Biblical Hebrew Forum

[Peter_Kirk AT sil.org]

Dear all,

Just to clarify a few points to all of you, before I get even more 
individual questions:

The BHS text which is now available from Oxford Text Archive (which I 
successfully downloaded last night - more than 3 Mb straight to 
Azerbaijan with no breaks is a record!) apparently consists of the 
entire BHS in the encoding used by CCAT, and explained recently on 
this list. It may not be exactly the same text that is available from 
CCAT. It is described as "Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia : 
(Michigan-Claremont text) / compiled by Richard Whitaker and H. Van 
Dyke Parunak ; and revised by the Computer Assisted Tools for 
Septuagint Studies project under Emanuel Tov and Robert A. Kraft".

This text consists only of ASCII characters and includes all 
cantillation marks. That means that it is not easily human readable! 
There is no font for direct viewing of this text in proper Hebrew 
script (that could not be done for a PC; a Mac setup could be made 
e.g. with Worldscript, but I do not know of such a setup existing).

As I recommended in my original posting on this, this text can be 
converted into a viewable form using the SIL Hebrew Font System, which 
is available from www.sil.org (you will also need the CC (Consistent 
Changes) program from the same site). First you need to convert the 
text into a viewable form, using a 3-stage procedure which is clearly 
outlined in the documentation of the SIL Hebrew Font System. You may 
also want to split the text into separate files. Then you can view the 
text with your favourite word processor using the SIL Ezra TrueType 
font included in the package.

It would of course be much more convenient to have the text available 
in this final and directly viewable form. I could make such a text 
available for someone to put on a web site (first give me time to do 
the above steps and check the results) if I could be assured that I 
have the correct permissions to do so. The Oxford site states the BHS 
text is "Freely available for non-commercial use provided that this 
header is included in its entirety with any copy distributed"; does 
that mean it is OK to put a processed form of this text on to a web 
site? Is there, or is there going to be, a web site linked with 
b-hebrew which could host this text?

Peter Kirk