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