I have been interested in how computers can help me study the Bible for a long time. I wrote my first webapp in 2009 while taking first year Greek. That was great, I could look up morphological data for any word in the New Testament. A friend then invited me to participate in building a native Linux app that did some pretty cool English Bible searches in addition to looking up morphology and we added a dictionary! And now, it’s started to seem as though every year a new iteration of some kind of Bible app come rolling out of my commit history.

Every time new data becomes available I’ve excitidely downloaded it to have a look at it and see what it would let me do. But I’m particularly interested in the Old Testament. So it’s been kind of frustrating to me that all the cool data is for the NT. And then it was amazingly exciting when ETCBC made all their Hebrew morphological and syntactical data available. This time round, I decided to build something with a bit more longevity though.

It began as an experiment to see whether I could build an interface that would enable me to search the Hebrew Bible easily (I had been frustrated with Accordance and Logos). The experiment was an overwhelming success in my books. I kept hosting my experimental server so that classmates could use it as well and eventually it went online as qBible.

But that was only an experiment and qBible.com was already taken.

Something was going to change (at the very least, the domain name). I decided to rethink the way the whole program worked. Nailed down some major efficiency improvements and built a clean new UI. So, Parabible was born. That actually happened a little more than a year ago (±13 Sept 2017) now and, with more than 130000 word lookups and almost 30000 searches, I feel like the experiment continues to be a success.

Why “Parabible”? Great question! Because in Greek, the word para means something like “next to” or “around” and the point of parabible is to help users read the Bible by giving you things like parsing of Hebrew terms or the ability to find similar syntax elsewhere.

Welcome, I hope parabible.com is useful to you!