Open Reader's Bibles

A reader’s Bible is a Bible that has the original language text of the Bible, alongside of glosses , parsings, and footnotes that help people to understand the text. The goal is to help someone who understands the original languages to be able to read the Bible without constantly having to refer to a dictionary or a parsing chart. They are very helpful for people who have studied the languages for a year or so, and need a bridge to be able to read the Bible fluently in the original languages.

Reader’s Bibles are generally published by for-profit companies. They need to cover the expense of producing the book. This has two consequences. First, the books are rather expensive (like a textbook). Second, reader’s Bibles are generally only available in languages that have a lot of customers.

You can make your own reader's Bible!

This is a website that will help you to produce your own reader’s Bible. It is a lot of work, but we’ve worked hard to make it as simple as possible. Then you can produce high quality PDFs or web pages from your hard work—and you can give them away for free.

How much work is this? This is what you will provide:

• You provide the glosses for the words.
• You translate the grammatical terms (indicative, subjunctive, qal, niphal, etc.)

Here is what we can provide:

• All of the parsing is already done.
• You don't have to gloss the same word over and over. You just translate “Δαυὶδ” once, and after that you just click to confirm.
• We will generate a nice PDF, which you can distribute.

The hope here is that people from all over the world will be able to benefit from these wonderful resources.

A personal invitation and challenge

Learning Greek and Hebrew is a lot of work! In the English-speaking world, we are blessed with many valuable resources. Many people around the world can only learn Greek or Hebrew if they learn a second academic language first—perhaps English, German, Spanish, or French. If that describes you: well done! Those of us who learned in our native language from the beginning are in awe of your hard work and dedication.

We would like to challenge you here to think about your fellow countrymen. You have overcome a lot of obstacles and difficulties to be able to read the Bible in the original languages. Will you now help others to get there as well? Will you help the next generation, so that they don’t have to go through all of the difficult work that you did?

The goal of this website is to make it as easy as possible to produce a reader’s Bible in your language. It is still not easy, but it is as easy as it can be. It will also take care of all of the publishing difficulties. So there should be very little holding you back. Can you commit a short time each day to work on developing a resource that will help future generations?

You can get started today. You can probably finish a short book like Ruth, 1 John, or Jonah in a couple of hours!