About the Author

Contact: you can get in touch via my Twitter handle @drmacdonald or via drobertmacd at gmail dot com.

My name is Bob MacDonald. My profession is Software. My wife and I have four children and two grandchildren.

In 2018, I completed my reading of the Hebrew Bible, posting day by day, an English reading for the music according to computer aided concordance rules for repeated words. 

The SimHebrew Bible, The Hebrew Bible in Simulated Hebrew with English Guide, 2021, is available both direct from the publisher  and through a distribution channel

A full concordance is available for this translation (volume 8 below and at the concordance page above.)

The English Guide is available in my translation series: The Hebrew Bible and its Music, in 10 volumes with many musical examples as illustrations. Pace yourself while reading and sing a verse in Hebrew. All volumes were updated October 2021.
My reading of the Psalter with its comprehensive analysis of word recurrence patterns, is Seeing the Psalter, Patterns of Recurrence in the Poetry of the Psalms. Seeing the Psalter can be previewed at Energion Direct and at other sites like Amazon. It was the first step in the project briefly introduced in this poster.

Learn to read and understand the ancient story using the music. My second book on the Bible, The Song in the Night, tells the story of the Old Testament based on the musical score embedded in the text itself. The Song in the Night is available at Amazon.

See also my YouTube channel

In 2015, I wrote a program to transform Hebrew Text into Music XML. Believe it or not, this was intended by the writers of the Hebrew text and they had never heard of programming. But they knew chironomy (hand signals used to conduct music) and what they did was encode these hand signals into the text syllable by syllable. This encoding process clearly shows our shared capacities both for design and for music. See the music page for more information on how to access the files.

I was born in Montreal, Canada in 1945, educated at Bishop’s College School and at McGill University, graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics in 1967. I have spent my working life in data processing, working first for IBM, then at the BC Systems Corporation, and then self-employed as a teacher of systems across North America. In 1984, I helped re-establish Anthony Macauley Associates, a software firm which has been recognized in Canada and around the world as a provider of Financial Management and Monitoring and Evaluation software.

I continue as a student of Hebrew. I have completed two fellowships at the University of Victoria in the Centre for Studies in Religion and Society, one with a research project on repeated word patterns in the Psalms, and a second on the music embedded in the Hebrew text.

I had serious doubts about my sanity in undertaking and continuing this project. It is, you should know, a project undertaken out of faith in Jesus. He said to me (not in so many words), How can you know my thoughts if you do not learn my language? Whoever or wherever this voice came from, it has led me on a real journey.

I am not a scholar. But I do want to know what is going on in the so called religious world. And I have discovered a lot. I show my rough work as well as my finished work in the hope that it might help others in some way. Religion is a power game and it is shrewd to learn how to play it.

These languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, Latin) were (and will remain) mystifying and foreign to me. The scholars are insightful, but they too have their own needs within their own professional areas. Some of them are wonderfully knowledgeable but they may hide their identity. Some are very helpful. Some are sometimes just plain wrong. Some are rude. (As indeed am I in these things sometimes.)

My training was in mathematics and physics. But most of my experience is in the management and development of software systems. And in the management and growth of a family over 55 years, with four children, two of which have special needs due to brain injuries, and two grandchildren. All of us benefit from the gifts of God through science, technology, and the ancient texts and testimonies.

I am getting old. Like the grey-haired of Judea in Ezra 6, building the temple. I run the risk of being put off by my enemies, just as they did. They might not even know they were my enemies. 

Anyway, if you follow my work - take care. I will not knowingly mislead you, but I may be materially wrong at times. Certainly, there can be no exhaustive completeness in this work. But it is a real human endeavour, and though it is madness, I have completed it in some sense while I have sufficient light and before I can no longer work.

One thing I have done that is unique to date in the history of the Hebrew Bible. I have read the text with a program and produced all the musical scores that are implicit in the accents of the Aleppo and Leningrad codices. The music reveals the text more than any other tool. See the music page.