Consecutive Mappiq He

• 03 September 2023
• Torah,
• concordance,
• Harold Zazula

Harold Zazula asks: What is the longest consecutive string of words with a mappiq he.

To figure this out, let's use the Leningrad Codex which has a nice XML representation of all of Tanach. You need to download this bit manually to avoid 403 errors.

unzip Tanach.xml.zip
cd Books
python

from pathlib import Path
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

URL_SEFARIA = "https://www.sefaria.org/{book}.{chap}.{verse}"

print("| count | ref | words |")
print("|-------|-----|-------|")
# iterate over each xml file alphabetically (to keep things deterministic)
for path in sorted(Path(".").glob("*.xml")):
    # ignore extraneous files
    if ".DH" in path.name or "Index" in path.name:
        continue
    # load the xml file; require lxml library
    soup = BeautifulSoup(path.read_text(), features="xml")
    words = soup.find_all("w") # get all the words
    streak = [] # reset our streak of found words
    for word in words:
        if "הּ" in word.text:  # if this word has a mappiq-he
            streak.append(word)  # add it to the streak
        elif streak: # otherwise, we'll need to reset the streak
            if len(streak) > 1:  # we should print streaks longer than 1 word
                # save a reference to chapter:verse
                book = path.stem
                chap = streak[0].parent.parent["n"]
                verse = streak[0].parent["n"]
                seq = ", ".join([w.text.strip() for w in streak])
                ref = f"{book} {chap}:{verse}"
                url = URL_SEFARIA.format(book=book, chap=chap, verse=verse)
                print(f"|{len(streak)}|[{ref}]({url})|{seq}|")
            streak = []  # reset the streak

Luckily there aren't that many results, so by visual inspection we can see that the maximum number of consecutive words with a mappiq he is 4 in Deuteronomy 28:56 (with one word in the next verse) and Hosea 2:13 (all in one verse with another mappiq-he two words later).

Updates #

2023-11-28 #

• Updated broken links.