Hebrew Scripture Source: Hebrew text, tokenization, and morphological data derived from the MACULA Hebrew project by Clear Bible, based on the Westminster Leningrad Codex (Public Domain / CC BY 4.0). MACULA Hebrew Linguistic Datasets, available at https://github.com/Clear-Bible/macula-hebrew/
Modifications to the data: for the Torah reader, the MACULA Hebrew dataset (one table row per morpheme, whole TaNaKh) was converted into per-chapter JSON files for all 39 books of the TaNaKh (the Torah, Prophets, and Writings). Rows were grouped into words and verses; columns this site does not use (such as the Greek and Mandarin glosses, semantic-domain codes, and participant references) were removed; field names were shortened and empty values left out; and each morpheme was labeled prefix, main word, or suffix. On display, stem names are standardized (for example “hithpael” is shown as Hitpael), forms the data marks “unknown: v” are labeled Hishtaphel, Aramaic stems are shown under their traditional names (for example Peal and Haphel), a verb’s root is shown as its lemma without vowel marks, and a suffix shows its short English gloss. One vowel point was corrected by hand: the patah in שֶׁבַע (Bathsheba) in 1 Kings 1:15, where the data had a segol. The linguistic analysis itself is otherwise unchanged. Out of religious respect, and following the Jewish tradition of not pronouncing or spelling out the Name of God in ordinary speech, the divine name as it appears in the source glosses and transliteration is shown on this site as “HaShem” (“the Name”), and the Name is read aloud as “Adonai”. This substitution was made in the per-chapter JSON files and in the lesson data. The English text (JPS 1917) already renders the divine name as “the LORD” and was not changed.
Full Textbook Lessons. The 45 textbook lessons are original teaching text. Their section references (“Gesenius §…”) point to Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar , edited by E. Kautzsch and translated by A. E. Cowley (Oxford, 1910), a public-domain work; the explanations are restated in new words and were not copied from it. Each lesson was then compared section by section against the Gesenius text, and wording was corrected where it differed. The copy of Gesenius used for this check is an OCR scan whose paradigm tables are not machine-readable, so those tables were checked against the Biblical text rather than word by word against the book. Every Hebrew example is a real TaNaKh verse taken from the MACULA data (CC BY 4.0, Clear Bible) credited above, and each example’s verse, word and grammatical label were automatically checked against that data. A dagger (†) marks a form that does not occur in the TaNaKh and is given only to complete a pattern. English glosses come from JPS 1917 (public domain) or are the site’s own. Accuracy review. The lessons were hand-reviewed by a real person, at a B1 CEFR level, against modern teaching textbooks, purely as a manual check for accuracy. No text, ideas, layouts, stylings, edits, fixes, information or changes were added to the lessons from those books, and none resulted from them. All of the writing, layout, styling and everything else in the textbook comes strictly from Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar and other public-domain sources, together with the openly licensed, credited Bible text data named on this page. No copyright-restricted content has ever been hosted on or uploaded to this website.
Judaism 101. The Judaism 101 course is original teaching text. Every Bible quotation in it is the Jewish Publication Society 1917 translation (public domain, via the Open Siddur Project, CC BY-SA) with the Hebrew text from MACULA Hebrew (CC BY 4.0), the same sources used elsewhere on this site. Verse numbers follow the Hebrew text. Every claim taken from the Bible links to the verse it comes from, and the build of the course checks each quoted phrase and number against that verse. Items labeled “Tradition” or “History” are not from the Bible text. Some lessons quote short passages, word for word, from The Jewish Encyclopedia (12 volumes, New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906; managing editor Isidore Singer), which is in the public domain. The course checks that each such quotation really appears in the volume. The Encyclopedia is a century old; it is used for definitions and for what the rabbinic sources say, not for its views on the Bible. The volumes were obtained as plain-text scans from the Internet Archive (archive.org ); the scans were made by Google Books from library copies. The text of the volumes is in the public domain in the United States. The text comes from automatic character recognition and contains scanning errors. Free to download: Vol. 1 · Vol. 2 · Vol. 3 · Vol. 4 · Vol. 5 · Vol. 6 · Vol. 7 · Vol. 8 · Vol. 9 · Vol. 10 · Vol. 11 · Vol. 12 .
Related words, roots and lessons. The “Root concordance” stem cards and related-word lists (data/rel.json , free to download) were computed from the MACULA Hebrew data above, with word families linked using the Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon (HebrewStrong.xml), released under CC BY 4.0, credit: the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project. The underlying texts of Brown–Driver–Briggs and Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary are in the public domain. Related-word groupings follow the lexicon’s derivation links and are traditional, not final, and some are debated; look-alike roots are chosen by letter similarity only. The explanations in Literacy Basics and Binyanim Basics are original and use verses from the data above; they follow the standard teaching order of classic public-domain grammars (such as Gesenius and Davidson) restated in new words, and are not copied from any modern textbook.
JPS 1917 TaNaKh English Text sourced from the Open Siddur Project. (n.d.). The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (1917 JPS Tanakh) . Digital transcription hosted by the Open Siddur Project. Released under Public Domain / CC BY-SA 4.0. https://opensiddur.org
English text (JPS 1917): license, attribution, and changes. The English translation shown on this site is The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1917), a work in the public domain in the United States. The digital transcription used here comes from the Open Siddur Project (opensiddur.org ), which releases it under Public Domain / Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0 ; legal code at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode ). Changes made by this website: the text was converted into one JSON file per chapter (data/eng/BOOK/CHAPTER.json), split by verse and labeled with book code, chapter, and verse number; and it is shown beside the Hebrew text, and optionally under each verse in the reader. The wording of the translation was not intentionally changed. Those English-text files (the adapted material) are shared under the same license, CC BY-SA 4.0, and you may copy, redistribute, and adapt them under that license if you give the credit above, link to the license, say that you changed them if you do, and keep the same license on your version. No warranty is given: the text is provided as is, without any promise that it is complete or free of errors, and the licensors and this website disclaim liability to the extent the law allows. This license covers only the English text files. It does not cover the rest of this website (its code, design, lessons, and audio), which stays under the copyright notice at the top of this section, and it does not cover the MACULA Hebrew data, which has its own license (CC BY 4.0) given above. Download the English text files (.zip)
Rashi commentary (Torah): license, attribution, and changes. The Rashi text shown in the Reader and in Judaism 101 is Pentateuch with Rashi’s commentary , translated into English by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann (London, 1929–1934), a work in the public domain, taken from the Sefaria export (Sefaria lists its license as Public Domain). It is shown unchanged except that the page markup was removed and each comment was split into its Hebrew headword, English headword and text. The Rashi notes in Judaism 101 are short restatements written for this site; the build checks each one against Rashi’s comment on that verse.
Rashi on the Prophets and the Writings: AI translation notice. The Rashi text shown in the Reader for the Prophets and the Writings is an English translation produced with Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 5.5, used as a translation and collation tool under constraints set by the site author, because no public-domain English Rashi exists for these books. It was translated from Rashi’s Hebrew (Rashi On Your Way , source mobile.tora.ws, digitized by Sefaria, Public Domain), from the reference works listed in the “AI translation” popup in the Reader, all public-domain editions obtained from Internet Archive. It is marked in the Reader with a purple dotted underline and the word AI . It has not been reviewed by a human translator, so use it with caution and check important points against the Hebrew. Comments whose reading is doubtful are marked “reading uncertain”. The Sefaria Community Translation of Rashi (CC0) was used only as a cross-check and was never copied. This translation is dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0, and credit is not required. The full translation can be downloaded from github.com/NatatiLi/Rashi_English_Prophets_Writings . The lessons on this site do not rely on it.
Hebrew calendar (Judaism 101). The calendar is calculated in the page itself from the fixed arithmetic rules of the Hebrew calendar (the molad cycle, the four postponements and the 19-year leap cycle), which are public knowledge and not copyrighted. The results were compared with the date library built into the browser for every day from 1900 to 2044, with no differences, and the rules were checked against the Jewish Encyclopedia article “Calendar.” The text on each holy day quotes JPS 1917 (public domain); the explanations are the course's own words, and later tradition is marked as tradition. Candle-lighting times, weekly Torah portions and moon-sighting are not included, so for practical observance please check with a local rabbi or a local calendar.
Audio: the Hebrew pronunciation on this site is made on your own device by a speech engine written for this website (a rule-based Hebrew phonemizer for modern Israeli pronunciation and a formant speech synthesizer). The built-in voice uses no third-party recordings or speech models. The optional “Natural voice” is a separate AI voice model, described below. This is the pronunciation used in Israel and in most Conservative, Reform, and Sephardi congregations; some traditional Ashkenazi communities pronounce certain letters and vowels differently. If you choose “My device’s Hebrew voice”, the speech is produced by your own browser or operating system, not by this site.
Voice recording and privacy. The speaking lessons (TaNaKh Road, Voice lessons) record your voice through your device’s microphone, only while you are taking a lesson and have tapped the microphone button. The recording is processed on your device to compare it with the AI voice and to give you a score. It is held in your browser’s memory only for that lesson and is discarded when the lesson ends, when you try again, or when you leave the page. This website does not store your voice for long-term use, does not upload it to its own servers (it has none), and does not use it for training, for building any voice or speech model, or as reference material of any kind. Where your browser offers speech recognition (Google Chrome, which this website recommends for the voice lessons, Microsoft Edge, and Safari), the lessons use it by default: the browser itself sends your recording to its maker’s speech service to turn it into text, under that company’s own privacy policy, and this website only receives the resulting text for the lesson and stores nothing. You can switch any lesson to “Compare by sound”, which keeps the recording entirely on your device. Microphone access needs a secure (https) address, and you can turn it off at any time in your browser’s site settings.
Speaking practice data: the conversation, gender, and person data for these lessons (data/voice.json , free to download) was derived from the MACULA Hebrew morphology (CC BY 4.0) credited above: it lists verse references with speaker, listener, and verb-person labels, and it contains no English text. The English shown in those lessons comes from JPS 1917, covered by the notice above.
Scripture role-play conversations. The conversations in the “Scripture role-play” game (data/dialogues.json , free to download) are made from two sources credited above: the Hebrew words come from the MACULA Hebrew data (CC BY 4.0, based on the Westminster Leningrad Codex), and the English lines come from the JPS 1917 translation (public domain; digital transcription by the Open Siddur Project, CC BY-SA 4.0). Changes made by this website: each verse was cut into the separate lines spoken by each person, using the data’s speech verbs (“said”, “answered”) to find where each speech begins, and narration such as “and he said” and “and they went” was left out; cantillation marks were removed while the vowel points were kept; the divine name is shown as “HaShem”; “the LORD” became “HaShem”; and two typing mistakes in the English transcription were corrected. The speaker labels (who says each line), the titles, the one-line summaries and the difficulty labels are original to this website. Because the English lines are adapted JPS text, data/dialogues.json is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 ): you may copy and adapt it if you credit the sources above, link the license, say that you changed it, and keep the same license. In the game, the Road’s lines are read by the same AI voice described below (or your device’s Hebrew voice, if you chose that); your own lines are scored on your device as described under “Voice recording and privacy”, and the recording is not kept. The Road’s lines are spoken ahead of time by that same AI voice and stored as short audio clips in voice/rp/ (an index and 13 files) (download voice/rp/ as one zip creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 ); credit Dan Be’eri and the Internet Archive “Tanakh Narration” collection as described below. If a clip is missing, the line is spoken on your device instead. Simulated TaNaKh Conversations. The practice conversations (data/sim.json , free to download) are new arrangements of real TaNaKh speech. Every sentence is word for word from a TaNaKh verse, with its source shown. The sentences are chosen and ordered by hand so that each one answers the one before it, but the conversations did not happen in the TaNaKh in this order, so they are practice material and not TaNaKh passages. Hebrew: MACULA Hebrew (CC BY 4.0). English: JPS 1917 (public domain; transcription by the Open Siddur Project, CC BY-SA 4.0). Changes were made, and the file is shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
AI voice (“Natural voice”): the Hebrew speech model is a neural text-to-speech model (VITS architecture, trained with the Piper training tools) that runs in your browser using ONNX Runtime Web (MIT License). Training data: the Tanakh narration read by Dan Be’eri, from the Internet Archive collection “Tanakh Narration” (archive.org/details/Tanakh_Narration_01Genesis ), licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0) . The recordings were cut into short clips and aligned to this site’s own Hebrew pronunciation text (from the Westminster Leningrad Codex data credited above). Starting model: training began from the public-domain LJ Speech English model checkpoint (“lj-med”) published by the Rhasspy / Open Home Foundation Piper project, to which the Hebrew data was added; no other voice data was used. The trained model is a derivative work of the Be’eri recordings and is therefore released under the same license, CC BY-SA 3.0. The model files (voice/he.onnx and voice/he.json) can be downloaded here: he.onnx · he.json · voice README and license notice . If you reuse or adapt the model, you must credit Dan Be’eri and this site, say that changes were made, and share your version under CC BY-SA 3.0. The website’s own code and design are not part of the model and are not covered by this license. Audio produced by the model is synthetic speech and is not a recording of a person reading the text aloud. To make single words play quickly on phones, the most common words and word forms were spoken ahead of time by this same model and saved as small audio files (voice/pack/, MP3, mono); those files are outputs of the model described here, and carry the same credits and license terms as the model.
Fonts (wide-screen version). The wide-screen version of this website embeds three fonts under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1 (full text below): Noto Serif Hebrew , Copyright 2022 The Noto Project Authors (github.com/notofonts/hebrew ); Frank Ruhl Libre , Copyright 2015 The Frank Ruhl Libre Project Authors (github.com/fontef/frankruhllibre ); and Inter , Copyright 2020 The Inter Project Authors (github.com/rsms/inter ). Changes: the fonts were reduced to the Hebrew and basic Latin characters this website uses and to a limited weight range, then packaged for the web. They are bundled and used only as part of this website, and are not sold by themselves. The wide-screen layout and colors were designed for this website, and the readability choices (contrast, line length, line spacing, left-aligned text) follow the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (W3C Document License).
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