal.org · 2026
Heikhalot Rabbati: the First Public-Domain English of Canonical Heikhalot, and the Merkavah-Ascent Frame Controller
Three passages from the foundational text of pre-classical Jewish mysticism (Heikhalot Rabbati 1, 19, 24 -- programmatic prologue, seal-passage instructions, throne-approach climax) translated under a new merkavah-ascent frame controller built for the corpus. The first Targum frame for pre-classical Jewish mysticism, surfacing the central modern scholarly debate (Scholem's experiential-ascent reading vs. Schafer's literary-magical reading) honestly in apparatus rather than collapsing to one reading. Hebrew source: Solomon Aaron Wertheimer's Batei Midrashot (Jerusalem, 1893-1897), public-domain globally. The shipment closes a thirty-year gap in publicly accessible Heikhalot Rabbati: the Morton Smith typescript and Davila's Hekhalot Literature in Translation are copyrighted; Odeberg 1928 covers Sefer Heikhalot / 3 Enoch only. Hekhal's namesake corpus finally gets its first canonical translations at full apparatus density.