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The Bible in Hebrew

The Hebrew Bible is the canonical collection of sacred Jewish scriptures, consisting of Torah, Prophets, and Writings, and written in Biblical Hebrew.

The Leningrad Codex is the oldest extant complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. It is dated 1008 CE.

The text of the Leningrad Codex is included in modern critical editions of the Hebrew Bible, such as the Biblia Hebraica (1937), Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (1977), and Biblia Hebraica Quinta (2004–present).

This edition of the Bible in Hebrew is based on the The Westminster Leningrad Codex, a digital version transcribed from the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia and maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research at the Westminster Theological Seminary.

The edition is offered in two versions:

  • a consonantal text. This is the text with consonants only
  • a pointed text. This is the text with the Niqqud system of dots that help determine vowels and consonants

Please note that the consonantal text is identical to the Hebrew Bible that is offered - in Open Access - as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library here on Scholarly Editions.

These versions of the Bible in Hebrew give the text of the Westminster Leningrad Codex. This text is in the public domain. Brill has created CTS compliant TEI XML for it. The resulting publication is in Open Access.

Brill Polyglot Bible is not a scholarly publication. It is a showcase of possibilities.

The aim is to collect the books of the Bible in the major languages of the ancient world and to publish them in CTS compliant TEI XML on Brill Scholarly Editions.

In this way, each Biblical passage has a persistent and unique identifier and can be retrieved. This means, for example, that a reference to a Biblical passage in a monograph or journal article can be turned into a hyperlink, so readers can review the passage and its context.

A further possibility is to connect the passages to Biblical iconography using the Iconclass classification system, so readers can go from, for example, an image of the annunciation in the Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie Online to Luke 1:26-38 in the Brill Polyglot Bible and vice versa.

Brill Polyglot Bible is in Open Access.