Without Vowels project

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This site is intended to analyze the meaning of Tanakh (Hebrew Bible, also known as Old Testament among Christians) as it was originally written, without vowels and other niqqudot but only with consonants.

This site was created based on the belief that Tanakh has many different senses because the sense changes when other vowels are inserted instead of the "standard" vowels of Jewish tradition.

Also it is much easier to study partial Hebrew grammar without vowels and other niqqudot.

Start with reading A tutorial for biblical Hebrew without vowels. It is quite simple. This page contains a "quick sheet" for quickly identifying a grammar form having a Hebrew word.

This site follows the rules and thus does not adhere to any particular religion or confession.

The aim of this site

This site is created with a pretentious purpose to collect all possible translations and all commentaries for the entire Hebrew Bible.

Bible interpretation topics

This page contains a list of articles on different topics related to Hebrew Bible. Enjoy reading.

• The list of all verses for which either a translation or a commentary is available
• What Bible says about evolution theory
• Fall of the man
• Cain and Abel: spiritual sense
• Circumcision
• Does God own and control everything?

Technical features of this site

It is a wiki site that is anybody can edit its content.

On this wiki is uploaded the text of Tanakh, verse by verse (you can start here).

Among of a verse are displayed the previous (except of the first verse of a book) and the next (except of the last verse of a book) verses in gray color with the purpose to allow the user to easily relate the text of a verse with the previous and next verses.

Every word is hyperlinked. Clicking the word you come to the page which is intended to contain the grammar of this word (without vowels). The grammar concerns the declined form of the word, not its primary form. (You are however free to create a page for the primary form of the word and interlink the pages with the primary and declined forms.)

The text of Tanakh is divided into fragments (so called parashot) with || markers (denoting so called Pe-marks) and into smaller fragment with | (so called Samekh marks). If you do some translation of a Tanakh fragment please click the link Exegesis and edit that page to insert your translation.

When editing a wiki page, to enter a Hebrew word with a reference to our without-vowels dictionary, click the "Aleph" icon in the editor toolbar and enter the word. Alternatively you may select a non-hyperlinked Hebrew word and click "Aleph" in toolbar in order to turn this Hebrew word into a hyperlink to our dictionary.

The text of Tanakh was obtained from this site. It is converted into the wiki format by this Python program

You cannot edit pages with Tanakh text (Tanakh:* namespace), because they are created automatically and your edit cannot overwrite it.

See the list of translated verses.

Some suggestions how to improve our software

Philosophy

The primary reason for creating this site is the belief that Tanakh is the word of God and it should be studied in all senses possible. Non-believing linguists/historians which wish to analyze the original meaning of Bible are also welcome.

Before starting musing on Tanakh, you are recommended to read all theological articles about meaning and interpretation of Tanakh provided on this site:

• Victor Porton's opinion on the meaning of Tanakh
• Victor Porton's hypothesis on spaces in Hebrew Bible

Support this project

See this page about how you can help this project.

If you want to contribute to this site, create account. Your edits will be moderated to prevent spam. You must follow the project moderation rules, if you edit this site.

This is not "Bible code"

So called Bible Code is the concept stating that reading Bible not character by character but for instance skipping every 50 letters, we can get a message.

There is certain skepticism regarding Bible Code, because of lack of proper reason to skip every say 50 characters reading Bible.

This project is different, it is well founded by the fact that initially Tanakh was written without vowels and other niqqudot, and thus it is the natural way to read Tanakh without them.

That saying, this project is like Bible Code but without skipping characters.

Many adherents to Jewish tradition would oppose reading Tanakh without vowels because they are adherents to the verbal tradition. Nevertheless many adherents of Jewish tradition accept Bible Code. That makes no sense to accept Bible Code but not to accept Without Vowels project, because if one accepts Bible Code then according to common sense he should also accept reading Tanakh without vowels.

Useful internal links

• Community portal
• site contents (index)
• For search text in Hebrew (everything)

Useful resources

You can use 2LetterLookup to look up meanings of Hebrew words.

Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (UBS) is a more traditional detailed Hebrew dictionary.

Hebrew with strongs and parallel English

The Wiki Bible Project (an editable wiki like this site, but not focused on Old Testament only and not so much tied to the Original as this site; also unlike this site they accept only Christian opinions)

Misc links

• Gesenius' Hebrew Grammar (a very hard to read book)
• Ancient Hebrew Research Center
• Hebrew for Christians
• Meanings for every grammar form of every word in Tanakh (understands only words with niqqudot, and thus little useful for us)
• Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (work in progress)
• Strong dictionaries in Russian