Textorah

How it works

A parallel reader for the Hebrew Bible and its oldest witnesses: the Masoretic text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint, each with an English translation where one is available.

Reading a chapter

Choose a book and chapter at the top, or type a reference into Go to (Isa 53:11, 1 Sam 3, sam 3:4, ii kgs 2, ben sira 51). Book names can be abbreviated; a name shared by numbered books (sam, kings, chr, macc) opens the first of them unless you add the number. The arrow keys move between chapters, and the address bar keeps a link to the verse you clicked, so you can bookmark or share a place.

Each row is one verse. Rows follow the Masoretic verse numbering, so the Hebrew, JPS and Samaritan columns line up exactly. The Septuagint is numbered differently in many places (Psalms, Jeremiah, Exodus 35–40, parts of Kings, Proverbs, Daniel, and dozens of chapter boundaries). Its verses are placed against their Masoretic counterparts, and a small tag such as 50:3 shows the Septuagint's own number when it differs. Greek verses that have no Masoretic counterpart (for example the Prayer of Azariah in Daniel 3) appear in reading order as separate rows marked LXX.

Columns

The Texts menu chooses what to show. Under each witness — the Masoretic text, the Samaritan Pentateuch, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint — you can tick the original and any translation available for it: English for all of them; German (Zunz, 1838), Spanish (Ribco), French (Bible du Rabbinat, 1899) and Russian (Da Project, 12 books) for the Masoretic text; French (Giguet, 1872) for the Septuagint. A translation is downloaded only when you choose it. The chips below the menu show the columns in their order: drag a chip (or a column heading) to reorder, press × to hide one; with a chip focused, the ← → keys move it. Your choice is remembered. The Samaritan columns appear only in Genesis–Deuteronomy; the scrolls column appears wherever a manuscript survives, including Ben Sira. Columns marked † are licensed for non-commercial use only.

Words: lexicon and concordance

Hover over any Hebrew word (Masoretic, Samaritan or scroll) or any Greek word to see its dictionary form, Strong's number, a short gloss and its grammar. Click the word to open the concordance on the right: the full lexicon entry, then every occurrence, grouped by book — for Hebrew, separately for the Masoretic text, the Samaritan Pentateuch and the scrolls (with the manuscript named). Click a reference to go there; every form of the word in the chapter is highlighted. You can also type a word or a Strong's number into Lexicon at the top.

In the Masoretic text, a Ketiv (the written form, unpointed) is shown in grey immediately before its Qere (the form read aloud); both carry the Qere's dictionary entry.

Variants

The Samaritan Pentateuch and every scroll are compared word by word with the Masoretic text of the same verse:

In the scrolls, letters in brackets are a modern editor's reconstruction and are never counted as variants; letters with a dotted overline are uncertain; ◦ is a trace of an unreadable letter. Manuscripts written in paleo-Hebrew script, and divine names that square-script scrolls write in paleo-Hebrew, are shown in paleo-Hebrew letters (switchable under Display). Hover a manuscript to see its edition. Display → Dead Sea Scrolls can hide the manuscripts that agree with the Masoretic text, or strip the reconstructions to show only what survives.

The comparison is automatic. It aligns words by spelling, so a transposition or a long rewritten passage can be marked imperfectly, and the spelling rule cannot tell a suffix from a vowel letter. Treat the colours as a finding aid and check a critical edition before building an argument on a reading.

Differences in meaning

A ≠ under a verse number means the Septuagint or the Samaritan Pentateuch differs there from the Masoretic text in what it says; the small number counts the major differences. Click it to list them, and hover a line to see its words in the columns. Whole chapter… lists every such verse.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are compared with the Masoretic text too, scroll by scroll, under each scroll's name: a word or a whole phrase found only in the scroll or only in the MT, and a different word in the same place. A phrase the Septuagint or a scroll adds as a whole (Genesis 1:8 “and God saw that it was good”) is listed as one phrase, not as a series of different words. Spelling differences (the scrolls' fuller spelling, their softer gutturals) are left out, and a different grammatical form (an added “and” or “the”, another suffix) counts as a smaller difference. Letters that are restored, uncertain, or at a fragment's broken edge never count as a major difference. In the Septuagint column, the words of a major difference have a wavy underline; hover one to see the difference, or click it to list all the differences in the verse.

The comparison is automatic. Every Hebrew and Greek word carries a dictionary number, and only words that carry meaning are compared (nouns, names, verbs, adjectives, numbers and negations), so word order, the article, “and” against “but” and grammatical form are ignored. How the Septuagint usually renders each Hebrew word is learned from the whole Bible with a standard statistical word-alignment model; each verse is then compared with that. Major differences are a word found on one side only (when none of its usual equivalents appears on the other side), a different name, different numbers or ordinals (the ages in Genesis 5, seventy or seventy-five in Exodus 1:5), a negation on one side only, and a verse missing from the Septuagint. Smaller differences are a different word in the same place (often a free or contextual translation, sometimes a different meaning), a subject the Greek names explicitly, a repeated word rendered once, and a verb in another person or number.

It describes; it does not judge which text is older or better. It can miss a difference where the same words carry another sense or the grammar changes who does what, and it can flag a usual way of translating; in spot checks about three in four “missing word” findings were real differences. Where the Greek is a free rendering (much of Job and Proverbs) or follows a different order (parts of Jeremiah, Exodus 35–40), the verse is marked “freely rendered”. Tested on 28 well-known differences (among them Genesis 2:2, 4:8 and 5:3, Exodus 1:5, Deuteronomy 32:8, Isaiah 7:14, Psalms 22:17 and 40:7, and the verses the Greek lacks in 1 Samuel 17 and Jeremiah 10), it flagged all of them. Treat it as a guide to where to look, not as a critical apparatus. You can turn the marks off under Display.

Books outside the Hebrew Bible

Besides the Septuagint-only books, the book list has 1 Enoch and Jubilees (“Other ancient books”), shown in R. H. Charles's English with the Qumran copies beside them, and Psalms has a chapter 151. Their scroll copies — like those of Tobit and Ben Sira — have no verse numbers in the data: each fragment is placed by its published identification, and its lines are spread over those verses, so treat the exact verse boundaries as approximate. Aramaic copies (Tobit 4Q196–199 and all of Enoch) are marked “Aramaic” and have no word lookups.

Rabbinic citations

The small ❝ under a verse number opens the passages of rabbinic literature that cite that verse — Mishnah, Tosefta, both Talmuds, Midrash, Targum and Kabbalah (and, if you tick the box, later halakhah, liturgy and thought) — fetched live from Sefaria, so it needs an internet connection. Each passage is listed with Sefaria's date for the work it comes from and a link to read it there. Sefaria's links include allusions and discussions as well as quotations; those it classes as quotations are marked. It works for the Hebrew Bible, Ben Sira (by Kahana's numbering, e.g. the Talmud's quotations of Ben Sira), Tobit and Jubilees. For 1 Enoch, which the rabbis do not quote, it lists instead the Zohar's passages about a “Book of Enoch”.

How the Septuagint is aligned

Each Greek verse is placed by combining three things: the standard table of Septuagint–Masoretic verse correspondences (SIL's lxx.vrs), the table of Masoretic–English numbering differences, and a comparison of the English of Brenton's Septuagint with the JPS English, which confirms each pairing and catches displaced verses. Where no Masoretic verse is similar enough, the Greek verse stands on its own row.

The Greek word data

No openly licensed word-by-word analysis of Brenton's Greek exists, so each Greek word is matched to the most frequent analysis of the same form in the openly licensed Swete Septuagint (Morpheus parser), then to a lexicon entry. About 95% of words are identified. Parses of ambiguous forms (e.g. αὐτοῦ, τοῦ) can be wrong; the card says "automatic parse" as a reminder.