The Hebrew Bible as Music

A Twenty-Year Interdisciplinary Study

This site presents the tools extracted from my database that are the byproducts of a 20-year project begun in St Andrews, Scotland in 2006 and Oxford, England in 2010. My desire was first to learn Hebrew and, after Oxford, to rediscover the embedded music in the text.

Project Utilities & Digital Assets

The music scores in raw XML form and finished one-line scores, one or many per verse, in the directory Music Scores (includes color-coded pages for every chapter that reveal shapes in the music).
The JSON data as a base for automated analysis of recurring sequences, intervals, and melodic motifs across books.
The concordance matrix: Access the matrix containing direct analytical links to my concordance. The translation is available in The SimHebrew Bible from Qualum Publishing.

The music scores (929 x .mscz files) are line-by-line verses of each chapter, requiring between one and four lines per verse. The .xml files share a 1:1 relationship with the MuseScore files but provide a fully available XML data tree for rapid processing by external scripts. These files have been rigorously verified for completeness against the master translation database.

"The scores opening in MuseScore are amazing, a profound, diligent, meticulous work."
— Dr. Binoy Venkatachellum, BSc.DCMus, Founder of the Binoy School of Symphonic Music, Surrey, BC.

Note that the XML files may be opened with most modern music notation software, while the .mscz files require MuseScore. The JSON files, derived from a custom debug trace running on the local Oracle XE processing engine, act as a condensed abbreviation map of the XML tree to support easier programming of Python queries.

📄 David C. Mitchell: Notes to Accompany the Cantata of Psalms (Oxford, 2010) — Historical program notes recovered from my 2010 Oxford files, bridging the Masoretic te'amim back to the Second Temple of Jerusalem via the Elders of Bathyra.

The Print Edition: "The Music of the Bible" Series

Developed over two decades, the project has culminated in a complete musical presentation of the full text of the Hebrew Bible. Translation and music are packaged together into a comprehensive 18-volume series spanning roughly 6,600 pages. The print publication rollout is moving forward deliberately:

Volume / Focus	Release Details	Extent	ISBN Reference
The Book of Job	Published (Jan 2026)	279 pages	978-1-0688691-1-2 (Includes introduction to the deciphering key and its music.)
The Psalms	Published (July 2026)	586 pages	978-1-0688691-4-3
The Five Scrolls	In Production Queue	226 pages	978-1-0688691-9-8
Deuteronomy	In Production Queue	228 pages	978-1-0688691-7-4
Proverbs	In Production Queue	197 pages	—

During this multi-volume production cycle, I use this GitHub site and Python scripts to search the music for unique structural characteristics. See also my Substack notes, e.g. A Rare Verse Shape in Hebrew Poetry.

Professor Susan Gillingham DD, Emeritus Professor of the Hebrew Bible, Worcester College, Oxford, UK writes of the Psalms:

"Bob MacDonald offers us here a controversial but extensively considered answer, psalm by psalm, to the familiar question: ‘So what did the music of the ancient psalms sound like?’. This is a bold and engaging work."