Read the Bible: Greek and Hebrew Reading Experiment

By BylineJohn Dyer on

Reader's Greek and HebrewFor my BibleTech:2009 presentation (“Technology Is Not Neutral: How Bible Technology Shapes Our Faith“), I created an example site to demonstrate what I like to call “technological minimalism” in Bible software. In my seminary Greek and Hebrew classes, I often relied too heavily on my Bible software during translations and my ability to actually read the text suffered. What I needed was some way to turn off all the cool features and only see the help that I really needed. In my case, I was supposed to have memorized all the Greek works which were used 50 times or more, so I only needed definitions for the more rare words. Unfortunately, there is no way to limit this that I know of in Logos.

A few years ago, Zondervan and the United Bible Society started publishing “Reader’s Editions” of the Greek and Hebrew texts. These versions have the original Greek or Hebrew in the top 2/3 of the page and definitions to words used 30 times or less in lower 1/3 of the page. There are some excellent reviews from Rick Mansfield and Justin Taylor that go over the pros and cons of the various versions. Alternatively, Kregel just published Reader’s Lexicon of the Greek New Testament which does not include the text, but includes more information on the words themselves.

I love that those books present you with only what you really need to actually read the original text free from the distractions of additional features.

In that spirit, I created an site that allows you to create a customized reader’s version of the Hebrew or Greek Biblical text. To use it,

  1. Go to http://bible.johndyer.name/
  2. Enter the reference you need
  3. Select only the features you need to read
  4. Print and read 🙂

Please leave any comments or suggestions here. I’d love to hear them! [Note: the Hebrew is not yet fully functional]

(Thanks to JT for the link)

193 thoughts on “Read the Bible: Greek and Hebrew Reading Experiment”

  1. Hello, my name is mike helverson and I found the Greek and Hebrew readers Bible site, but something seems missing. Where do I enter the reference into. There does not seem to be a location to put the reference in at. Thanks for the help. Mike

  2. John,

    Thanks for doing this. It is a real blessing to the body of Christ. I just printed off Mark 2-3 to work on as I will be preaching sections from these soon.

    Thanks!

    Nick

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  5. John, this is a terrific tool. I agree with Mike that changing the reference wasn’t clear to me either, so maybe it would be helpful to have something point that interface. Two other points to consider: 1) what about an RSS feed or a few possibilities? (3 verses per day, 1 paragraph, or 1 chapter) and 2) I find the Hebrew font a bit difficult to read and I see it lacks the accents. I have no idea what options you have, but I think moving to a different font w/ accents would be a good long-term goal. But again, this is a great tool and I can see myself utilizing it often. You better watch your back though because you may put a serious dent in the sales for some non-web-based programs…

    1. Ben. I love the RSS idea. I’ll contact Lee Irons to see if his reading program is available for use in other sites.

      Right now, to view the Hebrew you need to download and install the Ezra SIL font. I have contact the maintainers of the Westminster Leningrad Codex to see if I can get a more accurate copy, so for now it’s a little off on word counts and such.

  6. John,

    Fantastic site. I agree with ben w. Is there a way for visitors to view the page with different Greek and Hebrew fonts?

    Thanks for all the work!

    Adam York

    1. Adam, I’ll take a look at letting users change fonts at will. Thanks for the suggestion. Right now it’s using Ezra SIL and Gentium.

  8. Its very smooth. Lovely and fast. Congratulations. I have to ask a silly question though. What lexicon is used in the mouseover? Are those Strong’s number? Did I miss your reference?

    1. It’s a combination of Strong’s and Thayer’s. Those are the only real things available in the public domain, though I am looking at a few additional sources that might be better down the line. However, the main goal of the site is to provide a printable, reader’s version of the text.

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  10. Thanks John. FYI for whatever reason this is not working on a PC in Explorer, but does work in an I-Mac using Safari. Never thought I’d type those words, but there they are.

      1. Hi John!!!! first a huge THANK YOU for such a great page! I find it very useful.
        Any hopes that your site will run in IE?

          1. John you are right! it runs in IE8… however, the coloring words and background in the “parts of speech” does not work… maybe I have some configuration to make in my IE8?

            Thank you!!!

  11. Been searching for a use-able bible reading website for SO LONG now…it’s a blessing to find a good one. I agree that there is too much clutter on most sites, and that the views certainly don’t lend themselves to helping the Greek or Hebrew Student.

    Your site will be a great supplement to the only other good one I have found: http://www.biblos.com.

    Any chance you’ll make this into software? I need a Greek/Hebrew Bible for my phone too!

  12. Hi John, Fantastic site. I’m one of those who have been on the look out for a replacement for regreek.com/zhubert.com and this does a lot of what I was looking for.

    How are you licensing the source code? How is the content licensed? Would love to be able to run a copy on a local server and tweak and augment.

    1. Will, the site is mostly JavaScript (yeah, jQuery!), but the back end is ASP.NET and MS SQL Server. It would be fun to try to make it downloadable and installable, but I’d rather not try to support that for now.

  13. What an excellent initiative! Thanks fo ryour work on this John. The site is not only useful — it looks nice, too!

    I checked the Hebrew side of things. As you develop the OT offerings, perhaps you could use the SBL Hebrew Unicode font. It is even more reliable than the fine SIL Ezra font. I have put a link in the “Your URL” slot to one site that shows it at work in a web setting.

    Looking forward to this growing! 🙂

  14. That is a well-executed reader! I’m going to guess you used Rails to execute? I’ve wanted to do a project like this, but never got off the ground, due to the sheer amount of data to obtain and questions about how to best store it. I’d love to contribute to this project somehow, I’m a web developer! (I’ll be learning Greek this summer before I go on for my MTS)

      1. Hey, a Mac guy doing ASP.NET! Will wonders never cease?
        John, I am still in mourning over zhubert.com. Got the link here from the openscriptures.org “redeeming…” post. Very nice.

        I have an old copy of Accordance on an old iMac that someone gave me. But there is just something about being able to work on something for a few minutes online using a Web application, usually away from home. Thanks for doing this. “May you live to be a thousand years old, sir.”

        1. Matthew, that’s funny – I actually primarily use a PC, but I prefer not to think of myself as either a Mac or PC guy.

          Glad to hear you find a web app useful in some Bible study situations.

  16. Great site! Thanks for all your work…

    You are right, the site does work on the iPod Touch/ iPhone (!), but there is no way to initiate a search for a new text. You can enter the new reference over the old, but there is a problem when trying to hit return. Maybe it is something to do with the limitations of a touch screen/virtual keyboard. Any suggestions?

    Are there any other possibilities for new text searches for mobile devices?

    1. Justin, a mobile site sounds like a lot of fun as does a site that performs searches. Perhaps down the line, I can work on such a site.

      But it seems like there are several excellent resources that do that already. The goal of this site was to build something entirely unique – a way to help people print and read offline with minimal helps.

      1. First off, this is an awesome resource! Thanks so much!

        However, I am having the same problem that Justin S has. I can view the site fine on my iPod Touch, but when I tap on the reference and enter a new one, tapping the enter soft key doesn’t take me to the new reference. My guess is it has something to do with how you trap hitting the enter key.

  17. I’ve updated the site to allow font and size customization for those that needed it. Just type in the font you want (needs to be already installed on your computer) and select a size. Also, the reference input should be a little more obvious now.

    1. John,

      Thanks so very much for adding the ability to specify fonts. I think it makes a huge difference on the readability of both Greek and Hebrew.

      Blessings,

      Adam

  18. john, this is awesome. we have a really stinky connection here in beirut (slower than dial-up), but i haven’t had any “patience-building” moments using the reader. i love how simple this thing is. trying not to eat the fruit…but i can’t help it, it tastes so good! thanks for developing such a simple, really helpful tool!

  21. John –

    Wow! I’ll say it again, WOW! This is a treasure. I really hope you will be able to support a downloadable version when you get the product to where you want it. This is a great tool. Do you think there is any hope of working with UBS on using the NA27? Do you think you and Burer could get together and bundle his reader with your software interface? Or have it featured on Bible.org? I mean this is a fantastic tool. Have you shown this to Accordance?

    1. Joey, lately the UBS has been cracking down on any use of their text. Perhaps it’s in anticipation of their forthcoming NA28 which will be an electronic version of their text. I’d love to see more use and exposure for the tool if it gets people reading their Bibles, but I hadn’t really thought about all those idea you mentioned. Good stuff.

  22. John, thanks for putting this together. I really liked and used zhubert.com. It would be nice if you could click the words and the pop-ups stay in place. I was actually looking at doing something similar to this in Flex, making an Adobe Air app, but alas, time is of the essence.

    Anyways, great work. I look forward to additions.

    1. If I ever get to produce a more fully featured Bible tool in addition to his reading tool, AIR might just be the way to go.

  23. John,

    Thanks so much for the great effort and wonderful tool. Just curious, if I find something that could use correcting where might I send that info.?

    Jeff Mooney

  25. Hi John,

    I’m impressed with both the simplicity and robustness of the tool. The interface design is exactly what I’d want to see! Except for one thing: can you implement some kind of simple session state via cookies, so that on subsequent visits to the site it remembers my choices?

    Well done!

    -Jonathan

  26. Thanks John! Based on this response, it looks like you have hit on a serious need here. I know that I will be coming back to this as I continue to try to keep up with my Greek and Hebrew.

  28. When my old next door neighbor gets mentioned on Justin Taylor’s blog and Tim Challies blog all in the same week, I’d say he’s hit the big time! 🙂

    1. Bob, It’s wonderful to hear from you on the interwebs 🙂 If you make it to Dallas, be sure to drop by and meet my growing little family!

  29. Thank you, John! This is a great tool and I’m looking forward to using it a lot. I’ve still got one small suggestion, though: I just read a text where I knew all the words that didn’t have their definition shown — except one. At that moment, I just wished for some possibility, to, say, click on the word and have the definition shown anyway.

    1. Chris, you can turn on mouse over definitions (just check the box on the right) and then you’ll have the best of both worlds (as long as you don’t print it out 🙂

  30. Very cool; remembering your talk at BibleTech, this was one of those pieces that I’m glad that gets a wider public view.

    I’ll have to try this on my Nokia Internet Tablet, its not IE and should present some nice fun.

    By the way, conference audio is now live on the BibleTech site.

  31. Merciful. John, this is simply fantastic. You are so right about the need for some minimalistic tools in learning Greek and Hebrew. The Zondervan Reader’s NT is one of the main reasons I’m as good at reading the Greek NT as I am. I wish that some of the Bible software programs would do this sort of thing on the fly. How amazing would it be to pull up the Apostolic Fathers (or Josephus, Philo, etc.) in Logos and create a reader’s lexicon for it on the fly. That would be amazing.

    Thanks for doing this, John. It really is a wonderful help.

    1. Peter, I hadn’t considered other texts, but I agree that that would be ideal. I supposed I’d need to get some more robust lexicons as well as texts where the root word parsing was available…

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  33. John,

    This is a fantastic resource. Thanks very much.

    I’m wondering, hypothetically more than practically – how adaptable is the code? What if you wanted to process other ancient Greek documents, or Latin documents, against a standardised frequency list? Would that be possible?

    1. Seumas, if someone had a text that included the lexical forms of each word, it would be relatively trivial to do the same thing with those texts. If you have something in mind, let me know.

      1. Coming back to this idea, what sort of format would it need? I’m working on a patristic reader of Gregory’s Theological Orations at the moment, which would probably fit the bill.

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  36. Awesome site! Not to sound greedy or anything, but what about the LXX and Vulgate? 🙂

      1. “Also, I’m not sure what how you’d handle the word count treshholds for a “Reader’s” edition.”

        Not exactly an answer, but perhaps a point of reference:
        Rodney Decker’s page of LXX resources ( http://www.ntresources.com/lxx.html ) includes a vocab list of frequent LXX words, and estimates that words occurring 100 times or more in the LXX are about equivalent to words occurring 50 times or more in the NT (though he is clear that this is just a guess).

  37. John,

    I just tested out your Reader on my Nokia n800 internet tablet. It works pretty well. Since I’m now able to use the site on a mobile reader, I’m wondering if there is a way to make page settings persistent. On Firefox on my desktop the book and chapter stay persistent, but not on the n800. Would that be because Google gears is not installed on it? Even on my desktop, however, I lose font selection and font size, as well as lexicon/morphology selection and psarts of speech choices. Is there a way to make these persistent? Also, is there anyway to bookmark the place where I stop reading on a device like the n800? This would actually make reading through the GNT on a mobile device much more feasible. As it is now, every time I return to the page I’m back to Romans.

    BTW, for anyone who is using the n800 (and I assume the n810 as well), if you want to add other fonts (e.g. SBL Greek), just copy the fonts to /usr/share/fonts/truetype on your device. You will need to reboot the device before the fonts work.

    Thanks again John,

    Adam York

    1. Adam, those are some great ideas. I think persisting basic settings is a good start. Then I’d love to add some options for navigating and such down the line.

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  42. Thank you! I have been so stressed by all the man-made rules about spanking children.

    This site has been an absolute blessing for me to read what the Bible says in Hebrew and Greek to see that there is so much more to “discipline” than hitting. (I already knew this, but many bloggers I respect seem to use hitting as their first line of discipline. It felt odd to me, and now I know why.)

    I can’t find anywhere in scripture where I am mandated to slap my infant (per Tedd Tripp’s recommendation). Well, okay, I don’t really want to get any more into that.

    I just want to thank you for bringing freedom to my parenting. I now can feel free to use words, actions, consequences, etc. when I say discipline. I am not limited to spanking when I say discipline.

    2 Timothy 3:16 uses the same word as Ephesians 6:4. It’s also used in Hebrews 5:6-11. What a blessing!

  43. Oops! Hebrews 12:5-11 That is so cool! Can you tell us the code to get our verse comments in a pop up box like that? Wow!

  45. Thanks for the tool! It’s fabulous – I’m spreading the word to all my (pastor/theolog) buddies.

    Do you want to be told about errors in things like lemma and part-of-speech tagging in the BHS text? I just went to a random OT passage (Deut 6), and just on a quick scan of a few features there are quite a lot of errors – words linked to the wrong lemma, words which aren’t linked to any lemma (at least, nothing pops up), lemmas with the wrong part-of-speech designation.

    Most of the wrong part-of-speech lemma tags were with “little” words which don’t fit into any of the listed categories, but which are marked as Verbs – like “not” (לֹא) and “this” (זֹאת, v.1). But the noun “anger” (אַף, v.15) is also tagged as a Verb.

    Should I just assume that there are lots of bugs with all that in the Hebrew side, that they’ll iron themselves out, and that I should stop, err, bugging you??

    Oh, and thanks again!
    Stephen
    Santiago, Chile

    1. Stephen, thanks for the updates!

      On the Greek side, the Tischendorf text is well-maintained, but (as the footer suggests), I don’t yet have a reliable Hebrew text. I am contacting the content providers to get a better source, so for now just assume there will be lots of little errors.

  46. Mongolia, town of Precious (Эрдэнэт).

    Great job. Congratulations and thank you very much for this very. It appears on screen much quicker than Zhubert used to.
    + Maccabees 1:1-10 gave no answer: I guess greek books of the First testament are not there. That’s a pity. Even Luther used to publish it as an annex of what he had decided the Bible contents should be.
    + Colours are hard coded (which is not an excellent idea), except the reference’s colour, which is left at its default value. Consequently if, like me, your browser’s default colours are yellow on marine, you get yellow on white and at first I didn’t even noticed there were something there. You should hard code both the text and the background colours or none of them.
    + Even if one can read the reference, as expressed here above by Mike Helverson and Christoph Fischer, it’s not that clear what one has to/can do. Sentences like “Enter your reference here:” and “Fly over words.” would be welcome.
    + This site requires the user knows exaclty the English name and spelling of Bible books in English, which is not my case (I’m French.), though I can read them. A list would be welcome.
    + How are “words that appear x times or less” counted is not said: in the all Bible, or in that extract?
    + The incitement “Print it out” is not ecological at all. I don’t need you site to get a printed version of the Greek Bible. I need it to work on my computer.

    God be with you.

    1. Henri, greetings to Mongolia, my brother!

      You’ve made some great suggestions – thanks so much. I’ll look into them. To answer your question, the word frequencies in Greek are over the entire NT, and in Hebrew in the OT. I don’t yet have a Greek OT or Apocryphal text, but if/when I do, I’d love to add it.

      I should mention that the site is currently designed for reading not really study. For me, reading in a deep way happens best away from the screen with few distractions. However, the need for a study tool like zubert seems to keep coming up, so I’m looking into what it would take to build a helpful resource.

  47. Thank you for your answer.
    I don’t understand your point in ‘figuring out what a meaningful “Reader’s Edition” of the LXX would mean.’.
    As you said, the LXX text is available from CCAT. The LSJ is in public domain even in the European Union (Except in France for the 9th version where Jones where involved, but this doesn’t matter very much.) and this could be, at least as a start, a good lexicon. As in Zhubert, you could allow lexicon correction and addition proposals from the readers. To get a short article, just use the Little Liddell when that entry exists.
    God bless you and your job.

  48. I’m working with Wycliffe as an exegesis consultant in a couple of languages and find your website so helpful. Your work saves me hours of searching and helps get God’s word to bibleless people. Thanks!

  49. Thank you so much! I was really disappointed to find zhubert.com closed. The only thing I really miss is a translation pane: it saves a lot of time (about one third of my translation time) when I can have Greek on one side and my translation on the other.

  50. John, thank you very much for your site!

    I’m taking Greek with John Schwandt at New Saint Andrews College, and we were just bemoaning the absence of zhubert.com. I was very glad to see this site, and will share it with the class.

    Thanks!

  52. Hey John,
    I forget how I got pointed to this site, but it was through the Bible reader stuff… anyways, I wanted to say kudos on the work.

    This reminds me of a very practical example of the kinds of stuff Gabe Lyons, Andy Crouch, and Shane Hipps talk about with Fermi and the Q Conference — being “counter-cultural” for the common good. Rather than just using technology, I think you’ve found a profound way to co-opt it make society better (depending on the way people use the Bible, I suppose).

    Nice work.

    1. Petey, thanks for your comment. I agree that we sometimes have to knowingly go against the nature of technology for our good.

  53. John, thanks for this resource. At SBL last year I ogled the reader’s versions, wondering why there wasn’t something like this available online. Especially in the wake of the zhubert fiasco, this is very, very welcome.

  54. this is a stupid question but how do the frequency numbers work after the footnoted words?

    1. Chuck,
      Great question. The first, larger number is the total occurrences in the NT, and the second, lower number is the occurrences in that book.

  55. How about adding a “flashcard” app? Thus we could read and then spend a few minutes increasing our vocab…

  56. Thanks John for this. I can open the page but get no text. There is a slightly darker and blank rectangle which I can type into, but otherwise the text area is blank. I have tried typing in a Bible verse (but it gives no indication of required format for that) but then it just says, “Loading” and goes nowhere. At the botton of the page, it says, “Error in the page”.
    Any suggestions please,

  57. Great site. I am working in Thailand and would like to make a Greek Bible reader for Thai students. I am not very Web literate. Can you give me some direction how I could create a site like yours, but the lexical data in another language such as Thai?

  60. John,

    Thanks a lot for this amazing tool. Such a great site and work for the growing of our knowledge of the Scripture in its original language.

    Gracias,

    Marco Navarro

  61. A couple of suggestions:

    1. It took me a bit of time to work out how to change the reference. Obvious when you know, and I wish all sites followed your example, but till they do…

    2. Fonts are easy to change, but it might be good to provide a drop-down listing the academic Greek & Hebrew fonts which can usefully be used, otherwise too many people will ruin your page trying to use Times New Roman or BWHebb!; I prefer the Cardo font, which has Greek, Hebrew & Latin incl specialist early Christian characters, as well as free keyboards for Mac & PC – see here.

    3. It would be great if the hover-overs were a bit lower so that they don’t ever obscure the line you are reading.

    These are minor points for a great site!

    I’d love to add you to the main list of Bibles on the Tyndale Toolbar –
    do you have a simple URL-based way I can link to Bible chapters
    eg what would be a URL to Matt.1 (whole chapter)?

    David IB

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  64. This is an incredible resource, thank you John. do you or anyone else know if there is a way to get this site to work on a Blackberry? I am going on vacation and it would be a tremendous blessing to be able to take with me.

    Thank you everyone.

  65. I am interested in doing something similar for the perseus greek texts. Is it possible for you to send the source code? Thanks.

    1. Bradley, I’m happy to send you the source code, but it’s pretty rough and Bible specific. However, if you’re willing to give it a shot I’d love to see what you do with it.

  67. Hi John;
    Great work, very impressive. The site is great, an came in a perfect timing for those of us who were used to zhubert.com.
    I think we need to have a way to report lexical mistakes. I think this is very important, so the whole community would be it very accurate.
    Thank again and God bless.

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  70. Wonderful tool! Is there any chance that the code will be made open-source?

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  72. Thanks for your great work on this site! This is a great tool to use in class–one laptop is far easier to haul than the four or five textbooks we MIGHT use. I thank you and my neck thanks you!

  73. Many thanks for a great resource – after a gap I was surprised that zhubert no longer existed, and this does the job brilliantly for those of us who only have elementary NT Greek!

  75. hi… i love it… thank you… i wish that it would be a program which i can install in the computer and use it every moment even while there is no internet signal… because i am a missionary working around the world… i may not have internet every time… but… anyway… thanks a lot for the great work…

  77. John,

    Great bible study site! Thanks for the contribution! I have both versions of the Reader’s GNT and like them both, but this is even more powerful.

    Just a couple of comments/suggestions. First, it would be nice if you set some cookies to store setting of word occurrences, fonts, etc., so we don’t have to restore them each time.

    Second, I looked briefly at the LXX and it doesn’t seem to use the morphological forms, but the lemma form of each word. I guess you are still working on that.

    Anyway, a great looking replacement for zhubert. I especially like that I can set the font and size of the text.

    I also saw that someone had inquired about integrating some of the Perseus texts. I’d like to see that as well, especially Homer.

    God’s Blessings! David

  78. John,

    This is an extremely helpful tool. The ability to customize the original language to your reading level is very helpful. You have obviously poured many hours into this.

    A few thoughts:

    Is it possible to include a ‘print’ tab that will isolate only the text and footnotes to be printed?

    If we desire to cut and paste the text into word, is it possible to export a unicode font in order to retain the correct left to right reading in Hebrew?

    Thanks again for your work.

    Tommy

    1. Tommy, I updated the print template to remove the header and footer. I also worked around the copy paste problem so that Word recognizes Hebrew as right-to-left.

  79. Hey John,

    Did you ever add a link function?

    I’ve come to a fairly serious bug, when you type in something wrong it has a popup about an invalid reference that immediately opens again when you close it. The only way around this seems to be refreshing the whole page.

    Thank you again for this wonderful tool!

  80. A great resource John. Thanks!

    I’m trying to use it on my iPhone, however how do I press enter on my iPhone in order to submit the form to change the passage I want to look at?

    And secondly, how do I close the definition & parsing overlay on the iPhone after clicking on a word?

    Thanks mate.

      1. Thanks mate, that does really help.

        Two other things though:

        Hovering over the word ἠδύναντο in Mark 4:33 comes up with INI-3P-ATT. Is that a bug or something?

        Also, ἓν (with rough breathing) seems to be coming up with the wrong definition (eg: Mark 4:20) – it comes up with ἐν (with smooth breathing).

        Good on you mate for this great site!

  82. John,

    I took NT Greek in college in the early 70’s and have kept up with it, making use of the Analytical Greek Lexicon for parsing, and BlueLetterBible for concordance searches. I just discovered your Reader’s Version site – what a great tool! Thank you very much for you work and contributions.

    I have a question for you on the text:

    What are the textual differences between the Greek NT Testament, 4th Revised Edition UBS and the Tischendorf Greek New Testament you used for that site?

    (I also am a software developer and downloaded the Tischendorf files from the link you provided. My goal is to create a stand-alone tool for my Acer netbook so that I can use it in a class/remote setting, without a live internet connection.)

    Thanks!

  83. Grace and Peace;
    John;
    thank you so much for such a great site.
    I know this is not a questions related to the web site, but I’m looking for an online reading group that I can join. I’m already in one, but I probably need to join something extra to get to work on the text more. Are you familiar with any?
    If not are you familiar with one not necessary online, but in California… <:)

    thank you so much

    1. Fr. David,
      I only know of reading classes at the seminary where I am employed in Dallas, but I don’t know of any others. However, my wife used to be in a Latin group with Dr. Dale Grote of UNC, and I think he might also do Greek groups. So give him a shot and let me know how it goes.

  84. I very much enjoy this site, it is extremely helpful to me in my Greek studies! Thank you for all the work that you put into it!! I was looking for a place to submit corrections if I found an error but couldn’t find any place. It might be a good idea to make such an interface. But I’ll just leave what I found here – it’s really minor but ἀπεκρίθησαν in John 2:18 is an Aorist passive, not an Aorist middle as your site says (6th Principal part, not 3rd) – just minor, but thought you might like to know. Again, God Bless you for all the wonderful work you’ve put into this – I use your site constantly!

  85. great site. I use it quite often on behalf of my studies in Hebrew. would it be possible to create a drop down box in whitch You can choose the desired Bible book and verses?

    1. Willem, I’d love to find some time to make this easier to use, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make any major changes until the Spring.

  87. Delighted to find your readers bible and will now use it a lot. I must admit that at the beginning I didn’t realise you could type in the box to change the reference until I found this site to explain it.

    Thank you for all your hard work

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  90. I’d like to say thank you for this wonderful site.

    I love the Reader’s Hebrew/Greek Bibles from Zondervan, and I will continue to use them, but this site has everything you need and is adaptable to fit the students needs. Great job!

    I don’t know how much time you have to devote to this project, but I have some suggestions:

    1) Instead of having the definitions at the bottom of the page, how about having an option to display them on the right side of the text? Kind of like that site that you link to: http://biblewebapp.com/study/
    That way, one doesn’t have to scroll down to read a definition. Of course, having them on the bottom is great if one wants to print out the page, so you should keep that feature also.

    2) I second the motion that you add a Septuagint version, even if it can’t be as adaptable as the Greek and Hebrew you already have. Here is some info on the LXX frequency word list: http://faculty.bbc.edu/rdecker/lxx.htm

  91. only just came across this today. brilliant! this will be an excellent resource for me as I am trying to take my very basic Greek skills to the next level.

  92. I love your site and use it a lot. I thought I’d let you know if I found any errors in the program and I ran across one just now – in 1 Kings 13:2 the word עָלֶיךָ is identified and parsed incorrectly in the pop up – thanks again – Is this the proper place to submit corrections or should I do it somewhere else? Feel free to email me with the info – thanks – isaac.hanna07@northwestu.edu

  93. This is an awesome idea. It allows the student to print up exactly the amount of help that you need at that point in time.
    Three suggestions to users of this interface seeking to improve their language skills:
    1) Place the settings so that you are having to read just *beyond* your skill level. You’ve worked through an intro grammar that had you memorize words occuring 50+ times? Print up the text with words that are used less than 40 times. That way, you won’t get rusty on your lexicon skills, and you’ll get better and guessing at what a word means from context.
    2) Having done this, write down and memorize all the words that you have to look up. Eventually, you’ll have increased your vocabulary enough that you’ll be able to decrease the number that you put into the “words used less than” field.
    If you follow these two pieces of advice long enough, eventually, you won’t need anything but the Hebrew or Greek and a pocket lexicon!
    3) Do *not* check the “show parsing” box. This is especially true if you have had two or more years of Heb/Grk. You should be parsing on your own, and having words parsed for you is, in my opinion, too much help. It is going to make you lazy and rusty on your verbal forms. Even for the obscure forms that you won’t recognize right away–having them parsed for you will make you lazy and won’t help you develop the skills to figure them out on your own. That’s my experience, anyway. That’s one reason why the Zondervan GNT is, imo, a better tool than the UBS Reader’s GNT.

  94. Hello John,

    Thanks so much for this! I teach Biblical Languages at a small theological college in Zimbabwe. Unfortunately, the computer tools that are available are beyond the reach of most our students due to costs. This web tool really helps to bridge the gap between the first world and the developing world. I really hop to see more of these types of tools available in the coming years.

    ~Cheers,

    Mathieu Pelletier

  95. John, quick question for you. Is there a way to enter a reference that spans from one chapter into the next, i.e. 1 John 1:1 – 2:2? I haven’t been able to do it and it would be helpful when printing out certain passages.
    Love the site!
    Parker

  96. Hello, I may be repeating a question, but I didn’t have time to read all the replies to your post, and you may not ever see this since you may not have that time either. But if you do, I just want to say this and your biblewebapp is really interesting. I was wondering if you think this could be turned into an android app. I am not a developer, just a new android user, and I cannot find a good, free greek NT app. There is a really great app for Koine flashcards called Remata. It is very useful, and nicely done. Even the accent marks are there. One app called Cadre Bible does have the different versions of the Greek NT for free, but they do not have the accent marks, which really takes away from things. I don’t know Hebrew, but I downloaded the Hebrew Bible app, and it does not have the vowel marks. I wondered if that, especially the Greek, would interest you.

    1. Brad, I probably won’t be creating any native apps since there are so many platforms (Blackberry, iPhone, Andriod, Palm webOS, etc.), but I would like to make a web-based version.

      In fact, the current site looks pretty decent on an iPhone even though it’s not optimized for it. How does it look on Android’s browser?

      1. I bet it looks pretty good on phones like the N1 or Motoroloa Droid. I have a Sprint hero and actually your website does something that greekbible.com does not do, it automatically restructures itself to fit my screen. For instance, the biblewebapp page has the two versions next to each other on the web, but, on my phone they are on top of each other, so I don’t have to move around to see the text. This is a function on the phone. My phone doesn’t accept the greek font, so there are some boxes. On greekbible.com, if I use the images font in their font select drop down, I can read it nicely, but their website does not restructure like yours, so I have to navigate around to read a full sentence. For some reason your website. Yours also, if I zoom in, needs to be navigated around on, but at least when I’m zoomed fully out, I can still read the text, and it automatically stacks the two versions for easier reading. I’m not surprised to hear about the good rendering on the iPhone.

  97. Hi John,

    Thanks for website. This is what I need now. I have been struggling whether to buy a diglot hebrew bible: One one hand, I am afraid becoming lazy; on the other hand, I find myself reading too slow in hebrew.

    By the way, how do you count the frequency? Do you count them by strong number or what? It seems it is a bit different from the tool which I have been using. Moreover, does (123-12) means 123 times in the whole bible and 12 times in the current book?

    Thanks!

    George

  99. Hello John Dyer,
    I came across your website and I think is really great. I am a student of the Biblical Languages and hopefully a Greek Instructor in the future. I use BibleWorks, but I will strongly suggest it to students who don’t have this software.
    May the Lord continue to bless you greatly.

  100. John: I use your site pretty much daily (at least when doing NT studies). It has been a real blessing. May the Lord bless you!

    I’m going to be writing an iPad application in order to have an off-line tool for the Greek NT. I’ve found and downloaded the Tischendorf and MorphGNT files; writing a parser for them and storing them in MySql or SQLIte would be very easy.

    However, I can’t find any downloadable versions of Thayers or Strongs for the lexicon. Can you provide some links for those? (Thank you in advance!)

    Also, a small side note:

    I saw above some potential interest regarding Adobe Flex/AIR as a possible platform. I’ve been writing for that platform for nearly two years now (where I’m employed, as well as tools for myself) and constantly have been frustrated by it. My recommendation to you would be that you first write a proof-of-concept for the critical/difficult portions (via the free eval IDE – you have 60 days), then proceed with the eye-candy/bulk of the app – only if you are satisfied that you can implement the difficult portions. That strategy can save you a great deal of grief. (If you need/want some pointers on Flex, please contact me. I’d love to return the favor!)

  102. I just wanted to let you know that the morphology for Colossians 1 when requesting “ALL WORDS” to appear does not work. Thanks for the resource though! It’s been a great help!

  103. Hi John, I am hoping you can tell me which edition of Tischendorf you’re using for your online Greek text. Also, do you prefer Tischendorf over NA27/UBS4? Or do you use Tischendorf because it’s more accessible?

  104. Hi John

    Still finding your site very useful. Just a question please. If I specify a different font to the default, which splits up Hebrew words on my PC, is there a way to make it persistent.

    I use the Galaxie Unicode Hebrew font & it looks & prints really great, but I have to enter this every time I click onto the site.

    Thanks for listening & God bless
    Guy

  105. Hi John, really like your site. It is much easier to read on the screen than in the printed out version. For example in the printed version the footnote numbers are not in superscript and are quickly confused with the verse numbers. So I did screen shots of the page and printed those out instead – a fairly cumbersome way of getting readable text printed out. A small quibble though, Thanks for a great site, Danny

  107. Hi…got it..I got it!!! Downloaded the Chrome, and now it works :)))

  108. John,

    Thank you for this wonderful site.
    I’m wondering if you can grant us permission to create a Chinese edition based on your data?

    1. Enoch,
      That sounds like a create idea. Are you just wanting a Chinese interface? If you translate the words, I’m sure I could make it multilingual.

  109. John:

    I tried accessing http://www.biblewebapp.com/reader/ on my iPad for the first time yesterday; Rom 3.20-25 displays as expected with a Greek font.

    However, there are two anomalies:

    1. Entering another reference, then pressing the ‘return’ key on the keyboard shows “Loading…”, but the load never completes. (It does work on the Safari browser on my PC, so while it might not be the webkit browser, there is something different in the iPad implementation.)

    2. Tapping on a word activates the popup (from the text on the initial load), but there appears to be no way to dismiss it, short of tapping on some other word or active control.

    I have no idea how to debug this, but wanted to mention it to you.

    Again, thanks for a VERY useful site!

    Dave

  110. Dave,
    thanks. I recently got an iPad so I’ll be looking at the biblewebapp.com tools and trying to see what I can do to make them more iPad friendly.

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  120. Baptists: Please throw your Greek lexicons in the trash!

    Why do Baptist always want to go to the Greek to understand the Bible? It is as if Baptists do not trust their English Bibles: “Sorry, hold on a minute, I need to check the original Greek before we can believe that God really loves the whole world as your English Bible seems to say in John 3:16…we can only know for sure if we understand and read ancient Greek.”

    When God promised to preserve his Word…did he really mean that he would only preserve it on 2,000 year old parchment and papyrus in ancient forms of Greek and Aramaic?? Did God really intend that the only people who could REALLY know what he had to say to mankind…would be ancient Greek-educated Baptist Churchmen?? Is the non-ancient-Greek- speaking layperson sitting in the pew supposed to just shut his English language Bible and sit at the feet of these Baptist Greek scholars to learn what God couldn’t explain himself in plain, simple ENGLISH??

    Do you REALLY believe that God intended for only Baptist, Greek-speaking Churchmen to understand the Gospel? Because that is really what Baptists are saying, because the Greek scholars of the Greek Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, and the Methodist Church think that Baptist Greek scholars are all WET on their positions that the Bible does not support infant baptism and that baptism MUST be by immersion!

    Is it really possible that ONLY Baptist Greek scholars truly understand ancient Greek, and that the rest of the world’s Greek scholars completely bungle the translation of the New Testament? How is that possible? It defies common sense. And if I hear another Baptist start talking about how the Greek genitive case proves that the Baptist position is correct, I swear I’m going to puke! Seriously, every time I get into a discussion about Biblical translation with a Baptist he starts in with the genitive case nonsense. If you want to understand the genitive case in a Greek document…I suggest you confer…not with a Baptist…but with a GREEK!

    Instead of all this ancient Greek nonsense, which Baptists seem to have a fixation on, I suggest that every Christian layperson do this:

    1. Obtain a copy of four different English language translations of the Bible. Read each one of these “problem passages”, as Baptists and evangelicals refer to them, in each of these English translations.
    2. God’s true meaning of the passage will be plainly understandable after comparing these four English translations.

    You do NOT need to read the ancient Greek text unless you want to delve into the study of ancient Greek sentence structure or some other nuance. God promised he would preserve his Word, and the English-speaking people of the world have had the Word of God IN ENGLISH since at least William Tyndale (1300″s??). Dear Baptists…PLEASE stop insisting on using the ancient texts to confuse Christian laypeople of God’s simple, plain message of the Gospel!

    Gary
    Luther, Baptists, and Evangelicals
    an orthodox Lutheran blog

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