The Hebrew Bible: Help

If your browser does not support the Hebrew font (or the requisite font is not installed on your system), Hebrew letters will appear as accented lower case Roman letters. Hebrew is written right to left; these documents use "visual directionality", in which the characters in the Web documents are pre-arranged in the order they appear on the page; browsers need not support bidirectional text to correctly display such files.

To reduce the size of the documents and reduce the time required to download them, the "Cascading Style Sheet" feature is used to specify formatting of various components of the documents. Your browser must therefore also support this facility (all modern browsers do). If things look strange, make sure you haven't disabled Style Sheets in your browser's preferences settings.

When operating systems and Web browsers which support Unicode become widely available, all of this complexity will evaporate back into the clouds of chaos whence it originated, and there will be no difficulty whatsoever including characters from any number of different languages in a single document.

I did, however, perform a "reality check" which persuaded me that the text is, if not perfectly accurate, very close to perfection, at least for the portion I was able to verify. The test consisted of comparing the five books of the Torah with an independently-compiled Torah database which is considered accurate. That database, however, consists of just a string of letters--there are no spaces between words, punctuation marks, or final forms at the ends of words. Comparing just the letters, then, the Steve Gross Torah agreed perfectly with the other database. Erroneous word breaks, etc. may still exist, but at least the letter sequence is correct. I have, to date, located no reliable comparison document for checking the balance of the books of the Bible.

Numbers are then written as a sequence of letters which, when their numerical values are summed, produce the required value. Letters in the sum appear in descending order of magnitude (since Hebrew is written right to left, the largest valued letter will be rightmost in a number). Note that this is not a positional number system and that there is no digit for zero. Hence, the number of letters needed to express a given quantity bears no simple relationship to its magnitude. One writes 100 as ק, 101 as אק, 110 as יק, and 111 as איק.

The numbers 15 and 16 would, if written as the sum of ten and 5 or 6, form fragments of the Divine Name. Consequently, these numbers depart from the norm and are written as the sum of nine plus 6 or 7. Thus fifteen is written as וט and sixteen as זט.

Regrettably, this facility, which provided an efficient and effective means for Web pages to provide their own custom fonts, was destined to become a victim of the "browser wars": current browsers no longer support dynamic fonts and Bitstream have retired the technology. If you have a browser which still supports dynamic fonts and you'd like to try it with that version of the Hebrew Bible, it's still available.

With the demise of dynamic fonts, the only more or less platform and browser independent way to display Hebrew documents remaining is the ISO-8859-8 hybrid ASCII/Hebrew font widely used for Hebrew language E-mail and Web pages. Most modern browsers support it, although some require additional fonts be installed. This edition of the Hebrew Bible uses this ISO-8859-8 encoding of Hebrew, defining it as the document character set and thereby requesting the browser to render it with a compatible font. In general, if the browser correctly displays other Hebrew pages on the Web, it should have no trouble with this Bible.

The process a browser uses to decide how to display a document involves declarations in the document itself, information sent by the Web server regarding the document, user preferences in the browser, and the system configuration and fonts installed on the system on which the browser is running. In short, there are lot of things which can go wrong and when one does, the result is usually, in keeping with the grand tradition of the Web, gibberish on the screen with no direct clues pointing to the culprit.

If your browser is able to display Hebrew documents from other sites but Hebrew pages you place on your own server do not display in a Hebrew font, check whether your Web server is enforcing a default document character set. Due to security problems some years ago, many Apache Web servers have been configured with an "AddDefaultCharset ISO-8859-1" statement in their httpd.conf file. While this should be able to be overridden by a request for the ISO-8859-8 Hebrew character set within a document, this, in fact, does not appear to work and Hebrew characters are output as accented lower case Roman letters. To test whether this is the problem, try displaying the Hebrew document from a local file using a file: URL; if it displays correctly, server configuration is likely to be the problem. If you're using a Microsoft server, I can offer only sympathy, not suggestions.