2021-10-16 - 2022-9-11
The 'standard' internet text of the Hebrew Bible today, to the extent that such a thing exists, is the Westminster Leningrad Codex electronic text as maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research. It consists of an electronic transcript of the oldest complete existing Hebrew Bible, the Leningrad Codex. You can find it here.
The Leningrad Codex is a very good example of the Masoretic Text, but it is an accident of history that it wound up being used as the de facto standard text. Until 1947, there was a more complete codex, regarded by consensus as superior to it: the Aleppo Codex. Under disputed circumstances, large portions of the Aleppo Codex disappeared, so that it is not possible today to simply transcribe its text.
Nevertheless, the Aleppo Codex still exists for most of the Hebrew Bible, so one might expect that we should use the Aleppo Codex wherever it is extant, and then fill in the missing places either with the Leningrad Codex or by a careful comparison of the existing Masoretic authorities. Rabbi Mordechai Breuer took this approach, culminating in the publication of the Jerusalem Crown, which is now unfortunately out of print and tricky to get ahold of. A group of rabbis known as Mechon Mamre produced a similar text and put in online, but their insistence on their copyright prevent widespread use.
But now Rabbi Dr. Avi Kadish has produced an electronic text, with quite a bit of documentation, which follows the Aleppo Codex and its reconstruction to the extent that such a thing can be determined. You can find this here. It was first uploaded, if I remember right, about 2013, and since then has been continually updated. As of this year it has become the default biblical text for Sefaria.org. Dr. Kadish calls his project 'Miqra according to the Masorah'.
I would imagine that either Kadish's text, or something like it, will come to replace the Leningrad Codex as the standard internet Hebrew Bible. Kadish's text is in under a Creative Commons license (CC-BY-SA), so it should live beyond any one author and can be improved at will.
If it is as big a deal as I think it is, then it is strange that the appearance of an Aleppo-based electronic text has attracted so little attention. As far as I know, there's now three main electronic versions of the Masoretic Text: Kadish's, WLC, and Mechon Mamre.
Given that everything can be reduced to strings of Unicode and examined with electronic tools, it should be possible to see every single difference between the three texts. Then we can document all the ones that have significance and come to an understand of which texts are more reliable, what sorts of mistakes still exist, and so on.
The portions of this page that I have written are released under the CC0 1.0 license, which spells out in as much legal detail as possible my desire to waive any copyright I have over the work. Feel free to use it as you like.