A method and apparatus are provided for building and using a persistent XML tree index for navigating an XML document. The XML tree index is stored separately from the XML document content, and thus is able to optimize performance through the use of fixed-sized index entries. The XML document hierarchy need not be constructed in volatile memory, so creating and using the XML tree index scales even for large documents. To evaluate a path expression including descendent or ancestral syntax, navigation links can be read from persistent storage and used directly to find the nodes specified in the path expression. The use of an abstract navigational interface allows applications to be written that are independent of the storage implementation of the index and the content. Thus, the XML tree index can index documents stored at least in a database, a persistent file system, or as a sequence of in memory.