Biblical texts

Every text is in the public domain and may be freely used, copied, and distributed. Your primary text, the translation shown first for every verse, is the WEB unless you choose the KJV, the ASV, the GNV or TYN on your Account & preferences page, and your searches can look in all six English translations. Chosen as the primary text, the KJV is set plainly, without the Strong’s numbers it carries as a study layer. The short codes are what the app uses where space is tight — the text picker and the tag on each search result — and each is spelled out below.

The three older texts are here for a particular kind of reading. Set beside a modern translation they show how a verse has been turned into English across four centuries, and two of them are the ancestors the later versions were built on.

The translations

World English Bible (WEB)

The default primary text of this reader. The World English Bible is a modern English update of the American Standard Version of 1901, produced by volunteers under the editorship of Michael Paul Johnson. The text of the World English Bible is dedicated to the public domain and is not copyrighted. “World English Bible” is a trademark of eBible.org; the trademark is used here to accurately identify the translation, with no affiliation or endorsement implied.

Bible in Basic English (BBE)

Not a text to read by default, but one to reach for when it is needed: the whole Bible in Charles Kay Ogden’s Basic English, 850 words with some 150 more for the Bible and its poetry, prepared by Samuel Henry Hooke of the University of London and a committee (the New Testament in 1941, the whole Bible in 1949). With so few words, abstract language is unfolded into plain description: Genesis opens not with “In the beginning God created” but with “At the first God made.” Some dignity is lost, and passages often read past are forced into the open. It is a translation, not a paraphrase, but a vocabulary this small cannot help interpreting, and it settles ambiguities the original leaves open where a fuller English would rightly let them stand. So it is best read beside the WEB, when English is not your first language or an argument in Paul will not come clear. The BBE is in the public domain; Romans 16:24–25 have no BBE text, so there the reader falls back to the WEB and marks the verse.

King James Version (KJV) with Strong's numbering

The Authorized Version of 1611 (1769 Blayney text), tagged with Strong's numbers from Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (James Strong, 1890). Both the KJV text and Strong's concordance and dictionaries are in the public domain. (In the United Kingdom, the KJV remains subject to Crown letters patent; it is reproduced here outside that jurisdiction.)

American Standard Version (ASV)

The American revision of 1901, and the text the WEB was later built from. Its translators were the American half of the committee behind the English Revised Version, and where the two differed the Americans recorded their own preferences. Two things mark it. It renders the divine name as Jehovah rather than the LORD, some 5,800 times, so a distinction the KJV hides in capital letters is visible on every page. And it marks words supplied for English sense in square brackets — herbs yielding seed, [and] fruit-trees — the same courtesy the KJV pays in italics. The brackets are kept: they are the translation telling you where it has helped. The text is in the public domain.

Geneva Bible (GNV)

The Bible of the English Reformation, in the 1587 revision — made by exiles in Geneva, quoted by Shakespeare, and the household Bible of England and Scotland for about eighty years before the King James displaced it. It was the first complete English Bible printed in roman type with numbered verses, so it reads as recognizably modern in shape while its spelling is thoroughly Elizabethan: loued for loved, onely for only, giuen for given. It is nicknamed the Breeches Bible after Genesis 3:7, where Adam and Eve “sewed figge tree leaues together, and made them selues breeches.” The text is in the public domain.

Tyndale Bible (TYN)

The 1534 edition, and the first English Bible translated from the original Hebrew and Greek rather than from Latin — the source from which most later English translations descend, and a great deal of the King James Version is Tyndale’s wording kept. Much of the language English readers know best is his: let there be light, the spirit is willing, the powers that be. His spelling is the oldest here and takes a moment to settle into: In the begynnynge God created heaven and erth.

It is not a complete Bible, and cannot be. Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake in 1536 for the work; he had finished the New Testament, the first five books of the Old, and Jonah. Where the rest would have been, this reader says so instead of showing you another translation’s words in his name. The text is in the public domain.

The original languages

Westminster Leningrad Codex (WLC)

The Hebrew Old Testament, a digital transcription of the Leningrad Codex (the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible), maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research at Westminster Theological Seminary. The text is in the public domain. Its Strong’s numbers are aligned word by word from the interlinear apparatus credited below; the few verses where the two texts spell a word differently are left unnumbered rather than guessed.

Greek Textus Receptus (GTR)

The Greek New Testament of the Reformation era, the textual basis of the King James Version, tagged word-by-word with Strong's numbers so each Greek word can be looked up. The text is in the public domain.

Interlinear Bible

The Interlinear Bible’s word-by-word apparatus — the parsing of each Hebrew and Greek form, its dictionary form, and the English glosses — is adapted for Biblion from the Translators Amalgamated Greek New Testament (TAGNT), its Old Testament counterpart the Translators Amalgamated Hebrew Old Testament (TAHOT), and their companion morphology tables, prepared under Tyndale House, Cambridge and published by STEPBible.org under a CC-BY license. The Strong’s numbers shown are Biblion’s own tagging, so a number tapped in the interlinear always agrees with the lexicon and the occurrence lists.

The cross-references

Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (TSK)

The cross-references come from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, a 19th-century compilation of some 300,000 references keyed to individual words and phrases of each verse. Long attributed to R.A. Torrey (who edited and expanded it), it draws on the marginal references of earlier English Bibles. The work is in the public domain.

The Treasury only ever looks one way: it says what a verse points to, never what points back at it. The second list — the verses whose own references land on the one you are reading — is worked out here from the same 300,000, and it reaches close to two thousand verses the compilation never cites from at all.

A handful of references on each verse carry an often linked mark. That comes from the cross-reference votes published by OpenBible.info under a CC-BY license, where readers vote on how apt each link is: the mark flags the references of a verse that people follow most, which is the one thing the Treasury’s own list, being unranked, cannot say. Only the votes are used — the references themselves remain the Treasury’s.

The same site’s Torah flowcharts, also CC-BY, are the source for the order of steps in Covenant law. The wording of each step, the drawing of the charts and the illustrations that head them are Biblion’s own.