About Open Bible Data

Open Bible Data (OBD) is a large set of static webpages created for several main reasons:

As a way to showcase the Open English Translation of the Bible which is designed to be read with the Readers’ Version and the very Literal Version side-by-side. (Most existing Bible apps don’t allow for this.) Also, the OET renames some Bible ‘books’ and places them into a different order, and even modernises terminology like ‘Old Testament’ and ‘New Testament’ with ‘The Hebrew Scriptures’ and ‘The Messianic Update’.
To showcase how OET-RV section headings are formatted so as not to break the flow of the text. Section headings are available as a help to the reader, but were not in the original manuscripts, and the original flow of the text was not designed to be arbitrarily divided into sections.
To promote other open-licenced Bible translations, including those developed as resources for Bible translators themselves. We believe that God’s message should be freely available to all.
As a way to showcase open-licenced Bible datasets. Hence every word in the OET-LV is linked to the Greek word that they are translated from. In addition, most pronouns like ‘he’ or ‘she’ are linked to the earlier referrents in the text.
For the comparison and evaluation of the history and quality and distinctives of various Bible translations. So on the parallel verse pages, you can track Biblical wording right from the Biblical Hebrew or Greek, then up through the Latin (near the bottom of the page) and then Wycliffe’s and Tyndale’s early English translations, then right up through more modern translations all the way back up to the OET at the top.
We try to downplay chapter and verse divisions, and encourage readers to read narratives as narratives and letters as letters—would you take a letter or email from your mother, draw lines through it to divide it into random sections/chapters, and then read different sections on different days?

You might especially note the following features:

Our Related passage view shows the OET-RV by section, along with any other parallel or related sections, and then with all the cross-references expanded underneath that.
Our Parallel verse view shows individual OET verses at the top, but if you’re interested in English Bible translation history, go to the bottom of the page (and then scroll up through any Study Notes) until you find the original language (Hebrew or Greek) versions. Then work your way upwards, through the Latin to the Wycliffe and Tyndale translations, and then other early English translations until you see that English spelling becomes standardised with the proliferation of mass-produced books by the time of the 1769 revision of the KJB. As you work upwards in chronological order, it’s fascinating to see two things:
1. how spelling in early English books was phonetic (sounding out the words) and quite variable (and so we try to help you with a conversion to modern English in parentheses), and
2. how translators often reused phrases from earlier English translations, but other times chose to disagree.
Our Interlinear verse view shows word-for-word interlinear and reverse-interlinear views of the OET and the original languages.
Our Search page allows you to search for English, Latin, Hebrew, and Greek words.
On the negative side, note that our Old Testament pages are still much less developed than our New Testament ones—both a still very much a work-in-progress, but for the Old Testament, we're still waiting for corrections from some of our partners before we can improve our own side more.

We would welcome any others who would like to contribute open datasets or code to this endeavour. Please contact us at Freely dot Given dot org (at) gmail dot com. We consider this OBD project to be part of the very first stage of contributing to the development of an open-licensed Bible-study app to rival the commercial ones (like ‘Logos’—not the plural of ‘logo’).

You’ll possibly notice that not many large, commercial Bible translations are included in these pages because of their strict limits on the use of their texts. We highly recommend that our readers find better translations that are more influenced by discipleship priorities, and less by finances. (See SellingJesus.org if you want to learn more about commercialism of Christian publications.)

Acknowledgement: The overall design of the site was influenced by BibleHub.com and their OpenBible.com which have many features that we like (and likely many overlapping goals).

Technical details

These pages are created by a Python program that takes the open-licenced resources and combines them in different ways on different pages. The program is still being developed, and hence this site (or this part of the site), is still at the prototype stage, especially with respect to navigation around the pages which is still being improved.

Also, several Bible ‘books’ are not yet included because no draft of that OET book is available yet, so you might find some dead links, i.e., “Page Not Found” errors, that will eventually be filled out.

If you are the copyright owner of a Bible translation or a relevant dataset and would like to see it listed on this site, please contact us at Freely dot Given dot org (at) gmail dot com.

The source code for the Python program that produces these pages can be found at GitHub.com/Freely-Given-org/OpenBibleData. You can also advise us of any errors by clicking on New issue here and telling us the problem.

Last rebuilt: 2024-12-16 (OET v0.27)