Sources, licences and privacy
Texts
Every text here is either in the public domain or openly licensed, and is shown exactly as its publisher distributes it: no words are changed, and verse numbers are the source's own.
| Text | Source | Licence |
|---|---|---|
| World English Bible (WEB), Classic edition, with its deuterocanon | eBible.org (VPL text; paragraphing, poetry lines and notes from the same edition's USFM) | Public domain. "World English Bible" is a trademark of eBible.org; the text is shown unchanged. |
| King James Version (KJV), 1769 standard text | eBible.org, courtesy of the CrossWire Bible Society | Public domain outside the United Kingdom. In the UK the KJV is under Crown letters patent: printing it, or importing printed copies, needs permission (held by Cambridge University Press and others). bible.gripe displays it on the web and does not print it. |
| American Standard Version (ASV), 1901 | eBible.org | Public domain |
| Hebrew Old Testament: Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC) | eBible.org (from the Westminster Hebrew Institute) | Public domain |
| Hebrew–English verse map | Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible (VerseMap.xml) | CC BY 4.0: "Original work of the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible available at https://github.com/openscriptures/morphhb". Used unchanged to line verses up. |
| Greek New Testament: Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform, 2018 edition | byztxt/byzantine-majority-text (Unicode CSV, no variants) | Public domain (CC0) |
| Cross-references | OpenBible.info | CC BY. Cross-references from OpenBible.info. References with at least one vote are shown, most-voted first. |
| Fonts: Noto Serif Hebrew, Noto Serif (Greek letters only) | The Noto Project, via Google Fonts; subset for this site | SIL Open Font License 1.1 (Hebrew, Greek) |
Why these? Modern translations such as the NIV or ESV are copyrighted, so they can't be offered freely here. The World English Bible is a modern-English translation that its translators dedicated to the public domain; the King James and American Standard versions are old enough to be free.
Books and order
The main list is the 66 books in the usual Protestant order. The deuterocanonical books (also called the Apocrypha) that the World English Bible translates are in their own section, labelled as such, and are never mixed into the 66.
Verse numbering
Each text keeps its own numbering. The English versions number most of the Old Testament the same way, but the Hebrew text differs in places: psalm titles are verse 1 in Hebrew, some chapters start a few verses earlier or later (for example Malachi 4 in English is Malachi 3:19–24 in Hebrew), and a few verses are split differently. The compare view lines verses up with the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible's verse map and shows the source's own number beside any verse that is numbered differently; where verses only partly overlap it says so instead of forcing them together. In Romans, the closing doxology is 16:25–27 in the KJV and ASV but 14:24–26 in the WEB and the Byzantine Greek text; compare matches those too. Some verse numbers have no text in some versions (for example Acts 8:37 in the WEB and ASV), and the page says so where that happens.
Privacy
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