Page 7 - Texte Massoretique Hebreu

Introduction v

This work takes the BFBS and TBS editions of Ginsburg’s Massoretico-
Critical edition of the Hebrew Bible as a useful starting point because they
are of much better quality than any other existing or past edition (which I
have examined), and in many ways this work can be considered a corrected
and expanded version of Ginsburg’s work. A PDF version with the latest cor-
rections and footnotes is available for download from the Bibles.org.uk
website.

The type-setting of the Hebrew text in the traditional way is enormously
complex, and this project uses modern state–of–the–art methods of doing
this, including TEX, pdfLaTEX, Tiqwah, GNU sed, GNU flex and other text
processing tools running under GNU Linux operating system.

The words which have a textual variant note are marked with the circle
above the letter affected by the variant. In cases where the circle above the
affected letter would be obscured by a vowel or an accent, it was shifted to
one of the nearby letters.

Numerous printed editions of the Hebrew Bible were consulted for proof-
reading the base text of this edition. Namely, those of Snaith, Letteris, Keter
Yerushalayim, Stone, BHS, BHK, Koren, Kennicott-DeRossi’s variants, Ja-
cob ben Chayim’s 1524–25 Second Rabbinic Bible, Complutensian Polyglot
and others were used. Also, extensive use of the manuscript facsimiles,
such as the Aleppo Codex, Leningrad Codex, Lisbon Codex and many oth-
ers was made.

I endeavored to create a compact and pleasant to read edition which
can be used by every believer who loves the Lord and desires to keep all his
commandments given to our fathers by the hand of Moses and to search
out the deep things of God foretold by the prophets. What I did not try
to accomplish was to embed the Massorah apparatus into the footnotes of
this work. It properly belongs to be bound in separate volumes, as was
already done by Dr C.D. Ginsburg in his “Massorah compiled from the
Manuscripts”.

The electronic (PDF) version of this work has the following additional
features compared to the printed version:

• Each chapter of the Bible can be listened to while reading, by clicking
on the chapter number (Hebrew letter) in the margin. This feature is
portable across Linux, Mac and Windows platforms and is supported
by the Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 and later.

• There is a bookmark for every book and every chapter within a book
to allow quick navigation of the text using a PDF viewer.

• There are hyperlinked references in the massoretic summaries at the
end of each book which can be clicked to jump at the corresponding
place in the Text.

• The page numbers in the Table of Contents are hyperlinks which can
be followed in a PDF viewer.

• The Biblical Genealogy is presented in the form of a PDF bookmark