Every text on this site, with its translator, its date, its licence, and a link to the original you can download and check against what we serve. Nothing here is paraphrased, re-edited, or silently corrected.
We use public domain texts on purpose. A translation you must pay a licence fee to quote is a translation you cannot freely give away, and Scripture that cannot be freely given away is not doing its job.
The Old Testament is the Septuagint, the Greek text the apostles quoted. The New Testament is the King James Version, with the World English Bible alongside for comparison — there is no Septuagint New Testament, because the Septuagint translates the Old Testament only.
LXX
LXX2012
KJV
In the United Kingdom the King James Version remains under perpetual Crown copyright, exercised through royal letters patent and administered by Cambridge University Press. It is free to use here; the restriction is jurisdictional.
https://github.com/scrollmapper/bible_databases/blob/master/formats/json/KJVA.json→WEB
“World English Bible” is a trademark of eBible.org. Copying is unrestricted; the only condition is that a modified text may not keep the name.
https://eBible.org/Scriptures/eng-web_vpl.zip→Ancient writings quoted inside the New Testament but never canonised in the Western church. Kept deliberately separate from the received canon so the two are never conflated.
1 Enoch
Charles produced the translation. The 1917 edition’s introduction was written by W.O.E. Oesterley, not by Charles — a distinction often lost when this text is reprinted.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Book_of_Enoch_(Charles)→Supporting apparatus: the dictionary behind every tappable word in the reader, and the cross-reference dataset behind every verse-to-verse link.
Webster's 1828
Cross-references
The canons genuinely differ, and we would rather show you the seam than paper over it. A book listed under one translation and not another is not an oversight:
2 Esdras and the Additions to Esther
Survive in the Latin and English tradition but are absent from the Septuagint, so we serve them from the King James Apocrypha.
3 Maccabees, 4 Maccabees, and the Epistle of Jeremiah
Present in the Septuagint, absent from the King James Apocrypha.
Baruch
Five chapters in the Septuagint, six in the King James. What the West numbers Baruch 6 is the Epistle of Jeremiah, which the Septuagint carries as a book in its own right.
Psalm 151
Present in the Septuagint and the World English Bible, absent from the King James.
2 Esdras 7
Seventy verses longer in the World English Bible than in the King James. The passage was missing from the Latin manuscripts the King James translators worked from and was not rediscovered until 1875, so their chapter 7 jumps straight from verse 35 to what the World English Bible numbers 106.
The Additions to Esther
Numbered chapters 10 to 16, continuing the numbering of canonical Esther rather than starting afresh at 1.
The Old Testament is the Septuagint, in two editions: Sir Lancelot Brenton's 1851 translation, and a 2012 American English revision of Brenton by Michael Paul Johnson. Both are public domain and both come from eBible.org. The Septuagint is the Greek Old Testament quoted by the apostles and read by the Church for its first fifteen centuries.
The New Testament is the King James Version, following the 1769 Oxford standardisation, with the World English Bible available alongside it for comparison. There is no Septuagint New Testament: the Septuagint is a translation of the Old Testament only, so New Testament chapters are served from KJV and WEB.
Every scripture text here is public domain. The only exception is the cross-reference dataset, which is licensed CC BY 4.0 and requires attribution — OpenBible.info is credited on every page that displays a cross-reference. We deliberately use no translation that requires a licence fee, because a text you must pay to quote is a text you do not fully own.
Because the sources genuinely differ. 2 Esdras and the Additions to Esther survive in the Latin and English tradition but are not in the Septuagint, so we serve them from the King James Apocrypha. 3 and 4 Maccabees and the Epistle of Jeremiah are in the Septuagint but not the King James Apocrypha. Chapter numbering differs too: Baruch has five chapters in the Septuagint and six in the King James, because what the West numbers as Baruch 6 is the Epistle of Jeremiah, which the Septuagint carries as its own book.
Because Jude quotes it directly (Jude 14–15) and the early Church read it, and a reader who encounters that quotation deserves to be able to look up what is being quoted. 1 Enoch was never canonised in the Western church. It remains canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. It is kept on a separate section of the site so it is never confused with the received canon.
Found something that looks wrong in the text? Tell us — we check reports against the upstream source and correct genuine errors.