The Hekhal translation engine · v0.1 inaugural release

Targum

A translation engine for the texts no one has translated.

Frontier-model generation, scaffolded over a controlled lexicon, school-and-period scoping, hermeneutic-frame controllers, and a public audit trail. The schema enforces shape; the scaffolding enforces honesty.

Apply for beta access See the engine Browse 18 passages
The gap it is built to fill

Most of the esoteric corpus is functionally untranslated.

The Aramaic of the Zohar, the Heikhalot synoptic, Ibn Arabi's Futuhat, the Ismaili da'wa literature, the Hesychast fathers beyond the Philokalia. What translations exist are largely paywalled or out of print. Serious primary-source access in these traditions is a privilege of the academic library, not a public utility.

Targum is purpose-built for this register. Every weakness of a generic model in this domain, lexical drift, semantic-range collapse, erased ambiguity, frame-blindness, hallucinated authority, becomes a structured field in the output, surfaced rather than smoothed away. It is not a chatbot, and not a replacement for a scholar. It is the editorial infrastructure for translating slowly, with care, at a scale one translator cannot reach alone.

The engine, working

One passage through seven layers

A read-only view of the production pipeline on a single passage of Pseudo-Dionysius. The live engine runs the same path; here it is frozen so you can read what each layer contributes.

targum · engine console read-only
Christian Apophatic ▾

Τριὰς ὑπερούσιε καὶ ὑπέρθεε καὶ ὑπεράγαθε, τῆς Χριστιανῶν ἔφορε θεοσοφίας, ἴθυνον ἡμᾶς ἐπὶ τὴν τῶν μυστικῶν λογίων ὑπεράγνωστον καὶ ὑπερφαῆ καὶ ἀκροτάτην κορυφήν.

Trinity beyond-being and beyond-divinity and beyond-good, overseer of the Christians' divine wisdom, direct us toward the unknown-beyond-unknowing and brilliant-beyond-light topmost summit of the hidden oracles.

hyperousios → beyond-being excess mystikos → hidden pre-12c register logia → oracles footnote MT 1.3
pipeline
  1. 0
    Reference resolution resolved
    Mystical Theology I.1 · Migne PG 3:997 via Perseus
  2. 1
    Morphology parsed
    Greek · CLTK / Stanza router, immutable input
  3. 2
    Controlled glossary 4 terms
    gnophos · mystikos · agnosia · henosis
  4. 3
    Scholarly retrieval 6 sources
    Parker 1897 · Luibheid 1987 · Louth · Turner
  5. 4
    Frame controller kataphatic-apophatic
    excess · coincidence · silence · refusal clauses
  6. 5
    Schema-valid generation 1st attempt
    tool-use · crib / faithful / fluent
  7. 6
    Drift · registry · citation clean
    0 forbidden · 0 fabricated · 4 cited
  8. 7
    Editor sign-off machine-assisted
    no auto-publish
// audit-trail.json
{
  "chunk_id": "dionysius-mystical-theology-1-1",
  "status": "machine-assisted",
  "translation": { "passes": ["crib", "faithful", "fluent"] },
  "frame_controllers_applied": ["[email protected]"],
  "audit_trail": {
    "model": "claude-opus-4-7[session-pipe]",
    "lexicon_revision": "christian-apophatic-v0.3",
    "drift_audit": "clean",
    "registry_check": "clean",
    "citation_check": { "verified": 4, "training_memory": 0 }
  },
  "editor_review": null
}
machine-assisted · drift clean · 0 fabricated refs · awaiting editor sign-off

Every choice is interrogable. See it on a real page: the full output with apparatus →

What it does that a chatbot cannot

Six commitments, structurally enforced

i

Controlled lexicon

Every technical term is retrieved per passage and injected as a hard constraint. Consistency is mechanical, not heroic.

ii

School and period scoping

A Bahir passage is translated against Provencal-Catalan vocabulary, not Lurianic. The corpus identifier selects the register.

iii

Hermeneutic-frame controllers

PaRDeS, zahir-batin, kataphatic-apophatic and four more. The interpretive grammar each tradition uses on itself, made a parameter.

iv

Cross-translator memory

Each draft is compared, passage by passage, against the public-domain corpus: Nicholson, Parker, Mead, Westcott, MacKenna.

v

Letter-mystical detection

Gematria, notarikon, temurah, abjad and isopsephy are computed and footnoted where the source itself performs them.

vi

Public audit trail

Every non-trivial rendering carries a queryable record: lexicon entry, frame, model, drift status, editor sign-off.

What it has produced

The contributions so far

Each passage was drafted by the engine and carries the machine-assisted status until an editor signs it off. Each ships with full apparatus, original-language source of record, and a public audit trail.

18passages published
4corpora live
7frame controllers
4controlled glossaries
119lexicon entries

Akbarian Sufism

zahir-batin
Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam I -- Bezel of Adam Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam II -- Bezel of Shith Fuṣūṣ al-Ḥikam III -- Bezel of Noah Tarjumān al-Ashwāq, Ode I Tarjumān al-Ashwāq XI -- the religion of love Ibn al-Fāriḍ, Al-Khamriyya -- opening verses The Hidden-Treasure hadith

Christian Apophatic

kataphatic-apophatic
Mystical Theology I.1 -- the opening prayer Mystical Theology I.3 -- the divine darkness Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses -- the darkness Maximus, Chapters on Love I.1-3 Mystical Theology I.1 -- v1 baseline (kept as evidence)

Kabbalah

pardes
Sefer Yetzirah §§1-2 -- the thirty-two paths Sefer Yetzirah 1:7 -- the end fixed in the beginning Sefer Yetzirah §§1-2 -- v1 baseline (kept as evidence)

Heikhalot & Merkavah

merkavah-ascent
Heikhalot Rabbati 1 -- the programmatic prologue Heikhalot Rabbati 19 -- the seal-passage instructions Heikhalot Rabbati 24 -- the throne-approach climax

Thumbnails: public-domain manuscript folios via Wikimedia Commons, tradition-matched per text.

Browse the full catalog → Comparative source sheets for teachers → The v1 → v2 honesty proof
We publish our failures
The schema enforces shape; the scaffolding enforces honesty.

The first Pseudo-Dionysius run was an adversarial probe with none of its scaffolding built. The engine fabricated the missing infrastructure: a frame controller that did not exist, a glossary revision that was empty, six lexicon references pointing nowhere. We built the scaffolding, re-ran the same passage, and left both versions live so the difference is preserved as evidence rather than buried.

Read the full account →
Why beta access exists

Editorial labor for an open library

Targum drafts; it does not publish. Nothing flips from machine-assisted to verified without a qualified editor signing off against the source. That sign-off is the bottleneck, and it is exactly what beta access opens: the editor surface, the controlled glossaries, the frame-controller authoring tools.

Every draft a reviewer clears becomes a public, free, rigorously sourced translation on hekhal.org, a corpus with no paywall and never any. This is not a product trial. It is a way to put expert attention where the open library needs it most.

First cohort

Apply for beta access

Researchers in Akbarian Sufism, Kabbalah and Heikhalot, Christian apophatic and Hesychast traditions, Hermetic Neoplatonism, Ismaili esotericism, and adjacent fields. Reviewed personally.

No auto-publish, no spam. We email you only about beta access.