Search Seforim (Jewish Texts) Right From Firefox! or |DBS For The Rest of Us|
How great are those database software programs? They are immensely helpful in allowing those of us who learn and use a computer to have a better grasp of texts and find those hard to find things buried in a Rambam, Shulchan Aruch or Tanach. They allow us to find themes, and examine theories, all in all, one of the biggest things to hit Torah learning since, well, actually learning Torah. They are our tool in the fight against yeridas ha’doros, Rashi may have known everything by heart, but at least now we can level the playing field a little by being able to search through everything with a computer as he would have done in his brain. [I mean no disrespect to any gedolim/rabbanim/rishonim, just a little literary license to make a point in jest, don't need the new blog in cherem:)]
But at the same time, how many of us have the few thousand shekel or dollars to drop on all these great software programs? Not me, that’s for sure. Instead I either email/call friends who have them or have access to them, schlep out to a Yeshiva, or University (or a combination thereof) and use theirs, or (the most common) spend time online trying to find texts and using the rudimentary search features I can hack together (see “Let’s just get this out of the way…” for more on sites with texts). Until Now…
Sifrei Kodesh Search is a Firefox add-on that allows you to search through seforim (Jewish Texts) right from your browser! It currently searched through:
- Tanach (Tanakh or תנ”ך)
- Mishna
- Tosefta
- Talmud Bavli
- Talmud Yerushalmi
- Mishna Torah (Rambam)
It uses the power of Google Custom Search and is really great!
SKS has a virtual keyboard to allow you type in Hebrew, allows you to nail down a search by section, book, chapter, verse, etc. and is still in development so that means that there will be more great updates yet to come.
Here is a quote from the description on the SKS homepage:
Combining the power of Firefox, Google and the Mechon Mamre text library, this extension allows you to search the Hebrew texts of Tana”ch, Mishna, Talmud Bavli, Talmud Yerushalmi, Tosefta and Mishna Torah. You can search as broadly as all of these sources or as specifically as a single book of Tana”ch, a single tractate of Mishna or a single set of Halachot of the Mishnah Torah. The extension includes an onscreen Hebrew keyboard to assist those who do not know the Hebrew keyboard layout and/or do not have Hebrew input support on their computers. (You can use this keyboard to copy and paste Hebrew text into other things also.)
Click here for the SKS Homepage.
Click here for the Firefox add-on page for SKS.
Click here to download the add-on.
I’m currently working on a new version that will add many new sources to Sifrei Kodesh Search. I’m always looking for new sources that come available online to add, so if you know of any let me know. The big one that’s missing and I still can’t find a complete version anywhere for free is the Shulchan Aruch. If you know of a site that has it, that would be a tremendous addition. Alternatively, if someone has a lot of free time on their hands and feels like typing out the entire thing and posting it online, you would be making the world a better place.