Westminster Hebrew Morphology

The Westminster Hebrew Morphology (Senior editor: Kirk Lowery; Editor: Steve Salisbury). With seed funding from the Packard Humanities Institute (PHI), a team of Westminster scholars under the direction of Professor Groves began in 1987 to perfect a computerized version of the morphological analysis of the Hebrew text. We say perfect, because the basis for the text was a machine-produced analysis done by Richard Whitaker (Claremont, Princeton Seminary), who used the IBYCUS system to develop a parser that provided a trial parsing for about 95 percent of the words of the Hebrew Bible. While much editing was required, this initial analysis provided an excellent beginning database from which to build the database that exists today. The first version of the morphology was released in the summer of 1991. The second version, with significant corrections supplied by users, was released in 1994. The third version, which added homonyms and normalized the lemmatization to Koehler Baumgartner III, came out in 1998. The combination of the machine-readable version of the text and analysis provides a significant tool for Hebrew study for students at every level of interest and ability in Hebrew. The database is now referred to as the Westminster Hebrew Morphology and stands at version 4.14 (July 2010).  Version 4.16 will be released in the first half of 2012.

Significant contributions have been made by Professor Dale Wheeler (Multnomah Bible College), Professor Todd Beall (Capital Bible Seminary), Professor Eep Talstra (the Werkgroep Informatica, the Free University, Amsterdam), and Ferdinand Poswick (the Centre Informatique et Bible, Maredsous, Belgium). Under the direction of Dr. Lowery, enhancements and corrections are ongoing.

The Westminster Hebrew Morphology has been incorporated into many Bible software products. Among them are: Accordance by Oak Tree Software (Mac); BART by SIL/Wycliffe (Win); BibleWorks by Hermeneutika (Win); Logos by Logos Research Systems (Win); and WordSearch by iExalt Electronic Publishing (Win). Many of these products are available at a discount from the Westminster Bookstore.

For information about licensing the Westminster Hebrew Morphology for use in software pages or products, contact Dr. Lowery.