Freely-Given.org e-Sword Bibles

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Submitting e-Sword files to the Bible Drop Box

You should compress your unencrypted e-Sword Bible file into a regular zip archive. (You can't just submit the downloaded .bblx files -- you must compress them into a regular zip archive.) The filename must have a .zip extension. Take careful note of which folder you are saving your zip file into, because you will need that information in order to submit the file.

Installing your own e-Sword Bible modules

This is as simple as copying the .bblx file into the Program Files\e-Sword folder and then restarting the program.

I have had success running e-Sword under Wine on Ubuntu Linux in which case the correct folder for me was ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files (x86)/e-Sword.

More than you wanted to know about e-Sword Bibles

Regular e-Sword v9-10 Bibles consist of one binary file, usually ending with a .bblx file extension (indicating that it contains Bible text). Official e-Sword modules are encrypted (even the ones with non-copyrighted Bible versions) so that the data inside them is not accessable from other programs -- so obviously they are not usable by the Bible Drop Box either!

However, other groups and individuals also create e-Sword modules, such as BibleSupport.com and BibleModulesResource.com.

The files use RTF encoding for internal formatting, and appear to be encoded into the SQLite binary database format.
The Details table contains some metadata, typically:
CREATE TABLE Details (Description NVARCHAR(255), Abbreviation NVARCHAR(50), Comments TEXT, Version TEXT, VersionDate DATETIME, PublishDate DATETIME, RightToLeft BOOL, OT BOOL, NT BOOL, Strong BOOL, CustomCSS TEXT).
The Bible table contains the actual verse text, typically with the following schema:
CREATE TABLE Bible(Book INT, Chapter INT, Verse INT, Scripture TEXT, Primary Key(Book,Chapter,Verse)).

Note: Earlier versions of e-Sword (before v9) used MS-Access database files, and those older Bible modules are NOT usable by the Bible Drop Box.

Sample e-Sword files

You can view the Matigsalug demo e-Sword files here and the demo WEB e-Sword files here.

Test data: If you are able to provide any kinds of Bible files for automated testing purposes, please contact us and let us know the details so we can improve the internationalisation and ruggedness of the software for everyone’s benefit.