Hebrew Masoretic Text (Westminster Leningrad Codex)

The Masoretic Text is the authoritative Hebrew (and Aramaic) text of the Tanakh — the Hebrew Bible — as fixed, vocalized, and transmitted by the Masoretes, the Jewish scribe-scholars of the late first millennium CE. The Masoretes preserved not only the consonantal text but also the vowel-points (niqqud), cantillation marks (te'amim), and the marginal apparatus (the Masorah parva and Masorah magna) that guard the text against scribal drift. The single most important surviving witness to this tradition is the Leningrad Codex (Codex Leningradensis, shelf-mark Firkovich B19A), copied in Cairo around 1008/1009 CE. It is the oldest complete manuscript of the entire Hebrew Bible in one volume, and it serves as the base text for nearly every modern scholarly edition (Biblia Hebraica Kittel, Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, and others).

The Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) is the digital, electronic transcription of the Leningrad Codex — the Hebrew consonantal text together with the Masoretic vowels and accents, encoded character-by-character so that the manuscript can be searched, displayed, and studied by computer. Prepared and maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research (formerly the Westminster Hebrew Institute), the WLC is the standard machine-readable Masoretic text used across biblical software and open-text projects. The complete Tanakh in Hebrew is large (multiple megabytes of vocalized Unicode), so it is not inlined on this page — instead, the complete vocalized Hebrew Tanakh and a public-domain English translation (JPS 1917) are hosted here in full and can be downloaded directly below.

Source: https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb

Download the complete text

The full vocalized Hebrew Tanakh and a public-domain English translation are hosted here in their entirety — free to read and to download:

• Hebrew Masoretic Text — complete vocalized Tanakh (WLC): download the full Hebrew text → — all 39 books with niqqud (vowels) and te'amim (cantillation). Public Domain (CC0), from the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex (tanach.us).
• English pairing — JPS 1917: download the complete English Tanakh → — The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917). Public Domain.

What the Westminster Leningrad Codex contains

The WLC reproduces the full Tanakh in the traditional Jewish three-part arrangement:

• Torah (the Law / Pentateuch) — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.
• Nevi'im (the Prophets) — Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings (the Former Prophets); Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets (the Latter Prophets).
• Ketuvim (the Writings) — Psalms, Proverbs, Job, the Five Megillot (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes, Esther), Daniel, Ezra–Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

The text is given with full Masoretic vocalization: the consonantal Hebrew (with a handful of Aramaic passages in Daniel, Ezra, and Jeremiah), the niqqud (vowel-points), and the te'amim (cantillation accents), reflecting the Tiberian Masoretic tradition preserved in the Leningrad Codex.

Verified open sources

• OSHB / morphhb — Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project (the WLC text in OSIS XML, with an added lemma + morphology layer): https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb — fetch the raw OSIS files from the repository's `wlc/` directory for the complete machine-readable Hebrew text.
• UXLC — Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex (Christopher V. Kimball's maintained, format-rich edition derived from WLC 4.20, available as plain text, HTML, XML, ODT, and PDF): https://www.tanach.us/
• JPS 1917 — public-domain English pairing (The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917 — a Masoretic-based English translation, in the public domain by date of publication): available on Sefaria (https://www.sefaria.org/texts) and Wikisource (https://en.wikisource.org/).

Licensing (precise)

The two layers carry two distinct licences and must be credited accordingly:

1. The WLC text itself — the consonantal Hebrew together with the Masoretic vowels and cantillation accents — is Public Domain (released under the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0). It may be viewed, copied, and redistributed without restriction. The UXLC publisher (tanach.us) likewise states that "all biblical Hebrew text, in any format, may be viewed or copied without restriction."

2. The OSHB morphology layer — the added lemma data (augmented Strong's numbers) and morphological parsing supplied by the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project — is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) licence. Any reuse of that morphology/lemma data must credit the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project.

The repository states the position verbatim:

Lemma and morphology data are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. For attribution purposes, credit the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project. The text of the WLC remains in the Public Domain.

Provenance and licence: This is a reference-landing entry for the Hebrew Masoretic Text in its standard machine-readable form, the Westminster Leningrad Codex — a digital transcription of the Leningrad Codex (Codex Leningradensis B19A, copied c. 1008/1009 CE, the oldest complete Masoretic Hebrew Bible), prepared by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research. The complete vocalized Hebrew Tanakh is not inlined here owing to its size; the verified open sources are the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project / morphhb (https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb), the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex at tanach.us (https://www.tanach.us/), and the public-domain JPS 1917 English translation (Sefaria / Wikisource). Licensing: the WLC consonantal-plus-vowel text is Public Domain (CC Public Domain Mark 1.0); the OSHB lemma + morphology layer is CC-BY 4.0 — credit the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project. The complete downloadable Hebrew text (CC0) paired with the public-domain JPS 1917 English translation is hosted on this page under "Download the complete text." Reproduced for the M2M² Source Library.