| CARVIEW |
bible-api.com
This service provides a JSON API for retrieving Bible verses and passages, provided by Tim Morgan.
You can get the source code for this app and the open data for its database on GitHub.
There are two ways to use this service, described below.
User Input API
This is the original API, designed to take what a user types and return the matching verse(s).
https://bible-api.com/BOOK+CHAPTER:VERSEExamples
| description | link |
|---|---|
| single verse | john 3:16 |
| abbreviated book name | jn 3:16 |
| hyphen and comma | matt 25:31-33,46 |
Specifying the Translation
By default, we use the World English Bible (WEB). You can specify a different translation by
providing the translation parameter in the URL. For example:
/john 3:16?translation=kjv
See list of available translations below.
Single-Chapter Books
There are some books of the bible that only contain a single chapter,
i.e. Obadiah, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John, and Jude. That means it can be ambiguous to request
Jude 1. Do you mean the first chapter of Jude, or do you mean the first verse?
This API assumes you want the first verse. This seems to be consistent with
what most people expect, though it can be inconsistent when compared to other requests:
This is working by design. If you want the whole chapter/book of Jude (and all single-chapter books), you can change this behavior by either setting a header or passing an extra URL parameter:
- request header:
X-Single-Chapter-Book-Matching: indifferent - URL parameter:
single_chapter_book_matching=indifferent(example)
Parameterized API
This service provides a more precise identifier-based API as well. It requires that the translation, book, and chapter be specified exactly in the URL.
Usage: /data[/TRANSLATION_ID[/BOOK_ID[/CHAPTER]]]
TRANSLATION_ID- The translation identifier, such as "web" or "kjv".
BOOK_ID- The book id, such as "GEN" or "JHN" (they do not have to be uppercase).
CHAPTER- The chapter number.
If your browser (or an installed browser extension) supports formatting JSON, you can explore the API from /data and click the embedded URLs to navigate down to a chapter.
Some examples:
| description | link |
|---|---|
| available translations | /data |
| books in WEB translation | /data/web |
| chapters in John | /data/web/JHN |
| verses in John 3 | /data/web/JHN/3 |
Random Verse
There is an endpoint for getting a random verse.
Usage: /data/TRANSLATION_ID/random[/BOOK_IDS]
BOOK_IDS- a comma-separated list of book IDs (e.g. that which you would get from here, such as "GEN" or "JHN"), or the special strings "OT" or "NT" for all Old Testament or New Testament books, respectively.
Here are some examples:
| description | link |
|---|---|
| random verse | /data/web/random |
| random verse from specified book | /data/web/random/JHN |
| random verse from many books | /data/web/random/MAT,MRK,LUK,JHN |
| random verse from Old Testament | /data/web/random/OT |
| random verse from New Testament | /data/web/random/NT |
Translations
Both APIs support these translations:
| language | name | identifier |
|---|---|---|
| Cherokee | Cherokee New Testament | cherokee |
| Chinese | Chinese Union Version | cuv |
| Czech | Bible kralická | bkr |
| English | American Standard Version (1901) | asv |
| English | Bible in Basic English | bbe |
| English | Darby Bible | darby |
| English | Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition | dra |
| English | King James Version | kjv |
| English | World English Bible | web (default) |
| English | Young's Literal Translation (NT only) | ylt |
| English (UK) | Open English Bible, Commonwealth Edition | oeb-cw |
| English (UK) | World English Bible, British Edition | webbe |
| English (US) | Open English Bible, US Edition | oeb-us |
| Latin | Clementine Latin Vulgate | clementine |
| Portuguese | João Ferreira de Almeida | almeida |
| Romanian | Protestant Romanian Corrected Cornilescu Version | rccv |
To get more translations in this list, three things need to happen:
- Find a public domain or freely-licensed bible translation. This is probably harder than you think. Freely-licensed means the license says basically you can do what you want with it without restriction. Even if you find a bible that is fully downloadable in XML or whatever format, that doesn't mean its license is permissive. You have to check that it is either so old that is in the public domain, or that the copyright owner has explicitly granted free use.
- Add the XML to the open-bibles repository.
- Add a language file to the bible_ref repository (if the translation is a new language).
CORS
We support Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) so you can use this API via JavaScript in a web browser.
Terms of Use
This service is free for anyone to use as long as you don't abuse my server. This service is rate limited to 15 requests every 30 seconds (based on IP address), and this may change in the future. Do not use this API to download an entire bible; instead, get the data from the source.
I make no guarantees about this service's availability, quality, or correctness. In fact, this server can and will go down from time to time because it's just a hobby for me. If you need more reliable service, remember you can grab the code and data for this site here and host it yourself!