About Ancient Bible
Ancient Bible presents the Scriptures in the languages in which they were written — Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek — with every single word parsed. Click or tap any word and you get its dictionary form, its part of speech, its full grammatical analysis in plain English, a short definition, and beneath that the complete entry from a standard scholarly lexicon.
There is nothing to install, no account to create, and nothing to pay. The whole library is static files served straight from disk, one chapter to a page.
What is here
The Old Testament — the Hebrew Bible in the Masoretic text, with vowel points and cantillation marks as the Masoretes transmitted them. The Aramaic portions of Daniel, Ezra, Genesis and Jeremiah are marked and parsed as Aramaic rather than Hebrew, with the verb stems named in the Aramaic system: Peal, Pael and Aphel, not Qal and Hiphil.
The Septuagint — the Greek Old Testament as the Jewish translators left it, made between the third and first centuries BC. What stands under this heading is that translation and nothing else: later revisions and Christian additions are not included, so you will not find Theodotion’s second-century AD Daniel here, nor the Odes, the Christian liturgical compilation later appended to the Psalter.
Intertestamental — Jewish writings from between the Testaments, preserved in Greek. Most are deuterocanonical, received as Scripture by Catholics and Orthodox: Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch with the Letter of Jeremiah, and 1–2 Maccabees. The Greek additions to Daniel are here — Susanna and Bel and the Dragon as separate works — while the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men stands where the Greek puts it, inside Daniel 3, and the additions to Esther likewise sit inside Greek Esther rather than as a separate book. 1 Esdras and 3–4 Maccabees are here too; these are canonical in Orthodox rather than Catholic tradition. So are the Psalms of Solomon and the surviving Greek of 1 Enoch, which are canonical in no Western tradition at all — 1 Enoch only in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. Every book page says which it is, because a shelf is a location and not a verdict.
The New Testament — all twenty-seven books in Greek.
The Dead Sea Scrolls — the Qumran library and the manuscripts from the other Judaean Desert sites, in Hebrew and Aramaic: biblical manuscripts a thousand years older than the Masoretic codices, alongside the sectarian writings found with them — the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Hodayot, the pesharim, the Temple Scroll. They are listed by cave and site because that is how they are catalogued and cited. These texts are fragmentary in a way the rest of this library is not: square brackets mark letters restored by the editors rather than preserved on the leather, and a bracketed ellipsis marks a word that is lost entirely. Roughly one word in six carries some reconstruction. The parsing is scholarly work, not machine output.
How the parsing works
Every word carries four things: the form as printed, the dictionary form it comes from, its part of speech, and its full grammatical parse. For Hebrew and Aramaic, words are further broken into their component morphemes — the conjunction, the article, the preposition, the stem, the pronominal suffix — each parsed on its own, because that is how the language actually works. In Greek, every verb carries tense, voice, mood, person and number, and the middle voice is distinguished from the passive wherever the form alone leaves it ambiguous.
We are deliberate about where the analysis comes from, because not all of it is equally certain:
- The Hebrew, Aramaic and New Testament Greek parsing is scholarly work, not machine output. It was produced by human scholars over many years and released for free use.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls parsing is scholarly work too, by Abegg, Bowley and Cook. Where a Qumran word has no exact entry in Brown-Driver-Briggs it is shown with its parse and no definition, rather than linked to a similar-looking word: Qumran Hebrew carries a great deal of vocabulary the standard lexicon never covered, and a plausible wrong entry is worse than an honest gap.
- All the other Greek is machine-parsed. No openly licensed scholarly parsing of the Septuagint exists, so we produced our own with a neural model trained on ancient Greek. It is accurate often enough to be useful for reading, and wrong often enough that it should not be cited as an authority. Every page carrying machine parsing says so plainly, above the text rather than in the small print. Where a word could not be matched to a dictionary entry, the parse is shown without one rather than guessed at.
What the reader can do
Click or tap any word for its dictionary form, its part of speech, its full grammatical parse in plain English, a short gloss and the complete lexicon entry — without leaving the page. The same works from the keyboard: Tab to a word and press Enter.
English, three ways. Every text offers a word-by-word English gloss, painted beneath each word from the dictionaries — a vocabulary aid that works even on the Scrolls, which have no public-domain translation. Texts that do have one (JPS 1917 for the Hebrew Bible, the King James for the New Testament, Brenton for the Septuagint) also offer the full translation, under each verse or side by side. The English is a guide; the parsing stays on the original.
The two texts talk to each other. A line beneath each chapter links the Hebrew and Greek forms of the same book — Genesis to the Septuagint Genesis, the Greek Psalm to the Hebrew Psalm it translates, with the difference in numbering handled for you — and every biblical Dead Sea Scroll points to the book it preserves.
Every verse has an address. Click a verse number to copy a link straight to that verse; opening such a link highlights the verse and scrolls it into view. The left and right arrow keys turn the page, and the homepage remembers where you left off reading.
Every word has its own page. Beside each entry in the card is a link to that word’s own page: the full dictionary article, and every place the word occurs anywhere in the corpus, grouped by book, with each reference linking straight to the verse. Together they are a concordance of the whole library — Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek in one index.
Two further lexicons, on request. Greek words offer Liddell–Scott–Jones — the standard classical lexicon, which knows the Septuagint’s vocabulary in a way a dictionary of the New Testament never could. Words from the Dead Sea Scrolls that Brown–Driver–Briggs does not carry, because they are not biblical Hebrew, are looked up in Jastrow’s dictionary of the Targumim and Talmud instead. Both are fetched only when you ask for them, so an ordinary click costs nothing extra.
Search the concordance. The Concordance page searches every word in the corpus by headword, transliteration, or English meaning, and lets you walk the Hebrew and Greek alphabets a letter at a time. Each result opens its dictionary article in place and links to its own page. The site search box sends any Hebrew or Greek query there automatically.
Take it with you. The whole library can be downloaded from the homepage as a single archive that works with no internet connection at all, and the site itself can be installed as an app from your browser’s menu. Chapters and dictionary entries you have opened are kept locally for instant return visits, the pages follow your system’s light or dark preference, and a chapter prints cleanly with the apparatus stripped away.
Texts and editions
| Text | Edition | Rights |
|---|---|---|
| Hebrew Bible & Biblical Aramaic | Westminster Leningrad Codex | Public domain |
| — its lemmas and morphology | Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible | CC BY 4.0 |
| Greek New Testament | Nestle, Novum Testamentum Graece, 1904 | Public domain |
| — its morphology | Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen, via biblicalhumanities.org | CC0 |
| Septuagint & intertestamental Greek | Swete, The Old Testament in Greek, 1896–1905 | Public domain |
| — Greek texts supplied by | Open Greek and Latin, First1KGreek | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| — their morphology | Generated by Ancient Bible using odyCy | — |
| Dead Sea Scrolls | Transcriptions and morphology by Martin G. Abegg, Jr., James E. Bowley and Edward M. Cook; Text-Fabric edition by Jarod Jacobs, Martijn Naaijer and Dirk Roorda (ETCBC) | CC BY-NC 4.0 |
Dictionaries
| Language | Lexicon | Rights |
|---|---|---|
| Hebrew & Aramaic | Brown, Driver and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, 1906, via the Open Scriptures Hebrew Lexicon | Text public domain; markup CC BY 4.0 |
| Greek | Abbott-Smith, A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, 1922 | Public domain |
| Grammatical descriptions | STEPBible morphology-code expansions, Tyndale House Cambridge | CC BY 4.0 |
| Greek, the full article | Liddell–Scott–Jones, A Greek–English Lexicon, via the Perseus Digital Library | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
| Post-biblical Hebrew & Aramaic | Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature, 1903, via Sefaria | Public domain |
What is not here, and why
Several works often grouped with the intertestamental literature do not survive in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek at all. Jubilees and 2 Enoch come down in Ge’ez and Old Church Slavonic; 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch in Latin, Syriac and Armenian. 1 Enoch is complete only in Ge’ez, and what appears here is the fragmentary Greek rather than a translation made back from the Ethiopic. A site that parses every word cannot honestly present a text it does not have in the original language, so the rest are left out and said so rather than quietly substituted.
Nor are later Greek revisions of books already here. Theodotion’s Daniel and a second edition of Greek Isaiah were both set aside in favour of the Old Greek, so that the Septuagint on this site is the translation the Jewish translators made rather than the forms later editors preferred. Susanna and Bel and the Dragon are the exception, and are kept in Theodotion’s version: those two works survive in no earlier Greek form that stands on its own, and dropping the recension would mean dropping the works.
What the Scrolls section does not carry is images of the manuscripts, or the editorial apparatus of the official editions. It carries the text as transcribed, parsed word by word, with reconstruction marked.
Who made this
Ancient Bible is a philanthropic effort of Worth Media. It is free, carries no advertising, sells nothing, and asks nothing of you — no account, no sign-up. Anonymous visit statistics are gathered with Google Analytics, so that we can see which texts are being read; nothing else is collected.
We are grateful to the people who made this possible by giving their work away: the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible project, Tyndale House Cambridge and STEPBible, the Open Greek and Latin project, biblicalhumanities.org, and the Center for Humanities Computing at Aarhus, who built odyCy.
Sister sites
Ancient Bible is one of three free reading projects from Worth Media:
Ancient Library — the Greek and Latin classics in the original, with every word parsed, every form defined, and full dictionary entries from Lewis & Short and LSJ.
Better Gutenberg — the world’s great public-domain books, from literature and history to art and philosophy, as clean, modern EPUBs you can read online or download free.