{"collection":"Bible & Christianity","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/browse/bib/tnv/readme.htm","path":"bib/tnv/readme.htm","source_url":"https://sacred-texts.com/bib/tnv/readme.htm","text":"Sacred Texts\u00a0\nHypertext Bible\u00a0\nTanach without Vowels Index\u00a0\nOriginal Readme for Tanach\n Notes on the ASCII version of the Tanach\n============================================================================\n Quite a while ago, I purchased a copy of the Hebrew bible from\nthe Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT) at the University of Penn-\nsylvania. It is a scholarly edition of the text, called \"Biblia Hebraica\nStuttgartensia\" or BHS for short. This particular version is called the\nMichigan-Claremont BHS and is in machine-readable ASCII form. What this\nmeans is that rather than use a Hebrew character set, ASCII letters \nstand in for their Hebrew counterparts; for example, the Hebrew letter\n\"bet\" is B, the Hebrew letter \"mem\" is M, etc.\n The Michigan-Claremont BHS contains much more than this; encoded in\na similar fashion are the vowels (nekudot), cantillation marks (trop)\nKtiv-Kri (written vs. spoken text), paragraph and verse markings, and\nmuch more. It must be stressed at this point that the BHS is a scholarly\nand emphatically not a halakhic version of the Hebrew bible, based on\ndiverse manuscripts rather than traditional Masoretic texts.\n For fun, I decided to try and standardize the texts. I wrote some\nprograms that took the BHS text and stripped out everything but the letters\nof the text itself. I standardized the book, chapter and verse headers\nand put one sentence of text per line, terminated by a period.\n Now I had a problem - how did I know how close the text was to the\ntraditional tanach? To solve this problem, I downloaded the on-line\nHebrew version found on the internet, wrote some more programs to \nconvert the Hebrew to my ASCII character set, and compared each book,\nfile by file. When I found a discrepancy, I used a Mikraot Gedolot\ntext as arbiter. Using this process, I corrected \"my\" text.\n Only one problem with this. I attended a lecture by a Yeshiva University\nBible professor, who informed me that the standard Mikraot Gedolot\ntext is not a halakhicly \"correct\" text (or as he put it, \"produced by\na Christian publisher and an apostate Jewish assistant.\")\n Back to square one. Using a different source, I obtained the tanach\nfiles from a commercial product (that will remain nameless), converted\nthem again to my format for comparison purposes, and this time used the\nKoren tanach as the arbiter to resolve differences (on the say so of the\naforementioned Professor.)\n Thus, I have a final version of the tanach, in ASCII format, which\nI am uploading to the internet for anyone to use. The files take up \napproximately 1.8M in native format, 700K when zipped with PKZIP, and\n800K when compressed on UNIX.\n I would enjoy hearing any comments, questions or discrepancies.\n Regards,\n Steve Gross\n============================================================================\n A Note on the files and file formats\n The file format is the same for all files: first comes the three letter\nabbreviation for the name of the book; e.g., GEN for the book of Genesis,\nLEV for Leviticus, etc. Next is a space, followed by the three digit\nchapter number, a colon, the three digit verse number and a trailing\nspace. The rest of the line contains one verse, terminated by a period.\nFor example, the first verse of the book of Genesis looks like this (a\nseparate file, \"letters.tor\" contains the transliteration for the Hebrew\ncharacters):\nGEN 001:001 BRASYT BRA ALHYm AT HSMYm VAT HARc.\n Each file starts with the same three letter abbreviation of the name\nof the book, followed by three letter suffix \"tor\".\n Here is a list of the files in alphabetical order and uncompressed sizes:\n1ch.tor 67562 I Chronicles\n1ki.tor 74384 I Kings\n1sa.tor 75161 I Samuel\n2ch.tor 78918 II Chronicles\n2ki.tor 69464 II Kings\n2sa.tor 62255 II Samuel\namo.tor 11973 Amos\ndan.tor 34851 Daniel\ndeu.tor 81653 Deuteronomy\nest.tor 17327 Esther\nexo.tor 96011 Exodus\neze.tor 109778 Ezekiel\nezr.tor 23157 Ezra\ngen.tor 118606 Genesis\nhab.tor 3997 Habakkuk\nhag.tor 3430 Haggai\nhos.tor 14327 Hosea\nisa.tor 100602 Isaiah\njer.tor 124481 Jeremiah\njob.tor 54113 Job\njoe.tor 5778 Joel\njon.tor 4012 Jonah\njos.tor 58412 Joshua\njud.tor 56863 Judges\nlam.tor 9524 Lamentations\nlev.tor 67907 Leviticus\nmal.tor 5041 Malachi\nmic.tor 8331 Micah\nnah.tor 3421 Nahum\nneh.tor 33090 Nehemiah\nnum.tor 96698 Numbers\noba.tor 1683 Obadiah\npro.tor 45317 Proverbs\npsa.tor 131271 Psalms\nqoh.tor 16842 Qohelet\nrut.tor 7346 Ruth\nsos.tor 7922 Song of Songs\nzec.tor 18303 Zechariah\nzep.tor 4452 Zephaniah","title":"Original Readme for Tanach","type":"page"}