The Book — Biblical and Related Ancient Texts in Order of Composition

Timeline Threads Contents Search Canons Saved Accuracy

The texts are public domain — the World English Bible with Deuterocanon, R. H. Charles's 1917 Enoch and Jubilees, and the Ante-Nicene Fathers of 1870 and 1885. Four books of the Ethiopian canon are recovered from scans of older printings — Platt's Didascalia of 1834, Horner's Statutes of the Apostles of 1904, Issaverdens's Venice volume of 1901 and M. R. James's Apocryphal New Testament of 1924 — and each of those says on its own page that it is recovered rather than audited. Nothing here is drawn from a modern copyrighted translation.

The reference data is openly licensed, not public domain. Word definitions are Easton's Bible Dictionary, 1897, itself public domain, in a machine-readable parse by NEUU under CC BY 4.0. Coordinates come from OpenBible.info's Bible Geocoding under CC BY 4.0, parts of it derived from OpenStreetMap under the ODbL. Those requirements were inherited and cannot be dropped, so this site's own data carries them too: everything derived here is offered under CC BY 4.0, and the code under MIT.

The order is a scholarly reconstruction and is contested at many points. The accuracy report sets out what was verified, what was corrected, and what is still missing.

Take the whole library with you. Download it as one file — every text, the search, the definitions and the map in a single page that opens from your own disk with the network off. It is large, because it is the whole thing: nothing is fetched once you have it.

Keyboard shortcuts and accessibility

/: Go to search
l: Listen to the chapter, or pause it
d: Define the word you have selected
?: Look up any word by name
← →: Previous and next chapter
Esc: Close a definition or verse menu

Every verse number is a button: reach it with Tab and press Enter to save the verse, copy it, or copy a link to it. Text size is adjustable in any chapter, the whole site works in light and dark, and animation is dropped if your system asks for reduced motion. On a phone every link sits on screen rather than behind a sideways swipe, and the bar carrying them steps out of the way as you read down the page, returning as soon as you scroll back up.

Any chapter can be read aloud. The narration uses the voices already installed on your device — nothing is downloaded and no text leaves the page — so the range and quality of the voices is whatever your system provides, and the reading is a synthetic one, not a performance. It announces the chapter, follows the verse being spoken, keeps its place when you leave, and runs on from chapter to chapter and from one work into the next one written, unless you turn that off. That sequence is the order of composition, not the printed order. A browser with no speech support at all is shown no control; a device that has the support but no voice installed is told so plainly when it asks, since the voices come from the system and only the system can add them. On a phone the reading usually stops when the screen locks or you change app: the browser suspends the page, and this is a voice speaking the page rather than an audio file playing behind it.