The Jewish tradition is based on two laws: The Written Law and the Oral Law. According to Jewish belief, both laws were given together at Mount Sinai. The Hebrew Bible, compiled during the first millennium, BC , and constitutes the written law. The Talmudic Literature, composed of the Mishna, Tosefta and the Talmud (the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud) is the first codification of the Jewish "Oral - Law". It was compiled during the second, third and fourth centuries, AD .

The ability to search the Bible and the Talmudic Literature in 'full text' (i.e. - search for a specific word or words that appear anywhere in the text) is, of course, of great importance to students and scholars. Until recently, the only way to conduct such a search was to use a Concordance - a voluminous book in which all the words appearing in the Bible are listed in alphabetical order. For each word the places in the Bible where it appears are listed. In recent years several CD's that enable full text search of the Bible became available on the market [Bar Ilan Univ. The Responsa], but there were still no widely available, simple to use tools, enabling a full text search of the Bible on the Internet.

The Talmudic Literature quotes the Old Testament frequently, in order to prove or disprove claims or to bring examples. Most versions of the Talmudic Literature designate the chapter (but not the verse) from which each quote is taken. The Bible, compiled a long time before the Talmudic Literature, of course doesn't have cross references to those quotes. Thus another desired feature in databases of the Bible and the Talmudic Literature, is a thorough cross referencing between the Bible and the Talmudic Literature, based on the quotes described above, and the ability to easily follow those cross references.

We created a database containing the Bible and the Talmudic Literature, in Hebrew (ISO 8859-8) [Nussbacher & bourvine, 1993][Snunit, 1995] on the Web, that has the following features:

Full text search of the Bible and Talmudic Literature Easy to use, Hebrew interface for a graphical browser working on a variety of operating systems. Cross references from the Talmudic Literature to the Bible and vice versa, implemented through HTML links.

In the database, each chapter is represented as an HTML page. The Talmudic Literature texts quote often from verses in the Bible. In the database those quotes are represented as HTML links pointing to the exact verse from which the quote was taken. On the other hand, when a specific verse is quoted in the Talmudic Literature, it appears highlighted as an HTML link in the Bible. Pressing this link brings up to the user a different version of the chapter[Figure 2], which includes HTML links to the places in the Talmudic Literature that quote this verse. Thus the user can easily view the commentary from the Talmudic Literature available for each verse.
 

Architecture and Implementation:

The database itself is simply a collection of HTML pages, one for each chapter. The files were indexed using FreeWAIS 0.5. A 'WAISGate' [Tim BL & H. Frystyk 1995], is responsible for the interface between the WAIS server and the client's browser. Special modules were added to the WAISGate in order to support Hebrew search and return the list of matching verses according to the conventional order of the books in the Bible. We are currently replacing WAIS with 'Inter-Text', a commercial indexer, especially adapted for Hebrew, made by SPL.

As mentioned above, the Talmudic Literature contains a lot of quotes from verses in the Bible. For each quote, the chapter from which the quote was taken is mentioned, but not the verse. Also, many times the quotes are not exact: some words are spelled differently or omitted all together and it isn't clear where the quote ends and the Talmudic text resumes. A special algorithm, implemented in Perl, was developped in order to over come those problems and find the exact verse quoted. The algorithm rated all verses in the chapter according to how much they matched a given quote, and then chose the verse with the highest score as the one from which the quote was taken. If it seemed that several verses matched a given quote, the length of the quote was doubled, and the score for each verse recomputed. After the quoted verse was found, a hyper link pointing to it was made in the Talmudic text. Another hyper link, pointing to the Talmudic text, was made near the relevant verse in the Bible.
 

Conclusion

We have implemented a database of the Bible and the Talmudic Literature on the World Wide Web. The database enables the user to easily reach the chapter he is interested in, and view it in a way that is pleasant to the eye. By using HTML links embedded within the text, the user can easily move between a specific chapter and the commentaries relating to it in the Talmudic Literature. The user can also search the database for any words or phrases appearing in it.

We believe that databases, widely available to the public, should be one of the main constituents of the 'useful' portion of the World Wide Web. Here we have demonstrated how a rather advanced database can be built by using and modifying widely available freeware and combining it with some original ideas and algorithms. We also demonstrated how an 'electronic version' of a book can be produced on the Web, and how such a version can support advanced browsing features which would never be available in a conventional book.
 

References

[Bar Ilan Univ, The Respnsa] Bar Ilan University, The Responsa Project, URL: http://www.biu.ac.il/BIU/Jewish/responsa.html

[Nussbacher & Bourvine 1993] H. Nussbacher, Y. Bourvine, RFC 1555, "Hebrew Character Encoding for Internet Messages", URL: http://www.internic.net/rfc/rfc1555.txt 12/23/1993

[Snunit 1995] How to read Hebrew on the World Wide Web, URL: http://www1.snunit.k12.il/snunit/heb.html

[Tim BL & H. Frystyk 1995] Tim BL and Henrik Frystyk, The WAIS - WWW gateway URL: http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Gateways/WAISGate.html

Leslie D. Cuff, Commercial Hypertext Publishing - "Electronic Books Using Trails and the Author-Publisher-Reader Model", World Wide Web Journal, Fourth International World Wide Web Conference Proceedings,December 1995, Published by O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

[Figure 1] URL: http://www1.snunit.k12.il/shortfig1.html

[Figure 2] URL: http://www1.snunit.k12.il/shortfig2.html
 

Figure 1: The HTML page that the user receives in response to his query "Shaul and Jerusalem". The chapters that answered the user query are listed according to the traditional ordering of the books in the Bible. For each chapter, all the verses containing the words searched by the user are represented as HTML links.

Figure 2: The HTML page of Esther, chapter 10, in the bible database. The underlined lines are the hyperlinks to relevant commentaries in the Babilonian and Palestinian Talmud. (The original HTML page, is ofcourse, written in Hebrew, this is a translation to English of the page.)