1

First off, my intention is to create a pretty decent replica of the Hebrew text close to the formatting of the Sefer Torah or a Tikkun, for personal documentation purposes. My question though is 2-parts.

First, about the number of characters/letters, second about where I can find a "good" copy of the Torah with this number of characters online in text format (i.e. not PDF or image).

To start, the copy of the Torah I found online is roughly 305,172 characters. I calculated this from the original source on Sefaria.org by only counting the Hebrew alphabet characters in this set:

א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י ך כ ל ם מ ן נ ס ע ף פ ץ צ ק ר ש ת

That is, I ignored diacritics and spaces.

This site says it should be 304,805 letters. So it's off by +367 characters. I assume that is because I took the merged.json data from i.e. here. Maybe it is an algorithmically merged copy of one of these?

  • Tanach with Nikkud.json
  • Tanach with Ta'amei Hamikra.json
  • Tanach with Text Only.json (this has 316,792 letters!)
  • Yehoyesh's Yiddish Tanakh Translation [yi].json

Would one of those be better? Or is there an official Torah online which has the correct number of characters? Or is there even a thing as the "correct number of characters"?

Improve this question
12
  • talmudology.com/jeremybrownmdgmailcom/2016/4/3/… try the files here? mechon-mamre.org
    – rosends
    Nov 10, 2019 at 2:40
  • @rosends here is my analysis of the mechon-mamre.org "hebrew text only" text, which contains only 302,238 characters (without spaces). Am I supposed to include spaces and/or titles, or what is missing?
    – Lance
    Nov 10, 2019 at 3:07
  • A quick look at that analysis (and I don't know exactly what I'm looking at) shows multiple words on a single line in many cases.
    – rosends
    Nov 10, 2019 at 3:10
  • I cleared those out.
    – Lance
    Nov 10, 2019 at 3:11
  • 1
    @Nathan Sefaria has different versions of texts. Use the one called "Miqra_according_to_the_Masorah" (which isn't the default)
    – Double AA ♦
    May 20, 2022 at 14:44

0

Reset to default

You must log in to answer this question.

Browse other questions tagged .