Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Kirk Lowery <KirkLowery AT xc.org>]

Friends,

As Peter pointed out, "easily" available does not mean "free for the
downloading." As far as I know, you can't download it off the net, even if you
pay the price.

Why the cost? Because the BHS is copyrighted material, and a royalty must be
paid. Since it is electronic in form, the cost was--at the time I bought
it--significantly cheaper than buying a copy of BHS in hardcopy.

The other possibility is to purchase a copy of the raw form of MORF, the
morphologically analysed Hebrew Bible. The second field of this database is 
the
BHS text, and it would be trivial to extract that out. But this also costs,
because the owner of this database also must pay that same royalty.

If any of you use the more popular Bible software that offer the Hebrew (Bible
Works, Bible Windows, Logos, etc.), then you own a legal copy of BHS. I'm not
familiar with all the aspects of these programs. If they don't feature an
"export this verse/pericope in Michigan encoding", then communicate with the
vendor and ask that they add this feature.

Give some thought, though, as to whether the expense is worth it to you. If 
you
use the Hebrew Bible in the course of your profession, or if it is a serious
avocation for you, then it's going to be worth it for the time it saves. IMO,
you should have a need for these electronic texts beyond using it for this
forum. If you have a need for an electronic Hebrew Bible for word processing 
and
such, Linguist Software has both fonts and texts. But you can usually cut and
paste from the software I mentioned above that ought to meet your need, if you
already own it.

Give me a few days, and I'll make some inquiries about the present status of
things, how you can order, what the prices are. And I'll post that information
here.

Blessings,

Kirk
________________________________________________________________________
Kirk E. Lowery, Ph.D.                              voice: (215) 572-3845
Associate Director of Academic Computing             fax: (215) 887-5404
Westminster Theological Seminary              email: <KirkLowery AT xc.org>
Philadelphia, PA 19118