THB
The Translator's Hebrew Bible (THB) is a digital hexapla presenting six textual traditions in parallel columns with word-level morphological analysis. Hover any word to see lemma, parsing, and lexical data. Columns can be toggled, reordered, and resized.
Textual Foundations
Hebrew (Masoretic Text): The Westminster Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible (1008/9 CE), with morphological tagging from the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible project.
Greek (Septuagint): Swete's edition of the LXX (1887–1894), based primarily on Codex Vaticanus. The oldest and most complete Greek Old Testament manuscript tradition.
Latin (Vulgate): Jerome's translation completed c. 405 CE, the standard biblical text of Western Christianity for over a millennium.
Samaritan Pentateuch: The Torah as preserved in continuous use by the Samaritan community, with tens of thousands of variants from the Masoretic tradition.
English (KJV): The King James Version (1611), translated from the Masoretic Text for the Old Testament with reference to earlier English and Latin versions.
Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls): Biblical manuscripts from Qumran (c. 250 BCE – 70 CE), the oldest surviving witnesses to many books of the Hebrew Bible. Because the scrolls are physically damaged, the transcription data encodes the condition of each letter — and the site renders that encoding as color:
- Greyed out — reconstructed letters (lacuna; text restored from context inside [ ])
- Muted gold — uncertain reading (?)
- Amber — damaged letter (#)
- Orange — damaged and uncertain (#?)
- Red-orange — severely damaged (##)
- Strikethrough — scribal cancellation (deleted by the original scribe)
- Blue superscript — supralinear insertion (added above the line)
- Green — ancient correction
- Purple — modern editorial correction
Lemma Rarity Coloring
The ◈ button (top-right of each chapter page) activates rarity coloring. A logarithmic sensitivity slider controls the frequency threshold. Lemmas above the threshold appear uncolored; below it, color ramps from gold through amber and orange to red as frequency decreases — using the same palette as DSS damage rendering. The feature applies uniformly across all six traditions.
- Gold — uncommon, approaching the threshold
- Amber — rare
- Orange — very rare
- Red — extremely rare or hapax legomenon
Cross-Tradition Alignment
Hover any word and two layers of semantic highlighting activate simultaneously across all six columns. A light gold background marks the thought unit — the same semantic idea as it appears in each tradition. A full gold background marks the exact word-level counterpart across traditions. Both layers are baked into the page DOM at build time; no network request is made at hover time.
Where traditions diverge structurally — additions, omissions, word-order inversions — words with no direct counterpart still receive thought-level highlighting. Words in verses without alignment data render normally.
Development Philosophy
Open Access: No subscriptions, accounts, or institutional affiliation required.
Technical Simplicity: Runs entirely in the browser. No server-side processing, no plugins, no installation.
Transparent Sourcing: Every text and dataset is attributed to its origin. Coverage gaps and known limitations are documented. See the license page for full attribution and upstream terms.
About the Author
THB was built by Michael Muzar.