About the project

This is a volunteer effort. The goal is to serve the global church by making it easier to read the Bible in the original languages.

It's all anonymous, but if you need to get in touch, the email address *openreadersbibles at gmail dot com is the best way to reach out.

A more personal introduction

After I finished third-semester Hebrew, I had still read very little of the Hebrew Bible. I knew that if I didn’t use it, I would forget it. And so I set myself the goal of being able to read the Psalms without having to use a dictionary. After one or two years, I achieved that goal. But I was exhausted! I knew that at that rate I might never read through the entire Old Testament.

Somewhat reluctantly, I bought a Hebrew reader’s Bible. At first I was ashamed: I thought of it as a cheater’s edition. But then I began to read from it daily, and I saw how helpful it was. After several more years, I had read completely through the Old Testament. I knew that never would have happened if I had just been relying on BHS and a dictionary.

Somewhere in those years, I began to wish that there could be a reader’s Bible in one of the languages that is near to my heart. I sent an email to the publisher of a Greek reader’s Bible. They replied with a sensible question: how many copies did I think it would sell? But I knew that that was the end of the idea: we would be lucky to sell a few hundred copies. So I set the idea aside.

As I continued to read in my reader’s Bible, I thought about how it had been produced. As a computer person, I could see that a database was involved. I found myself getting distracted in my devotions, thinking about how I would code that sort of system.

Fairly soon after I finished reading through the Old Testament for the first time, I was at a conference with a lot of Russians. I was doing my devotions in the hotel lobby, and a new Russian friend sat down. He was a pastor, and also fluent in English. He noticed the book, and said that he had the same one: someone had brought it in for him specially in Russia. I was glad that he too was able to use it, but I was also upset. First, he could only get that book because he knew an expatriate who could bring it in for him. Second, he could only benefit from it because he already knew English. How many more Russians would benefit from a Russian reader’s Bible? How many people of other languages would also benefit?

So, at some point after that, I decided to make this a priority.