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.

You will find all the following items linked by volume in the volume directory Music Scores.

Music scores for each chapter (929 x .mscz files).
The .xml files that can be read and formatted by any music program.
Colour-coded pages that reveal shapes in the music. This concordance of contours in the text allows you to find where else in the Bible these musical shapes are used.

"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.

📄 David C. Mitchell: Notes to Accompany the Cantata of Psalms (Oxford, 2010) — Historical program notes recovered from my 2010 Oxford files bridge 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

A complete musical presentation of the full text of the Hebrew Bible, translation and music, is packaged into an 18-volume series spanning roughly 6,600 pages.

Volume	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	Published (September 2026)	226 pages	978-1-0688691-9-8
Deuteronomy	In Production Queue	228 pages	978-1-0688691-7-4
Proverbs	In Production Queue	197 pages	—

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."

The translation is available separately in The SimHebrew Bible from Qualum Publishing.

For further information and analysis please see my Substack notes and articles, e.g. A Rare Verse Shape in Hebrew Poetry.

For a presentation on how to use this site, please see Psalm 117.

Note that GitHub is for research. Researchers may fetch the entire site to write programs that will analyse the data and make additional features and results available. You can learn more in theread-me.