| What's It |
| TanakhML Project | Top |
TanakhML Project aims at providing scholars with efficient tools for travelling over the Bible in Hebrew, as well as with a common descriptive language for describing the structure of the Bible according to the Jewish masoretic tradition.
Tanakh, in TanakhML, stands for Torah (תורה, or "Law"), Neviim (נביאים, or "Prophets") and Ketuvim (כתובים, or "Writings"), that is, for the Hebrew Bible, while ML stands for XML.
TanakhML is thus, stricto sensu, that specific language, described according to the XML meta-language, used to express the structure of the Hebrew Bible, or Tanakh (Tanach), as formalised by the Jewish tradition, or Masorah.
Think about TanakhML just like you do about MathML, the Mathematical Markup Language, FpML, the Financial products Markup Language, or even RecipeML, the Recipe Markup Language!
| What You Will Find Here | Top |
| Hebrew Text Browser |
TanakhML Project website provides you with an Hebrew text browser that enables you to travel over the whole Tanakh in its fully vocalised and cantillated version. King James Version is also included - either as a stand-alone text or as a parallel one - to support your readings.
| Verse Structure Analyser |
You will also find here a verse analyser that enables you to analyse (almost) every verse of the non-poetic books of the Bible according to its masoretic cantillation. Verse structure is visually made obvious using a "nested box" layout. This feature - based on Richard L. Goerwitz work (see Credits) - is probably the main added value of our site today.
| Form Concordancer |
A form concordancer will enable you retrieving every occurrence of any formal pattern you may specify. Consonantic, vocalic and mixed patterns can be keyed in through dedicated consonants and vowels keypads.
| Hermeneutic Tools |
Finally, some hermeneutic tools will enable you to explore the Hebrew Bible from a traditional, hermeneutic point of view. Those tools include today: a Gematric Calculator, for calculating the numeric value of a given Hebrew word, a Gematric Concordancer, for retrieving all Hebrew words of the Bible sharing a given numeric value, and a Temura Concordancer, for retrieving all attested anagrams of a given Hebrew word. A Notariqon Concordancer will also be proposed in a next release, for retrieving all attested clauses that are the acrostics of a given Hebrew word.
| Incoming Tools and Features |
Please, refer to our What's Planned section for getting an idea of some functionalities that are planned to be supported in the next months.
| Before Going Further | Top |
| Hebrew Fonts |
You should ensure you got installed at least one complete, Unicode compliant Hebrew font. By complete, we mean: supporting accents as well as vowels and consonants.
Some Unicode compliant Hebrew font systems:
Cardo font is also included, along with valuable keyboards for easily typing Biblical Hebrew, Greek and transliteration, in the Tyndale Unicode Font Kit, freely available, for non-commercial purpose, from Tyndale House, University of Cambridge.
For the time being, best results on this site seem to be displayed using SBL Hebrew font.
| Transliteration Fonts |
Hebrew is also proposed in transliteration. Transliteration, however, uses Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A and Combining Diacritical Marks Unicode areas. If you have any problem for displaying them, just install Gentium Unicode font, freely available from SIL International website.
| Browsers |
Any browser complying with W3C Recommendations, namely XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2, will be able to correctly understand TanakhML pages. And, as all TanakhML generated XML pages are transformed to HTML ones on server side (using Cocoon), you won't need, coupled with your browser, any XSLT interpreter (like MSXML with IE6, for instance).
Some browsers, however, like Mozilla-based ones (Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox), still show today some (little) bugs when displaying fully pointed hebrew text.
Two of them, occurring when Hebrew text is justified, as it is on our site, will affect your display of TanakhML Hebrew pages when using Mozilla-based browsers:
The first one was already listed on mozilla.org's bug-tracking system (see Bugzilla Bug 60546), and a great patch is now proposed by Stephen Blackheath, Wellington, New Zealand, for Firefox 1.0 as well as for Firefox 1.6 alpha 1 (Deer Park).
We reported the second one to Stephen, who added it, as #17, to its list of Mozilla Firefox Hebrew related bugs, but he won't fix it himself, as it has already been fixed in Deer Park, the basis for Firefox 1.5 and later. As Deer Park, however, doesn't fix the first bug, the single Firefox version currently available that fixes both the above reported bugs, and thus that correctly displays a justified, fully pointed hebrew text, is Steve's patched version of Firefox 1.6 alpha 1. Thank you very, very much, Steve, for your valuable contribution!
Finally, it should also be noted that some browsers, like Opera, do not justify at all, and interpret CSS 2 'text-align' property 'justify' value as either 'left' or 'right', depending on current text direction. But this is totally allowed (see CSS 2 Recommendation, 'text-align' property).