As Moshe Koppel mentioned in his March essay for Mosaic, artificial intelligence has an impressive capacity to improve our ability to understand and interpret ancient Jewish texts. Etgar Lefkowitz explains a new application of this technology, developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU):

Engineering students at BGU are now employing Mask Language Modeling to get to the bottom of . . . centuries-old inscriptions which have been marred over time by earthquakes, fires, political conflicts, and other natural and human-related causes.

Previously, epigraphists encountered a major challenge in reconstructing the missing parts of such valuable writings, and had to use time-consuming manual procedures to make out an approximation of the missing content. Through the AI technique, the damaged content, whether single characters, partial words, single complete words, or multiple words, can be reconstructed more efficiently.

Students successfully tested the technology by taking hundreds of sentences from the Bible and applying them to corrupted inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic.

At the moment, Hizballah’s superiors in Tehran probably aren’t giving much thought to the militia’s next move. More likely, they are focused on the fact that their country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, along with the foreign minister, may have been killed in a helicopter crash near the Iran-Azerbaijan border. Iranians set off fireworks to celebrate the possible death of this man known as “butcher of Tehran” for his role in executing dissidents. Shay Khatiri explains what will happen next:

If the president is dead or unable to perform his duties for longer than two months, the first vice-president, the speaker of the parliament, and the chief justice, with the consent of the supreme leader, form a council to choose the succession mechanism. In effect, this means that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will decide [how to proceed]. Either a new election is called, or Khamenei will dictate that the council chooses a single person to avoid an election in time of crisis.

Whatever happens next, however, Raisi’s “hard landing” will mark the first chapter in a game of musical chairs that will consume the Islamic Republic for months and will set the stage not only for the post-Raisi era, but the post-Khamenei one as well.

As for the inevitable speculation that Raisi’s death wasn’t an accident: everything I have read so far suggests that it was. Still, that its foremost enemy will be distracted by a succession struggle is good news for Israel. And it wouldn’t be terrible if Iran’s leaders suspect that the Mossad just might have taken out Raisi. For all their rhetoric about martyrdom, I doubt they relish the prospect of becoming martyrs themselves.