Open Word Bible has a rule that surprises people: no one, human or AI, ever types a Greek or Hebrew word into the translation or its notes. Every original-language word you see on this site, including the Greek in these articles, is copied by software from fixed source data.

Why

Greek and Hebrew are hard to type correctly. Greek has accents and breathing marks; Hebrew has vowel points and cantillation marks. Many of them look almost identical on screen but are different characters underneath. A word typed from memory can look right and still be wrong: a different accent, a missing breathing, a letter that does not exist in the source at all.

In early testing, Greek typed from memory contained exactly these errors. A translation that claims to show its work cannot show the wrong words.

The sources

The text comes from fixed, openly licensed editions, each pinned to an exact version so that every result can be reproduced:

  • New Testament: the SBL Greek New Testament (version 1.2), with word-by-word data from MACULA Greek.
  • Old Testament: the Westminster Leningrad Codex, with word data from MACULA Hebrew and the Open Scriptures Hebrew Bible.

Full credits are on the About page.

How it is enforced

The rule is not just a habit; the software checks it on every change.

  • The original text of each sentence is rebuilt from the source data, and a sentence whose text does not match is rejected.
  • Any Greek or Hebrew word anywhere else, in a gloss, a translation or a note, must match a form or dictionary word in the source data exactly, character for character. A word with a wrong accent fails the check.
  • These articles quote Greek through placeholders that the site fills in from the data when it is built. When this article shows the first words of John’s Gospel, Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, the words come from the SBL Greek New Testament data, not from a keyboard.

These checks run automatically before anything is published.