The Pill Tanakh: Hebrew-English Jewish Scriptures - Volume I, The Torah

The Hebrew-English Jewish Scriptures, Volume 1 - The Torah.

This book comprises the first five books of the Jewish Scriptures, otherwise known as The Torah, The Five Books of Moses, and The Chumash.

What makes The Pill Tanakh different? The following are some examples.

1) The Hebrew and the English are side-by-side, on facing pages, with matching verses; there is no run-over of the more verbose English to another page!

2) Each new book starts with an image from the photo-facsimile Leningrad Codex on the page that the first verse of the book begins. Underneath each page image, the column and position of the first verse of the book is provided, and the page file number from the Leningrad Codex pdf is provided.

3) For this edition, I have altered both the Hebrew and English especially to conform to the actual Leningrad Codex (circa year 1009), most notably in the Ten Commandments of Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.

4) I set the Hebrew numbering, represented by Hebrew letters, to follow a natural rendering for numbers 15 and 16, which rabbis insist must be obfuscated to NOT reflect the Divine Name (YHVH). I use yud-he for 15 and yud-vav for 16 instead of tet-vav and tet-zayin as per 'rabbinic superstition!'

5) Additionally, I have altered some English verses to better represent the Hebrew text in several places. As an example, I changed the over 5,000 instances where the title 'the Lord God' appears, replacing it with 'Yehovah', the transliteration of the Hebrew.

6) In the margin of a line in the actual Leningrad Codex, there are words added that rabbis refer to as 'Qere' (what is to be read). These words were intended to replace a matching word in the written text, known as 'Ketiv' (what is written). Other Jewish publications force the reading of the 'Qere' in lieu of the 'Ketiv, ' obscuring the originally written text; some versions place the 'Ketiv' in brackets while others place it in the margin outside the line! In The Pill Tanakh, I relegate those 1,110 'Qere additions' to small footnote notations in the Hebrew text, so that the reading is natural just as the Masoretic scribes intended. Moreover, I have found few instances where the 'Qere' is actually correct, but there are many instances that are blatantly wrong!

Again, this is Volume 1 - The Torah, part of a three volume set of Torah, Prophets and Writings, which make up the entire Jewish Scriptures.

I have been retired since May of 2019. I spent my career in the Printing Industry, the last part of which I worked in Professional Services as a Program Manager/Programmer. I worked for several OEM manufacturers in that capacity (Creo Products, Eastman Kodak, KForce contract with HP, Inc.). As a layperson, I began reading the "Bible" regularly in early 1980 and have read it all of the way through pretty much every year since then. I would read some Hebrew in addition to English after I had begun learning Hebrew formally since the 1980's. In early 2012, I began reading the Hebrew portion first in my regular reading, followed by the English. In 2019, I completed writing a program I had begun in 2015, in the C++ programming language, where I was able to convert the UTF-16 (wide-character) Unicode Font-Encoded source from the Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) to a UTF-8 Web-Hebrew Font-Encoding (in programming terms, it was like 'trying to herd cats!'). I then set up my online Hebrew-English Tanakh from that encoding, placing the Hebrew Scriptures side-by-side a modified JPS 1917 English translation. I put that completed Hebrew-English Tanakh on my website, the-iconoclast.org in September, 2019. During the course of updating my website, I decided I wanted to put a page together about the Ten Commandments. It was in that process that I discovered the uniqueness of the Leningrad Codex in its verse separations which I also found had not been adhered to by any other publication, particularly those which had claimed the Leningrad Codex as their source for the Hebrew Language based Jewish Scriptures! It was from that effort which led me to decide to write my previous book, The Real God Code: The Ten Commandments In The Leningrad Codex! In January 2022, after several years of programming and hand editing, I started typesetting this volume of the Hebrew-English Jewish Scriptures.