Sacred Texts
Hypertext Bible
Tanach without Vowels Index
Original Readme for Tanach
Notes on the ASCII version of the Tanach
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Quite a while ago, I purchased a copy of the Hebrew bible from
the Center for Computer Analysis of Texts (CCAT) at the University of Penn-
sylvania. It is a scholarly edition of the text, called "Biblia Hebraica
Stuttgartensia" or BHS for short. This particular version is called the
Michigan-Claremont BHS and is in machine-readable ASCII form. What this
means is that rather than use a Hebrew character set, ASCII letters
stand in for their Hebrew counterparts; for example, the Hebrew letter
"bet" is B, the Hebrew letter "mem" is M, etc.
The Michigan-Claremont BHS contains much more than this; encoded in
a similar fashion are the vowels (nekudot), cantillation marks (trop)
Ktiv-Kri (written vs. spoken text), paragraph and verse markings, and
much more. It must be stressed at this point that the BHS is a scholarly
and emphatically not a halakhic version of the Hebrew bible, based on
diverse manuscripts rather than traditional Masoretic texts.
For fun, I decided to try and standardize the texts. I wrote some
programs that took the BHS text and stripped out everything but the letters
of the text itself. I standardized the book, chapter and verse headers
and put one sentence of text per line, terminated by a period.
Now I had a problem - how did I know how close the text was to the
traditional tanach? To solve this problem, I downloaded the on-line
Hebrew version found on the internet, wrote some more programs to
convert the Hebrew to my ASCII character set, and compared each book,
file by file. When I found a discrepancy, I used a Mikraot Gedolot
text as arbiter. Using this process, I corrected "my" text.
Only one problem with this. I attended a lecture by a Yeshiva University
Bible professor, who informed me that the standard Mikraot Gedolot
text is not a halakhicly "correct" text (or as he put it, "produced by
a Christian publisher and an apostate Jewish assistant.")
Back to square one. Using a different source, I obtained the tanach
files from a commercial product (that will remain nameless), converted
them again to my format for comparison purposes, and this time used the
Koren tanach as the arbiter to resolve differences (on the say so of the
aforementioned Professor.)
Thus, I have a final version of the tanach, in ASCII format, which
I am uploading to the internet for anyone to use. The files take up
approximately 1.8M in native format, 700K when zipped with PKZIP, and
800K when compressed on UNIX.
I would enjoy hearing any comments, questions or discrepancies.
Regards,
Steve Gross
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A Note on the files and file formats
The file format is the same for all files: first comes the three letter
abbreviation for the name of the book; e.g., GEN for the book of Genesis,
LEV for Leviticus, etc. Next is a space, followed by the three digit
chapter number, a colon, the three digit verse number and a trailing
space. The rest of the line contains one verse, terminated by a period.
For example, the first verse of the book of Genesis looks like this (a
separate file, "letters.tor" contains the transliteration for the Hebrew
characters):
GEN 001:001 BRASYT BRA ALHYm AT HSMYm VAT HARc.
Each file starts with the same three letter abbreviation of the name
of the book, followed by three letter suffix "tor".
Here is a list of the files in alphabetical order and uncompressed sizes:
1ch.tor 67562 I Chronicles
1ki.tor 74384 I Kings
1sa.tor 75161 I Samuel
2ch.tor 78918 II Chronicles
2ki.tor 69464 II Kings
2sa.tor 62255 II Samuel
amo.tor 11973 Amos
dan.tor 34851 Daniel
deu.tor 81653 Deuteronomy
est.tor 17327 Esther
exo.tor 96011 Exodus
eze.tor 109778 Ezekiel
ezr.tor 23157 Ezra
gen.tor 118606 Genesis
hab.tor 3997 Habakkuk
hag.tor 3430 Haggai
hos.tor 14327 Hosea
isa.tor 100602 Isaiah
jer.tor 124481 Jeremiah
job.tor 54113 Job
joe.tor 5778 Joel
jon.tor 4012 Jonah
jos.tor 58412 Joshua
jud.tor 56863 Judges
lam.tor 9524 Lamentations
lev.tor 67907 Leviticus
mal.tor 5041 Malachi
mic.tor 8331 Micah
nah.tor 3421 Nahum
neh.tor 33090 Nehemiah
num.tor 96698 Numbers
oba.tor 1683 Obadiah
pro.tor 45317 Proverbs
psa.tor 131271 Psalms
qoh.tor 16842 Qohelet
rut.tor 7346 Ruth
sos.tor 7922 Song of Songs
zec.tor 18303 Zechariah
zep.tor 4452 Zephaniah