Honour to whom honour

The King James Version

1611 · Forty-seven scholars in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge

In 1604 King James I of England commissioned a new English Bible. Forty-seven scholars, working in six companies at Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge, translated their assigned books and then checked one another's work before a final review in London; the King's Printer, Robert Barker, printed it in 1611. The wording most people read today is the standard edition of 1769 rather than the 1611 printing. The text is in the public domain in nearly every country; in the United Kingdom, printing it is still governed by a royal patent.

The classic English text on this site, and the English words that stand behind every Strong's number.

To the translators of 1611, whose names most readers never learn: four centuries on, your sentences still carry the Word to people who have never seen England. Thank you.

King James Version (1769 standard text). Public domain; in the United Kingdom, printing is governed by Crown letters patent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Version

eBible.org

1994 · Michael Paul Johnson

In March 1994, driving between Longmont and Boulder, Colorado, Michael Paul Johnson decided to make a Bible translation that would be “forever free to use, publish, and distribute.” He began by modernizing the 1901 American Standard Version line by line with programs he wrote himself; the work became the World English Bible, and hundreds of volunteers helped by email over the years, so many that he says there is no complete list of them. His small Colorado nonprofit, Rainbow Missions, runs eBible.org, which now hosts hundreds of free Bible translations in many languages.

Free Bible texts on this site that come from eBible.org, beginning with the World English Bible, which is entirely in the public domain.

Thank you, Michael, for thirty years of unpaid patience, and for deciding that free should mean free forever.

Per edition, as registry/languages.json records it: CC BY-SA 4.0 (68 languages), Public Domain (35 languages), CC BY 4.0 (29 languages), CC BY-NC 4.0 (2 languages). (World English Bible: public domain. Other eBible.org texts: the licence stated on that text's own eBible.org page.)

https://ebible.org/

The Berean Standard Bible and Bible Hub

2016 · The Berean Bible Translation Committee, with the Bible Hub and Discovery Bible teams

Bible Hub grew out of a small site called Bible.cc, launched in 2004 to show several Bible translations side by side, verse by verse. Wanting a modern Bible it could give away with no strings attached, the Bible Hub and Discovery Bible teams formed the Berean Bible Translation Committee and translated the whole Bible from the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, posting their translation tables for public comment and folding in hundreds of corrections from teachers, pastors and students. The finished text was first printed in 2016 and then dedicated outright to the public domain rather than copyrighted.

A modern English Bible this site may quote, search and build on without asking anyone's permission.

Thank you for choosing to own nothing so that everyone could own it.

Berean Standard Bible: dedicated to the public domain. Courtesy of Bible Hub.

https://berean.bible/

Biblica

1809

Biblica began in 1809 as the New York Bible Society, formed to get Scripture to the people of New York City; within a year it was already funding William Carey's Bengali Bible for India. In 1892 it was handing Scriptures in 65 languages to immigrants arriving at Ellis Island. It became the International Bible Society in 1974 and Biblica in 2009, and its best-known work is the New International Version. In 2020 it opened open.bible, where it releases some of its Bible texts, audio, maps and images under open licences instead of ordinary copyright.

Bible texts on this site that come from open.bible, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence.

Two centuries of handing out Scripture, and now handing out the rights to it as well. Thank you.

© Biblica, Inc., via open.bible, CC BY-SA; the version shown on each open.bible resource

https://open.bible/

United Bible Societies

1946

In May 1946, less than a year after the Second World War ended, representatives of about thirteen national Bible Societies met at Haywards Heath in England and agreed to coordinate their work worldwide instead of labouring separately, as they had since the first Bible Society was founded in 1804. The fellowship serves Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant churches alike and has grown to roughly 150 Bible Societies working in more than 240 countries and territories. Its Digital Bible Library stores and distributes checked Scripture files for translators, publishers and app makers, and it releases a set of Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, images and map data under an open licence.

Reference data on this site that comes from United Bible Societies' open-licence collection, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.

Thank you for eighty years of working together instead of apart, and for opening the scholars' shelves to everyone.

© United Bible Societies, CC BY-SA 4.0

https://unitedbiblesocieties.org/

SIL International

1934 · William Cameron Townsend

In the summer of 1934, William Cameron Townsend, who had spent years in Guatemala translating the New Testament into Kaqchikel, ran a small linguistics training camp out of an old farmhouse near Sulphur Springs, Arkansas, for a handful of students. It was called Camp Wycliffe, after the medieval Bible translator, and it grew into two organizations: SIL International, for language research and development, and Wycliffe Bible Translators, for the translating itself. SIL now works on more than 1,600 language projects in around 160 countries, publishes Ethnologue, the standard catalogue of the world's languages, and keeps the ISO 639-3 register of language codes that every language on this site is named by.

The three-letter language codes and language names this site is organized by, and Ethnologue's account of where each language is spoken.

Thank you for ninety years of writing down languages that had never been written, and for keeping the list that lets a site like this call each one by its name.

Language codes: ISO 639-3, maintained by SIL International. Semantic Domains and other open SIL data: CC BY-SA 4.0.

https://www.sil.org/

The Society of Biblical Literature and the SBL Greek New Testament

1880 · Michael W. Holmes, editor of the SBLGNT

The Society of Biblical Literature began in 1880, when eight scholars met in New York City; eighteen people came to its first annual meeting that June and it had 45 members by the end of the year. It is now the oldest and largest scholarly society in biblical studies, with more than 8,500 members. In 2010, together with Logos Bible Software, it released a freshly edited Greek New Testament prepared by Michael W. Holmes, free for anyone in the world to read electronically; his text differs from the standard printed editions in more than 540 places.

The Greek New Testament text behind the Greek words and Strong's numbers on this site.

Thank you for putting the Greek New Testament in everyone's hands at no charge, and for the care in every one of those 540 decisions.

SBL Greek New Testament, edited by Michael W. Holmes. © Society of Biblical Literature and Logos Bible Software. CC BY 4.0.

https://sblgnt.com/

The Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible

1991

The Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible began as one person's private, word-by-word study of the Hebrew Bible, started by hand in 1991 and moved onto an Atari home computer in 1996, long before it looked like a project. After its maker got online in 2002 and found the Open Scriptures community, the solitary study became a shared one. What it adds is a layer of tagging over the Westminster Leningrad Codex, the standard scholarly Hebrew text: each word's root, keyed to an extended form of Strong's numbers, and its grammatical form. The Hebrew text itself is public domain; the tagging is given away under an open licence.

The Hebrew Bible text and the word-by-word tagging behind the Hebrew words and Strong's numbers on this site.

Thank you, whoever you are, for thirty-five years of quiet work on a home computer, and for giving it away when it was done.

Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible Project (tagging: CC BY 4.0; Westminster Leningrad Codex text: public domain).

https://hb.openscriptures.org/

James Strong and Strong's Exhaustive Concordance

1890 · James Strong (1822–1894)

James Strong was a Methodist minister and a professor at Drew Theological Seminary in New Jersey who spent decades, with a team of helpers, on one patient task: giving every word in the King James Bible a number that points back to its Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek root. The Exhaustive Concordance was published in 1890, compiled entirely by hand, so that a reader with no Hebrew or Greek could still trace any English word to the original. Roughly 8,674 Hebrew and Aramaic roots and 5,624 Greek roots were numbered. The work is long out of copyright, which is why Strong's numbers appear free in Bible software and websites everywhere, including every study on this site.

The numbering system that every study on this site is built around, in every language.

To James Strong, who died in 1894 and never saw a computer: your numbers are the spine of every study here, in all 88 languages. Thank you.

Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (1890): public domain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong%27s_Concordance

STEPBible and Tyndale House, Cambridge

2011 · David Instone-Brewer, Peter Williams and Dale Brueggemann

Tyndale House is a Bible research library in Cambridge, England, founded in 1944 to support serious study of the languages, history and culture behind the Bible. In 2011 three of its scholars, David Instone-Brewer, Peter Williams and Dale Brueggemann, started STEPBible.org to hand ordinary readers the original-language tools that scholars use, deliberately without denominational slant. STEPBible became an independent charity in 2020. Behind the website it maintains tagged Greek and Hebrew Bible data and a brief Greek dictionary, all released for anyone to reuse.

Word-by-word Greek and Hebrew tagging and dictionary data behind the Strong's tools on this site.

Thank you for doing the scholars' work and then refusing to keep it to the scholars.

Data from STEP Bible (www.STEPBible.org), CC BY 4.0.

https://www.stepbible.org/

Cloudflare

2009 · Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn and Lee Holloway

Cloudflare grew out of Project Honey Pot, a volunteer effort by Matthew Prince and Lee Holloway to trace where email spam came from. In 2009 Prince met Michelle Zatlyn at Harvard Business School, and the two decided to turn the idea into a service that could stop attacks rather than just watch them; a friend called what they were building a firewall in the cloud, and the name stuck. They launched in September 2010 and found an unexpected bonus almost at once: sites behind Cloudflare also loaded about a third faster. Today its free plan carries small sites like this one on the same network as some of the largest in the world.

The hosting, the worldwide delivery, the certificate that makes the padlock, and the protection against attacks, all at no charge.

Thank you for carrying a small free site to readers in 88 languages on the same wires as the biggest sites on earth, and for never sending a bill.

This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and protected and accelerated by Cloudflare.

https://www.cloudflare.com/

Anthropic

2021 · Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei and their co-founders

Anthropic is an AI safety and research company started in January 2021 by a group of researchers who wanted the development of artificial intelligence to go well, not merely fast. It is organized as a public benefit corporation, a company with a legal purpose beyond profit, which it states as the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity. Its founders have written that they expect AI's effect on the world to be comparable to the industrial and scientific revolutions, and that they were not confident it would go well without dedicated safety work. Its models are called Claude.

The English studies on this site were translated into its other languages with Claude, and the quiz questions were drafted with it; every translation passed this site's own checks before it was published.

Thank you for a tool that let a handful of people do what once took a mission agency, and for building it carefully.

Translations and quiz drafts made with Claude, by Anthropic, and checked by this site's own tests before publication.

https://www.anthropic.com/

The people who write free software

This site is built with Python and with free libraries that volunteers around the world wrote and still maintain, most of them unpaid and unnamed. The picture formats that keep its pages light, the tools that check its pages, and the programs that build it every night were all given away by people who wanted others to be able to build.

The tools this site is built with, at no charge.

To everyone whose name is in a licence file nobody reads: thank you.

https://www.python.org/