What this site will not do
This is a tool for reading the Bible. A confident sentence about God’s word that turns out to be false does more damage than an empty margin ever could. So the rules below are constraints on the software, not aspirations for it — and several of them cost real features.
The four rules
1. Scripture is copied, never composed.
Every character of every verse is read out of a source file on disk and passed through untouched. No part of this site generates, paraphrases, completes, modernises or “corrects” a word of the biblical text. No language model is involved at any point in producing the text you read. Every book declares its verse count per chapter in advance, and the build refuses to run if the parser produces anything else — 48 verses of Jonah, 85 verses of Ruth, 167 verses of Esther, 21 verses of Obadiah, 47 verses of Nahum, 25 verses of Philemon, each in unbroken order. A program that silently drops scripture is worse than no program.
2. Every claim in the margin names how to check it.
Each note carries a basis, and there are only four permitted: an observation about the text you can verify by reading it; a value computed at build time from a named dataset; a footnote written by the translators themselves; or an open question where scholars disagree. There is no fifth basis. In particular there is no “well known” and no “commonly understood.” A claim that cannot carry one of the four does not appear.
| Basis | Meaning | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| text | Verifiable by reading the passage | 32 |
| computed | Derived at build time from a vendored dataset | 12 |
| translators | Quoted from the WEB committee’s own footnotes | 7 |
| disputed | Named positions, no winner picked | 3 |
3. Where scholarship is unsettled, the page stays unsettled.
The site does not flatten a live disagreement into a clean answer because a clean answer looks better. It names the positions and leaves them standing. You are trusted to hold two of them at once.
4. Nothing here is a substitute for the thing itself.
Information about a text and relationship with its author are different things, and the first can quietly counterfeit the second. That is the real failure mode of a project like this one — not a wrong distance, but a reader who ends up feeling well-informed about God instead of close to him. Every chapter therefore ends in a stop rather than a next, and the way onward does not appear for a few seconds. That delay is not a bug.
A worked example: the data we threw away
The source file for the World English Bible ships a Strong’s concordance number attached to nearly every English word — 1,077 of them in Jonah alone, across 173 distinct numbers. That would make a word-study feature almost free. We do not use it, because it is wrong.
The tags are machine-aligned. In Jonah, 164 words carry H3068, the number for the divine name — but only 26 of them are actually the word “Yahweh.” The other 138 (84%) are ordinary English words the aligner spilled the tag across:
“to”, “the”, “But”, “of”, “He”, “a”, “he”, “sent”, “on”, “and”, “was”, “that”
Had we shipped the obvious feature, this site would have told you that the English word “a” is the personal name of God. So the tags are stripped out of the text at build time and never rendered. Word notes are hand-checked one at a time instead, which is slower and produces far fewer of them. That trade is the whole point.
A second example: the map that will not pin Tarshish
Jonah’s flight is the most quotable fact in the book — he was sent to Nineveh and paid for a ship to Tarshish. The map on the Jonah plate draws Joppa and Nineveh as points, because the vendored OpenBible rows for both cite the verse that names them and give an exact coordinate. Tarshish does not get that treatment:
| From | Toward | Distance | Bearing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joppa | Tarshish | 3,779 km (great-circle) | — |
| Joppa | Tarshish | — | 290° WNW |
We cannot put a confident pin in Tarshish, because nobody knows where it
was. Our own two source files disagree with each other: OpenBible’s places.txt has no numeric coordinate for that row at all; merged.txt supplies one, in southwest Spain. The map draws that
point as an open ring — “disputed,” never a pin as certain as
Nineveh’s — and adds the one thing the dataset actually supports
without naming a place: a bearing of 290°
(WNW) from Joppa, toward Tarshish. We do not
draw other proposed identifications (Tarsus, Sardinia), because the
vendored dataset identifies Tarshish with neither. It does carry Tarsus, as
a separate place of its own, and that point is not west of Joppa at all —
so this site no longer says “every candidate lies west”, which
it once did. See the known gap below.
So the distance above is “the distance to one disputed identification of Tarshish,” and the site says so wherever it appears. What survives the uncertainty is what the text itself says: he was sent to Nineveh, and paid for a ship to Tarshish instead (Jonah 1:2–3).
Known gaps, stated plainly
- Licences were audited once, on 2026-10-19, against each publisher’s own terms; the result is on Sources. A licence can change after it is checked, and nothing here watches for that.
- Tarshish’s identification carries no independent citation yet. The point drawn on the map is the one our own vendored dataset supplies, marked disputed rather than certain — it is not a scholarly identification we have sourced ourselves. Other proposed identifications exist in the literature, but the dataset does not identify Tarshish with any of them, so the site does not draw them; adding one properly means reading and citing the scholarship behind it first, not typing in a coordinate.
- No Hebrew is displayed except where the translators displayed it. There are currently exactly two distinct Hebrew words on this site, across 7 WEB footnotes and nowhere in the text of a verse — the build refuses to publish if that stops being true. Until word-level data is hand-verified, there will not be more.
- Distances are great-circle, not routes. They are the distance a bird flies, not a road walked or a course sailed. Anywhere this site eventually shows travel time, it must say which it means.
- Six books are built. Jonah, Ruth, Esther, Obadiah, Nahum and Philemon. No other book of the Bible is here, and nothing on this site should be read as a claim about one. (How many there are depends on the tradition; this site does not count them.)
If you find an error
Errors in the apparatus are bugs and are treated as bugs. Errors in the scripture text itself would be a serious defect — the text ships with a recorded SHA-256 checksum precisely so that any drift from the published source file is detectable rather than a matter of trust. Both checksums and retrieval dates are on the Sources page.