Using the chapter files:
Download the file called "chapter files.zip", and unzip the contents all into a single folder on your computer. The files you've unzipped onto your computer (3716 files, if everything has worked correctly) are all html files. Just click on one of them to open it in your browser. If you want to look at the first chapter of Genesis, choose Genesis1.html; for the fifth chapter of Ezra choose Ezra5.html; etc. Once opened, you can step through verse by verse or chapter by chapter by clicking on the grey navigation bars - the right side for going forward; the left side for going back to a previous verse or chapter. The text on the left side of the screen is always just the original Hebrew text. On the right side you can choose between viewing an English glossing of the text or a transliteration of the Hebrew. To switch to a transliteration of the Hebrew, click on the English glosses. To switch back to viewing the English glosses, click on the transliteration. To switch the orientation of the phrasing trees from left to right or back again, click on one of the phrasing trees. This switching involves the use of three additional files for each chapter - with "Tr" in the name indicating that it uses the transliteration rather than English, and with "R" in the name indicating that the trees are right-oriented rather than left.

To make large jumps within a book or from one book to another, rather than going step by step with the navigation bars, you'll be better off directly editing the URL in the address bar at the top of the browser window. To go from Genesis 1 to Genesis 35 for example, just replace the 1 with 35. To go from Genesis to Ezra, just replace "Genesis" with "Ezra". The R's and Tr's could be edited there as well - but probably better to manage this part just by clicking on the trees and text until you see what you're after. If you want to go directly to a particular verse of the target chapter, that too can be done by editing the URL. To go to Genesis 35:15 for example, assuming that you're already looking at the beginning of Genesis 35 - first click on the arrow to the right of verse 1, stepping forward to the next verse. This puts most of what you need for verse-specific addressing into the URL. Then in the URL just change "35:2" to "35:15".

For some purposes it's nice to view things chapter by chapter. The files are smaller, so they load more quickly, and allow your browser to be more responsive. And the columns don't require so much of the screen width, since they only need to be wide enough to accommodate every verse in the current chapter, rather than every verse in the whole book. For other purposes - particularly if you're using the browser to search for other occurrences of a particular word - it's nicer to be able to browse the whole book at once. So a similar set of files for book by book viewing is also available.

Using the book files:
Download the file called "book files.zip", and unzip the contents all into a single folder on your computer. Just put them in the same folder where you have the chapter files. This is 156 files in all - four for each of the 39 books. Again, all html files, so just clicking on one of them will open it in your browser. As with the chapter files, you can step through verse by verse or chapter by chapter by clicking on the grey navigation bars - on the right side to go forward, or on the left side to go back to a previous verse or chapter. 

The two modes of viewing - book by book, and chapter by chapter - operate in much the same way. The grey navigation bars are the same, with the right side going forward and the left side going back. And both allow you to switch back and forth between left and right orientation of the trees, and between English glossing and the transliteration. The way the two modes are different is just that when viewing chapter by chapter, less text is loaded into the browser at once - so when you browse forward to the next chapter, the browser closes the previous file and loads the next one. In book by book mode on the other hand, browsing forward to the next chapter is just a process of scrolling down through the file that's already open.

If from time to time you want to switch between these two modes, this can be done by editing the URL in the address bar at the top of the browser window. It would be nice to just have a button to press for this - but I don't yet see where such a button should be put. So to switch from viewing just one chapter to viewing the whole book, edit the URL, removing the chapter number. Just from the filename - no need to change the chapter and verse reference after the '#' sign. Or going in the other direction, from viewing the whole book to focusing in on one particular chapter - just add the desired chapter number. For example, changing "1Kings18.html#1Ki18:33" to "1Kings.html#1Ki18:33" switches from browsing just chapter 18 to browsing the whole book, but without changing which verse you're currently looking at. And then adding back in the "18" after "1Kings" will switch you back to browsing just chapter 18. And an example for the book of Psalms is in order as well, just to let you know that here you'll need to be attentive to a subtle complication that doesn't happen in any of the other books. Similar to the first example, changing "Psalm118.html#Psa118:16" to "Psalms.html#Psa118:16" switches from browsing just Psalm 118 to browsing the whole book of Psalms. The one extra detail to note is just that for the Psalms when you remove the chapter number, you'll also need to add an 's' in order to point to the correct file. And then remember to also take off the 's' when adding a chapter number.

The subfolder called "book and chapter files" contains all these same files, but just arranged in a different way. Rather than two zip files containing everything - here you'll find 39 zip files, one for each book. Each of these book files contains both the book and chapter files for that book. This might be a useful way to download the files, if you need to just focus on one particular book, and would rather not download all the rest.

The primary purpose of these files is to make accessible that part of the Hebrew text which up to now has been hidden to most of us - the phrase marking. The trees show the flow of the phrasing that's represented by these markings. But to fully grasp how this tree structure and phrasing guides our understanding of the text, it's necessary to also understand the words that we're reading - by either reading the Hebrew with understanding, or by reading a phrase-by-phrase glossing of the Hebrew in a language that we do understand. This is the purpose of the English glossing - for those of us who read English fluently, but are limited in our understanding of Hebrew. 

An English translation is included for all of the books, using the World English rendering from https://ebible.org/engwmb/ - and hopefully this is enough to be of some use. But for English speakers to fully understand the phrasing, it's necessary that the English rendering be reworked on a phrase-by-phrase basis - to accurately indicate which meaning components belong to each of the phrases. This will eventually be done for all 39 books, but much of it is still unfinished. What is completed and available here in the files that you've just downloaded, is 20 of the books (Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Ruth, Lamentations, Esther, Ezra, and the 12 minor prophets), and miscellaneous individual chapters and verses of some of the other books. May the rest come together quickly. If you would see some value in making a similar rendering of the Hebrew Scriptures available in another language - replacing the English glossing with French, Vietnamese, or some other language of the world - let's figure out a way to accomplish that.

The base text - the Hebrew shown on the left side of the screen from which everything else (phrasing trees, transliteration, and English glossing) has been derived - originally this was from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, WLC 4.20, from www.tanach.us - with adjustments to this base text having been introduced whenever attention to the functions of the accent marks made it clear that the correct reading was more likely one of the alternate renderings found in other versions of the text. As of April 2023 the total number of these adjustments for the processing of all 39 books was 132.

But a much improved version is now available in which many of those basic error corrections have already been made in the base text, thus not needing to be rediscovered each time the text is used. This base text is called MAM, "Miqra according to the Masorah" - an edition managed by Ben Denckla (bdenckla@alum.mit.edu). A few adjustments to the base text are still being made here - but far fewer than were previously needed.

A note regarding this updated version and the word files described below. These word files are still those which were generated from the WLC base text - and for many of the words of Scripture this works fine. Eventually they will be updated to more perfectly match the MAM base text - but until then you'll likely encounter occasional glitches where the browser says "file not found". This happens where the transition from WLC to MAM has resulted in a change in the spelling of the transliteration. Many of the spelling changes are just from "a" to "o" - so a workaround that can sometimes get you where you meant to go is, to just change "o" back to "a" in the URL for the word file.

The word files:
Download the file called "word files.zip", and unzip the contents into the same folder where you've put the chapter and book files. This lets the user view for any given word, a list of all occurrences of that same word in Scripture, to provide more clarity in grappling with the sense and range of meaning of a word. This is accessed by clicking on the transliteration of the word of interest. This will bring up the list of occurrences for that word in a separate tab of the browser, and then from there the user can navigate to any of the other occurrences that seem worthy of investigation.

In the list of occurrences is one line for each occurrence of the specified wordform, and 6 columns of data. In the first column is the Scripture reference at which a given occurrence is found, formatted as a link, so that by clicking on it you can jump to that reference and see that occurrence in its full context. Upon jumping to a given reference, in order to more easily locate the word in question, take note of the number shown in the second column. If that number is 5 for example, this tells you that when you get to the specified verse, it's in the 5th phrase of that verse that you'll find the word in question.

The third column shows the form of the Hebrew word at this particular occurrence. This is usually identical to what's found in the original text. It differs just in certain places where the accent can't be counted on to indicate which syllable gets the word stress, so that accent has been left out. This is the case with certain prepositive and postpositive accents.

The fourth column shows the transliteration of that Hebrew word, with the stressed syllable as specified by the accent marks being shown in bold. The fifth column then shows the transliteration of that word along with the whole phrase in which it's being used. The occurrences have been sorted to put all with the same stress pattern side by side, and then within this, to also put all which belong to identical phrases side by side. If more than one stress pattern for a given word is found, the one taken as the default - typically the most commonly occurring stress pattern - is highlighted in green. 

Where there are alternate stress patterns, indicating that something in the context of the phrase has caused a shift in the word stress, these alternates are highlighted in orange. 

And then at the end of the list are any occurrences for which no word stress is marked, highlighted in grey. These are the cases where the accent was one of those prepositive or postpositive cases which can't be relied on to indicate word stress. One important function of these word-level lists is to provide the user with assistance in these cases where the word stress is not marked. In most of these cases by just clicking on the unaccented transliteration, the green highlighting in the list of occurrences that opens up will show you where to correctly place the word stress. 

And finally the sixth column shows the English glossing, of each occurrence for which the glossing has been completed. Many of these glosses are still missing, since the glossing work hasn't yet been completed for all books. So this part will gain more and more usefulness as more and more of the glossing is completed. Ultimately, when the glossing has been completed for all the books and this sixth column has been filled in, this will provide a way to check the consistency of the English glossing throughout the Hebrew Scriptures.