The Leningrad Codex is the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible. Many projects have transcribed its biblical text; few have encoded its layout. This digital edition treats the codex not just as a text, but as an object.
Goals
- Accessibility — a digital edition of the codex, encoded in TEI and released under a permissive MIT license, with a quick download link and this online viewer.
- Transparency — the generation process is documented, with special regard to how AI was used.
- Reproducibility — the pipeline that produced the edition is published and configurable.
- Community — an unaffiliated, community-driven endeavor. See the contributing guide.
Method
The edition is encoded with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), which provides the framework for describing the manuscript in a machine-readable way using XML. Recent advances in AI, combined with existing open data, make this work feasible at scale: multi-modal models draft the columnar layout of each folio side, which is then cross-checked and corrected.
Each folio side is one TEI document carrying the main biblical text only — the ketiv consonantal text as written — with verse milestones marking where each verse begins and samekh/pe paragraph-division markers inline. Per-word biblical references are derived at index time, not stored per word.
Data
The biblical text in the edition was not transcribed directly from the images. The text used is the Unicode/XML Leningrad Codex (UXLC) maintained by Christopher V. Kimball and accessible on the tanach.us site. For this reason, the text in the edition may differ from the images in the manuscript. That is an intentional choice.
The text determined to be on each folio was derived from Ben Denckla's index of the Leningrad Codex.
The verse zones that mark where each verse sits on the facsimile image come from the Masoretica handwritten text recognition (HTR) of the Leningrad Codex by Idan Dershowitz.
Each folio page ends with a Credits section. It lists the people and data sources named in the
respStmtelements of that folio's TEI header, including the contributors who encoded it.Transparency & AI use
AI tools were integral to this project, used for:
- Generating the code in the repository
- Aligning the biblical text to the columns and lines of a folio
The alignment work is fully documented per folio:
- The facsimile image used (URL and sha256) is recorded in the TEI header
- The model and parameters are recorded in the TEI header
- The prompt is linked to a commit sha
The pipeline and prompts are published in the repository, and the full history is visible in git. Contributors were allowed to use any model. Each folio page indicates which model was used for alignment.
Reproducibility
The pipeline that generated the edition is published so future researchers can re-run it and configure it to different models and inference strategies — with the caveat that AI outputs are not always reproducible. See thepipeline docs in the repository.
Reuse
The edition is MIT licensed. Browse it folio by folio, fetch raw TEI per folio at
/edition/Fxxx[A|B].xml, read the manifest at/edition/index.xml, fetch an IIIF manifest with the verse zones per folio at/iiif/Fxxx[A|B].json, or grab the whole-edition zip. Agents should prefer the XML over scraping this site — see /llms.txt.The Author
I'm Charles Loder, the initial author of this project. You can find more about my work and contact me through my social media profiles:
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