Textorah

Tobit 13

1
Καὶ Τωβὶτ ἔγραψε προσευχὴν εἰς ἀγαλλίασιν, καὶ εἶπεν, Εὐλογητὸς ὁ Θεὸς ὁ ζῶν εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας, καὶ ἡ βασιλεία αὐτοῦ,
Then Tobit wrote a prayer of rejoicing, and said, Blessed be God that liveth forever, and blessed be his kingdom.
2
ὅτι αὐτὸς μαστιγοῖ καὶ ἐλεεῖ, κατάγει εἰς ᾅδην καὶ ἀνάγει, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ὃς ἐκφεύξεται τὴν χεῖρα αὐτοῦ.
For he doth scourge, and hath mercy: he leadeth down to hell, and bringeth up again: neither is there any that can avoid his hand.
3
Ἐξομολογεῖσθε αὐτῷ οἱ υἱοὶ Ἰσραὴλ ἐνώπιον τῶν ἐθνῶν, ὅτι αὐτὸς διέσπειρεν ἡμᾶς ἐν αὐτοῖς.
Confess him before the Gentiles, ye children of Israel: for he hath scattered us among them.
4
Ἐκεῖ ὑποδείξατε τὴν μεγαλωσύνην αὐτοῦ, ὑψοῦτε αὐτὸν ἐνώπιον παντὸς ζῶντος, καθότι αὐτὸς Κύριος ἡμῶν, καὶ Θεὸς αὐτὸς πατὴρ ἡμῶν εἰς πάντας τοὺς αἰῶνας.
There declare his greatness, and extol him before all the living: for he is our Lord, and he is the God our Father forever.
5
Καὶ μαστιγώσει ἡμᾶς ἐν ταῖς ἀδικίαις ἡμῶν, καὶ πάλιν ἐλεήσει, καὶ συνάξει ἡμᾶς ἐκ πάντων τῶν ἐθνῶν, οὗ ἐὰν σκορπισθῆτε ἐν αὐτοῖς.
And he will scourge us for our iniquities, and will have mercy again, and will gather us out of all nations, among whom he hath scattered us.
6
Ἐὰν ἐπιστρέψητε πρὸς αὐτὸν ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ καρδίᾳ ὑμῶν, καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ ψυχῇ ὑμῶν, ποιῆσαι ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ ἀλήθειαν, τότε ἐπιστρέψει πρὸς ὑμᾶς, καὶ οὐ μὴ κρύψει τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ἀφʼ ὑμῶν· καὶ θεάσασθε ἃ ποιήσει μεθʼ ὑμῶν, καὶ ἐξομολογήσασθε αὐτῷ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ στόματι ὑμῶν, καὶ εὐλογήσατε τὸν Κύριον τῆς δικαιοσύνης, καὶ ὑψώσατε τὸν βασιλέα τῶν αἰώνων· ἐγὼ ἐν τῇ γῇ τῆς αἰχμαλωσίας μου ἐξομολογοῦμαι αὐτῷ, καὶ δεικνύω τὴν ἰσχὺν καὶ τὴν μεγαλωσύνην αὐτοῦ ἔθνει ἁμαρτωλῶν· ἐπιστρέψατε ἁμαρτωλοὶ, καὶ ποιήσατε δικαιοσύνην ἐνώπιον αὐτοῦ· τίς γινώσκει εἰ θελήσει ὑμᾶς, καὶ ποιήσει ἐλεημοσύνην ὑμῖν;
If ye turn to him with your whole heart, and with your whole mind, and deal uprightly before him, then will he turn unto you, and will not hide his face from you. Therefore see what he will do with you, and confess him with your whole mouth, and praise the Lord of might, and extol the everlasting King. In the land of my captivity do I praise him, and declare his might and majesty to a sinful nation. O ye sinners, turn and do justice before him: who can tell if he will accept you, and have mercy on you?
7
Τὸν Θεόν μου ὑψῶ, καὶ ἡ φυχή μου τῷ βασιλεῖ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ, καὶ ἀγαλλιάσεται τὴν μεγαλωσύνην αὐτοῦ. 7aΛεγέτωσαν πάντες, καὶ ἐξομολογείσθωσαν αὐτῷ ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις. 7bἹεροσόλυμα πόλις ἁγίου, μαστιγώσει ἐπὶ τὰ ἔργα τῶν υἱῶν σου, καὶ πάλιν ἐλεήσει τοὺς υἱοὺς τῶν δικαίων. 7cἘξομολογοῦ τῷ Κυρίῳ ἀγαθῶς, καὶ εὐλόγει τὸν βασιλέα τῶν αἰώνων, ἵνα πάλιν ἡ σκηνὴ αὐτοῦ οἰκοδομηθῇ ἐν σοὶ μετὰ χαρᾶς· καὶ εὐφράναι ἐν σοὶ τοὺς αἰχμαλώτους, καὶ ἀγαπήσαι ἐν σοὶ τους ταλαιπώρους, εἰς πάσας τὰς γενεὰς τοῦ αἰῶνος.
I will extol my God, and my soul shall praise the King of heaven, and shall rejoice in his greatness.
8
Let all men speak, and let all praise him for [his] righteousness.
9
O Jerusalem, the holy city, he will scourge thee for thy children’s works, and will have mercy again on the sons of the righteous.
10
Give praise to the Lord, [for he is] good: and praise the everlasting King, that his tabernacle may be built in thee again with joy, and let him make joyful there in thee those that are captives, and love in thee forever those that are miserable.
11
Ἔθνη πολλὰ μακρόθεν ἥξει πρὸς τὸ ὄνομα Κυρίου τοῦ Θεοῦ, δῶρα ἐν χερσὶν ἔχοντες, καὶ δῶρα τῷ βασιλεῖ τοῦ οὐρανοῦ· γενεαὶ γενεῶν δώσουσί σοι ἀγαλλίαμα.
Many nations shall come from far to the name of the Lord God with gifts in their hands, even gifts to the King of heaven; all generations shall praise thee with great joy.
12
Ἐπικατάρατοι πάντες οἱ μισοῦντές σε, εὐλογημένοι ἔσονται πάντες οἱ ἀγαπῶντές σε εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.
Cursed [are] all they which hate thee, and blessed shall all be which love thee forever.
13
Χάρηθι καὶ ἀγαλλίασαι ἐπὶ τοῖς υἱοῖς τῶν δικαίων, ὅτι συναχθήσονται καὶ εὐλογήσουσι τὸν Κύριον τῶν δικαίων.
Rejoice and be glad for the children of the just: for they shall be gathered together, and shall bless the Lord of the just.
14
Ὦ μακάριοι οἱ ἀγαπῶντές σε, χαρήσονται ἐπὶ τῇ εἰρήνῃ σου· μακάριοι ὅσοι ἐλυπήθησαν ἐπὶ πάσαις ταῖς μάστιξί σου, ὅτι ἐπὶ σοὶ χαρήσονται θεασάμενοι πᾶσαν τὴν δόξαν σου, καὶ εὐφρανθήσονται εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.
O blessed [are] they which love thee, [for] they shall rejoice in thy peace: blessed [are] they which have been sorrowful for all thy scourges; for they shall rejoice for thee, when they have seen all thy glory, and shall be glad forever.
15
Ἡ ψυχή μου εὐλογεὶτω τὸν Θεὸν τὸν βασιλέα τὸν μέγαν,
Let my soul bless God the great King.
16
ὅτι οἰκοδομηθήσεται Ἱερουσαλὴμ σαπφείρῳ καὶ σμαράγδῳ, καὶ λίθῳ ἐντίμῳ τὰ τείχη σου, καὶ οἱ πύργοι, καὶ οἱ προμαχῶνες ἐν χρυσίῳ καθαρῷ,
For Jerusalem shall be built up with sapphire, and emerald, and precious stone: thy walls and towers and battlements with pure gold.
17
καὶ αἱ πλατεῖαι Ἱερουσαλὴμ ἐν βηρύλλῳ, καὶ ἄνθρακι, καὶ λίθῳ ἐκ Σουφεὶρ ψηφολογηθήσονται.
And the streets of Jerusalem shall be paved with beryl and carbuncle and stone of Ophir.
18
Καὶ ἐροῦσι πᾶσαι αἱ ῥύμαι αὐτῆς ἀλληλούϊα καὶ αἴνεσιν, λέγοντες, εὐλογητὸς ὁ Θεὸς, ὃς ὕψωσε πάντας τοὺς αἰῶνας.
And all her streets shall say, Alleluia; and they shall praise him, saying, Blessed be God, which hath extolled [it] forever.

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 chips at the top switch columns on and off. Drag a chip (or a column heading) to reorder; 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.

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.

About the texts

What each column is, where it comes from, and what to keep in mind when reading it.

Masoretic Text — Westminster Leningrad Codex

The Masoretic text is the Hebrew Bible as transmitted by the Masoretes, scribal scholars active in Tiberias and elsewhere roughly from the 7th to the 10th century, who fixed its vowel points, accents and marginal notes (the Masorah) around a consonantal text that was already essentially stable by the 1st–2nd century CE. The Leningrad Codex (St Petersburg, Firkovich I B 19 A), copied in 1008/1009 CE in the Ben Asher tradition, is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible; the slightly older Aleppo Codex lost most of the Torah in 1947. It is the base of the standard critical editions (BHK, BHS, BHQ).

The Westminster Leningrad Codex is the public-domain digital transcription of it maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center at Westminster Theological Seminary. In this edition a Ketiv appears as its own unpointed word before the pointed Qere.

JPS 1917 — The Holy Scriptures according to the Masoretic Text

The first English Bible translation produced by a committee of Jewish scholars for the Jewish Publication Society of America, under Max L. Margolis as editor-in-chief, published in 1917. Its language deliberately follows the cadence of the King James and Revised Versions, but its renderings follow the Masoretic text and Jewish exegetical tradition, and it keeps the Hebrew chapter and verse numbering. It is in the public domain; its successor, the New JPS (Tanakh, 1985), is not. The electronic edition used here writes the divine names as “HaShem” and “G-d”.

Septuagint — Brenton's Greek text and the Updated Brenton English

The Septuagint is the Jewish translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek. The Torah was translated in Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE (the Letter of Aristeas tells the legend of 72 translators under Ptolemy II); the other books followed over the next two centuries. Because it was made from Hebrew manuscripts older than the Masoretic text, it often preserves a different Hebrew text: Jeremiah is about one-seventh shorter and differently ordered (a shorter Hebrew text of this type survives at Qumran in 4QJerb,d), Job is about one-sixth shorter, and Esther and Daniel have long additions. It was the Bible of Philo, Josephus and the New Testament writers, and became the Old Testament of the Greek church, which in turn led Jewish translators (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) to produce closer revisions.

Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton published an English translation in 1844 and a Greek–English edition in 1851. His Greek is essentially the Sixtine (Roman) edition of 1587, which follows the 4th-century Codex Vaticanus. It is older and less critical than the modern editions of Rahlfs (1935) and Göttingen, which are under copyright. The English column is the Updated Brenton (Adam Boyd, 2020), Brenton's translation with modernised spelling and wording, dedicated to the public domain.

Samaritan Pentateuch †

The Torah as preserved by the Samaritan community of Mount Gerizim (Nablus), written in the Samaritan script, a descendant of the paleo-Hebrew alphabet. It differs from the Masoretic text in about 6,000 places, most of them spelling or grammar; in about 1,900 of them it agrees with the Septuagint. Some readings are distinctively Samaritan, above all the commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim added after the Ten Commandments (Exod 20:17; Deut 5:21) and “Gerizim” for “Ebal” in Deut 27:4. Many others — harmonising expansions that copy one passage into its parallel — are shared with “pre-Samaritan” Qumran manuscripts such as 4QpaleoExodm and 4QNumb, showing that the text type is older than the Samaritan schism.

European scholars learned of it in 1616, when Pietro della Valle brought a manuscript from Damascus; it was printed in the Paris (1645) and London (1657) Polyglots, collated by Benjamin Kennicott (1776–80) and edited critically by August von Gall (1914–18). The Hebrew here is Aleksandr Sigalov's digital text, based on Kennicott and checked against von Gall; the English is Sigalov's adaptation of the King James Version to the Samaritan readings. For modern scholarship see Abraham Tal's edition of MS Shechem 6 and Stefan Schorch's critical editio maior.

Dead Sea Scrolls and other Judean Desert manuscripts †

Between 1947 and 1956 the remains of about 950 manuscripts were found in eleven caves near Khirbet Qumran. Some 230 are biblical — every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther is represented, from tiny fragments to the complete Great Isaiah Scroll (1QIsaa) — dating from about 250 BCE to 68 CE. They are a thousand years older than the Leningrad Codex. Most are close to the ancestor of the Masoretic text (“proto-Masoretic”), but others agree with the Septuagint (4QJerb, 4QSama in places), with the Samaritan text type, or with neither — evidence that several forms of the text circulated side by side before the Masoretic text prevailed.

Manuscripts from other sites fill out the picture: Masada (before its fall in 73/74 CE; excavated by Yigael Yadin, 1963–65) and the Bar Kokhba refuges of Wadi Murabba'at and Naḥal Ḥever (132–135 CE), whose biblical texts are already virtually identical with the Masoretic text, as well as Naḥal Ṣe'elim, Wadi Sdeir and Naḥal Arugot. The official publication is the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series (Oxford, 1955–2010).

The transcriptions here are those of Martin G. Abegg Jr., James E. Bowley and Edward M. Cook, as converted by the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computer (ETCBC). Each manuscript is labelled with its siglum (e.g. 4QIsad), its DJD number, its find-site and the column or fragment and line. Besides the biblical manuscripts, the copies of Ben Sira, Tobit, 1 Enoch, Jubilees and Psalm 151 are shown under those books. Not every manuscript is in the dataset — notably the Greek scrolls (such as the Greek Minor Prophets from Naḥal Ḥever) are absent, and the Masada Ben Sira scroll is added separately (see Ben Sira).

Ben Sira

The Wisdom of Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira, composed in Hebrew in Jerusalem around 190–180 BCE and translated into Greek by his grandson in Egypt after 132 BCE (his prologue explains the difficulty of rendering Hebrew into Greek). It belongs to the Septuagint and to the Catholic and Orthodox canons (Latin Ecclesiasticus) but not to the Jewish one, although the Talmud and midrash quote it. Its Hebrew text was lost to the West until 1896, when Solomon Schechter, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson identified medieval copies in the Cairo Genizah; ancient Hebrew copies then emerged at Qumran and Masada.

About two-thirds of the Hebrew is now known, from six medieval Genizah manuscripts (A–F, 10th–12th century) and three ancient ones: 2QSir (2Q18; Sir 6:14–15, 20–32), the acrostic of Sir 51:13–20, 30 in the Psalms Scroll 11QPsa (columns 21–22), and the Masada scroll (Mas1h), found by Yigael Yadin in 1964 in a casemate room of the fortress and published in 1965: seven columns with Sir 39:27–44:17, copied in the early 1st century BCE, little more than a century after the author. Its agreement with Genizah manuscript B showed that the medieval copies descend from the ancient Hebrew rather than from a translation back from Greek or Syriac.

Here the book is shown in Brenton's Greek and English. The Hebrew column is the Kahana edition, as transcribed on Hebrew Wikisource and distributed by Sefaria (CC BY-SA): a running text built on the Genizah manuscripts, in which words in [brackets] are Kahana's restorations; chapters with no surviving Hebrew are empty. Kahana numbers the verses in the Hebrew order — in the Greek, two blocks of chapters 30–36 are transposed — so his verses have been matched to Brenton's by content for this site, with his own number shown as “Heb.” where it differs. The scrolls column has the three ancient witnesses; the Masada text is Eric Reymond's transcription from bensira.org. Their placement was made for this site by matching the text; there is no Masoretic text to compare them with, so no variants are marked.

Psalm 151

The Septuagint Psalter ends with a short psalm “outside the number”, in which David recalls tending his father's sheep, his anointing and his victory over Goliath. It belongs to the Greek, Syriac and Ethiopic Bibles but not to the Hebrew one, and was long thought to have been composed in Greek — until the Psalms Scroll from Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa, published by James Sanders in 1965) turned out to contain a longer Hebrew original in its 28th column, as two poems (151A on David's music and anointing, 151B, broken off, on Goliath). The Greek is a condensed translation of them. The psalm is shown as chapter 151 of Psalms, with the scroll's lines under the Greek verses they correspond to.

Tobit

A Jewish novella of the Eastern diaspora (probably 3rd–2nd century BCE): the pious exile Tobit, blinded in Nineveh, sends his son Tobias to recover money in Media, guided by the angel Raphael in disguise; on the way Tobias marries Sarah and drives off the demon Asmodeus. It is in the Septuagint and the Catholic and Orthodox canons. It survives in two Greek forms — a shorter one (Codices Vaticanus and Alexandrinus, printed by Brenton) and a longer one (Codex Sinaiticus) — and the Qumran copies, four in Aramaic (4Q196–199) and one in Hebrew (4Q200), published by Joseph Fitzmyer in 1995, side with the longer form, which is now generally taken as nearer the original. Their verse placement here follows Fitzmyer's identifications.

1 Enoch

A collection of five works ascribed to Enoch, the seventh from Adam who “walked with God” (Gen 5:24): the Book of the Watchers (ch. 1–36, 3rd century BCE), on the angels who descended to the daughters of men; the Parables (37–71); the Astronomical Book (72–82); the Dream Visions (83–90), with the “Animal Apocalypse” of Israel's history; and the Epistle of Enoch (91–108). It is quoted in the Letter of Jude (1:14–15) and is canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, whose Ge'ez version is the only complete text; Greek survives for about a third. Józef Milik published the Aramaic fragments from Qumran Cave 4 in 1976: eleven copies, covering every part except the Parables, the oldest from around 200 BCE. The English is R. H. Charles's 1917 translation from the Ethiopic (public domain). The Astronomical scrolls (4Q208–211) contain a much longer calendar than the Ethiopic; only their few passages that match chapters 76–82 are placed.

Jubilees

A retelling of Genesis and Exodus 1–14 as revealed to Moses on Sinai by an “angel of the presence”, dated by a calendar of 49-year jubilees and a 364-day solar year (mid-2nd century BCE). Like 1 Enoch it is canonical only in the Ethiopian church, whose Ge'ez version is the only complete text; parts survive in Latin, Syriac and Greek quotations. Fragments of about fifteen Hebrew copies were found at Qumran, more than of most biblical books, and are published in DJD 13 (VanderKam and Milik, 1994) and DJD 23. The English is R. H. Charles's 1917 translation (public domain).

Lexicon and concordance data

Hebrew words carry the analysis of STEPBible's Translators Amalgamated Hebrew OT (Tyndale House, Cambridge): extended Strong's numbers — James Strong's 1890 numbering, subdivided to follow the Brown–Driver–Briggs lexicon (1906) — with morphology from the ETCBC and an abridged BDB for definitions. Samaritan and scroll words take the analysis of the Masoretic word they correspond to, or, where they differ, of the same written form elsewhere in the Masoretic text. Greek words are matched through the Swete Septuagint and the Morpheus parser to STEPBible's Greek lexicon, which draws on Abbott-Smith (1922) and Liddell–Scott–Jones.

† Licensed for non-commercial use only. Full credits and licences: Credits and licences.