Compact, flexible, and developer-friendly Bible JSONs with embedded USFM-like tags.

📌 Table of Contents

• About
• Why
• Important Warning: Always Check Twice
• Usage
  • Why tags
  • Example JSON Structure
• Limitations
• Potential Mistakes
• Licensing and Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Support
• Contributing
• My Call

📚 About

This is a simple repo for having actual 'usable' bibles as json.

Want to have footnotes, titles and other important markers? Want the actual link of the files, writing direction, language information, copyright information?

Here you have it, in different languages and relatively free licensing too! Just clone this repo and start building your bible app without much headache.

I call this json unofficially "babij", because this json embeds USFM-like tags in text to mark words or text with roughly the same semantics in usfm. Hence the name "Bad Bible JSON".

🤔 Why?

The Journey:

• Wanted to build a Bible app -> needed Bible data.

• Found many formats (USFM, USX, SWORD modules) but no good JSONs.

• Existing JSONs were incomplete: no footnotes, titles, or unified structure.

• Converted USFM to USJ to a better JSON (Babij) with embedded tags.

• Result: A (hopefully) more compact, flexible, and developer-friendly format.

⚠️ Important Warning: Always check twice

• Always verify the metadata (copyright, license, writing direction).
  • I used AI/Google for non-English/German languages - errors may exist.
  • You are responsible for compliance with each translation’s license.
• Report issues if you find mistakes in writing direction or metadata.

🛠️ Usage

Why Tags?

• CSS: Define how every tag should be rendered by ONE css file (see example.css).

• Compactness: Reduces file size (for example: 5MB USJ -> 1MB Babij).

• Flexibility: Direct access to marked-up text. You decide how to render:

  • <bold> -> bold or not bold?
  • <footnote> -> numbers or icons?
  • No need for complex traversal algorithms.
  • Even if you need to specific tags, most languages can extract such things easily with libraries.

Example JSON Structure

    {
        ...,
        "verses": [
            {
                "global_locator": "GEN 1:1",
                "chapter": "1",
                "alternate_verse_number": "",
                "verse_number": "1",
                "text": "In the beginning, God created the <bold>heavens</bold> and the <dictionary_word>earth</dictionary_word>.<footnote />
                <translators_addition>God and the bible are awesome!</translators_addition>",
                "position": "left",
            },
        ]
    }

Full tag documentation: See /docs.

⚠️ Limitations

Feature	Status	Reason
Figures (\fig)	❌ Not supported	No linked images in source files.
Crossreferences (\x)	⚠️ Partial	References exist, but no standard for resolving targets (multi-language issue).
Jump/Link-text (\jmp)	❌ Not supported	Parser limitations or software-specific links.
List Headers/Footers (\lh, \lf)	❌ Lost	Parser couldn’t handle multi-line markers; replaced with \p. I deleted them uncarefully at the beginning

🚨 Mistakes

I can not garuantee to have things right. There are multiple sources of mistakes. Create an issue if you think something got wrong

Source	Issue	Action
Manual Edits	Formatting/content errors in modified files.	Check "Remarks" in files (format in /docs).
Conversion Scripts	Bugs in my Python programm or the usfm_grammar	Report issues!
Translations	Spelling/theological errors.	Verify with original sources.
Dictionary Entries	Non-Hebrew/Greek words lack definitions.	Older translations over-tagged words (e.g., 14MB of English words).

📜 Licensing and Copyright

• Each Bible JSON file includes its own copyright notice, license, and attribution requirements (visible in the file metadata).
• Most translations are under Creative Commons (CC-BY, CC-BY-SA) or Public Domain.
• Derivatives of CC-BY-SA files must also be CC-BY-SA.
• Some files have full copyright—check per-file info before use.
• Users must verify and comply with each translation's license. I am not responsible for misuse.

🙏 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank open.bible and ebible.org for giving the world digitial bibles in usable formats and for free. Without this foundation, this could have never happened. Please use their ressources or support them!

Also important were the the usfm-grammar package (python) and the usfm-documentation (2.4, 3.0) from United Bible Societies.

❤️ Support

If you want to support this, please built upon it or use this to make a better format. If you are a christian, pray for this project and or its influences.

But if you really want to help. Please donate to any Aid Organization or the ones, that are listed below

🤝 Contributing

All contributions help! Here’s how:

• Report Issues: Found mistakes? -> issue.
• Improve Docs: Clarify tags, add examples...

🌟 My call

I want the bible to spread and be easily used by developers. Please build on this or clone it and make this better. Overshadow me in structure and usability! I will not care, if this repo becomes unneccessary, as longs as it benefits god and his word. If nobody cares, so be it. If somebody cares and takes this source as inspiration, I will be glad, that it was a foundation.