About the project

What is Parshandata?

Parshandata is an advanced search engine for Tanakh that was created by Yosef Ginsberg, founder of Open Masorah.

How is Parshandata different?

While many tools for searching Tanakh exist, they are ubiquitously clunky and unnavigable. The core idea behind Parshandata is an intuitive yet powerful interface that affords scholar and student alike the ability to search Tanakh with ease. Because Parshandata allows for arbitrarily complex searches written in natural language, it provides a strong and flexible means of canvassing the entire Tanakh for targeted phenomena. Parshandata does not use AI to execute searches; it is based on a custom and novel query language, so each search is deterministic.

What is Parshandata useful for?

In building Parshandata, two of my main goals were to:

• Streamline research on Hebrew accentuation (Ta'amei HaMikra, or Trop). The system that governs accentuation in Tanakh is complex and opaque, and very often certain formations have only been partially understood. This is especially true regarding the poetic accents (Ta'amei Emes) which are used only in the non–prosaic books of Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. Parshandata, as a fine–toothed research tool, will allow for proper and critical analysis of such accentuation.
• Facilitate investigation into the Masorah. The Masorah is a collection of textual comments and glosses from antiquity (mostly found in manuscript). They often pertain to linguistic or textual minutiae, and are nearly always short and cryptic. For example, a typical note will state that a certain word only appears two times in the entire Tanakh, which can be quite tedious to verify. Parshandata will make checking the accuracy of such Masoretic notes a clean and quick experience.

For example: the Masorah states that the word "כֹּה" with the legarmeh accent ("כֹּ֣ה ׀") appears 18 times in the book of Jeremiah. But where exactly are these 18 occurrences? Various scholars have struggled to identify them for centuries: the popular Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) fails to give a full list, while C. D. Ginsburg in his “The Massorah” attempts to list 18 places, but one of them is erroneous (mistakenly including 33:4 instead of 47:2).

This simple search, when uploaded on Parshandata, reveals, for the first time, the true list of 18 occurrences.

Parshandata can also expose where the Masorah itself is inaccurate, or perhaps relied on a different version of the text than the one we have today. A Masoretic note preserved in Okhlah ve–Okhlah (ed. Frensdorff, §316) lists three verses of exactly eighty letters that open with the word "וכל": Genesis 2:5, Numbers 36:8, and Joshua 11:14. This search, however, surfaces a fourth verse that the note omits — Esther 9:3.

The Text

Parshandata relies on the open–source text of Miqra al pi ha-Mesorah (MAM), a contemporary critical edition of the Tanakh prepared according to the Masorah, primarily following the Aleppo Codex and related Tiberian manuscripts.

Features

Beyond the query language itself, Parshandata is built to make searching practical:

• Instant feedback — as you type, Parshandata checks your search and tells you immediately whether it is valid.
• Built–in keyboard — an on–screen palette of every keyword, character, and building block, each with a help card explaining what it does.
• Choose your scope — search the whole Tanakh or any selection of books, and switch between the keri and ketiv readings.
• Save and reuse searches — save a search to your device and re–upload it later to run it again.
• Export results — download any set of results as a spreadsheet.
• Recent searches — see searches recently run on the site, for ideas and inspiration.
• Reading comfort — dark and light themes, and an interface in both English and Hebrew.
• Free to use — no account required.

What is the future of Parshandata?

I hope to continue to expand this project to include other Tanakh–based research tools, and constantly update and improve the current apparatus. To facilitate this, or if you find Parshandata particularly helpful or inspiring, please consider expressing your appreciation by donating to the project!