This is still very much in progress. I am changing formatting, adding books, and deciding on a system. If the Bibles are misformatted in some way from the automatic script, then pull requests are welcome.
I took the USFM files from Ebible and edited out the USFM tags to leave a fairly simple set of Bibles in Org mode. Any that would distract from reading was removed. In practice, I left chapters, verses, titles, and emphasis markers. Footnotes, lemmas, cross references, and the like were all removed.
Versification is kept roughly intact. I replaced the \qN markers with spaces with #+BEGIN_VERSE and #+END_VERSE tags. Verse numbers, however, have not been moved up. I may adjust that in the future if it proves difficult to read. However, that would be hard to do with an automated script, which is why I have not moved verse numbers from the margins.
As a rule, across all org Bibles I want common names or resolvable common names. This means no single tradition of the biblical text will be represented adequately:
- In the Masoretic tradition, 1-2 Samuel, 1-2 Kings are called as I just wrote them. In the LXX, they are 1-4 Kingdoms.
- The books of Ezra vary wildly in naming.
- 1-2 Chronicles are called 1-2 Paralipomenon in the Latin and Greek, “things left aside.”
- “Malichi” is “My messenger.”
- Names differ in Hebrew more often than not. They are named for the first word of the book.
No matter what someone is used to, because I opt for common names, some books will be presented weirdly.
“Apocrypha,” as a general rule denotes books in a Roman Catholic or Orthodox Bible that the speaker does not include in theirs or, if they do, separate them out. It’s a sliding term. Thus the Protestants consider all books not in their Bible “Apocrypha.” The Roman Catholics have a smaller Bible than the Orthodox, so books like 1 Esdras or 3 Maccabees are “Apocrypha” in theirs and Protestant Bibles. The Orthodox have the broadest Old Testament of all with the Greeks and Russians differing including only one of 4 Maccabees and 3 Esdras respectively.
Strangely, this does not carry for the NT, and up until recently there was disagreement on that subject. Syrian Christians did not include Jude, 2-3 John, 2 Peter, or Revelation and would have considered them “Apocrypha.” The Ethiopians have a much broader NT canon that includes things like I Clement. However, the term never denotes this, because “apocrypha” originally denoted books “hidden” from the Jewish Bible but in the Christian Bible and did not mean “fake.”
My approach is simple: if a book is in any traditional Bible, it is treated as the Bible. In practice, I’m not including Ge’ez Bibles, because I cannot read them. Any biblical translation that includes Apocrypha never gets it separated. Daniel and Esther will always include the Greek portions. With Daniel, I include one copy, since the pluses to the Hebrew are easy to work around. However, I include two copies of Esther where it’s relevant, because the pluses are much harder to work around. This also affects the naming of the books of Ezra as outlined below. It also means that differences in Greek and Russian Bibles are conflated.
Eventually I will try to include books translated form the Ethiopian texts like I Enoch or the Book of Jubilees into a separate directory since no major translation includes them. They rarely even dignify the Ethiopian tradition by including their books as Apocrypha. It’s as if they don’t exist. For my part, even though it’s confusing to others until I explain it, I make a point of counting their books as “Apocrypha” when I talk about them to give them some dignity and noting the books are not in my Bible (and I would not put them in). I have not included them yet, because I have seen so many corruptions in the e-texts of these books that I would not feel remotely comfortable including them yet. At the moment, buy copies of these books, because the free versions I’ve seen are universally corrupt.
In the case of the books of Ezra, there is a */lot*/ of confusion as to what they actually are. Before I explain how these Org Bibles handles the problem, here’s the background.
There are three primary texts we have: Ezra-Nehemiah/2Esdras, 1 Esdras, and III Esdras. The naming conventions are a mess as explained below. “Esdras” is just “Ezra” from Latin and Greek.
Ezra-Nehemiah form a single book in the Hebrew MSS and in most LXX MSS. It was originally separated by Origin, then followed suit by St. Jerome. This was picked up by English Bibles and bymost printed Bibles now. However, with the Hebrew and with the Greek versions, I join them and symlink Nehemiah to it. The text of 2 Esdras in the LXX is so similar to Ezra-Nehemiah that I regard it as a translation of the same text.
1 Esdras replicates quite a bit of content from Chronicles and Ezra-Nehemiah with several passages unique to it. The relation of it to 2 Esdras is open. The Hebrew original is lost. It is named “I Esdras” in the LXX where the Greek translation of Ezra-Nehemiah as we now know it is 2 Esdras.
The complexity comes with St. Jerome’s translation. He omitted 1 Esdras from his translation initially (he had early issues with what we call “apocrypha” today and coined the term). He also followed Origin and separated Ezra-Nehemiah into two books. Without a I Esdras, his separated book of Ezra became his 1 Esdras. Since Nehemiah was a portion of Ezra-Nehemiah, he named it 2 Esdras. When he was forced to accept the traditional Latin Bible, he added 1 Esdras back in. However, he renamed it 3 Esdras. The Apocalypse, however, refers to itself as the “Second book of Ezra.”
There is also an Apocalypse of Ezra that appears in Slavonic Bibles as apocrypha. In Bibles that never underwent Origin’s and Jerome’s modifications, the book appears as 3 Esdras. However in the Latin tradition, the book appears as 4 Esdras where it was sometimes included until Trent.
In English Bibles, 1 Esdras was omitted almost universally. The Latin 1 Esdras was renamed to Ezra, and 2 Esdras was renamed to Nehemiah. 1 Esdras is simply called 1 Esdras because Ezra and Esdras get treated as different words in English. The apocalypse was still called 4 Esdras…/except/ when in a translation 2 Esdras (LXX), when it may be called 3 Esdras.
Because of the confusion this engenders, I have to pick a way of naming them. I am including the LXX as a full member, so I am opting for the following:
- If a translation splits Ezra-Nehemiah, I name them as 2ezr-ezr and 2ezr-neh respectively. However, I present the original texts as a single text, I use 2ezr. I did merge them together in the masoretic text even though the source e-text did not, because it universally is in the MSS. I included org partitions so that it’s easy to navigate them since most printed Hebrew Bibles no separate them (most Greek Septuagints are more faithful in this respect). I am not changing the translation choices, but I am naming the books to make it clear that they should be printed as a single book.
- 1 Esdras is simply 1ezr. I’m simply not going to follow Jerome here.
- The Apocalypse of Ezra is 3ezr.
There is no way of including a full suite of biblical books without Ezra becoming extremely confusing, but here is a table for:
| English | Septuagint | Hebrew | Vulgate |
| Ezra | 2 Esdras | Ezra | 1 Esdras |
| Nehemiah | 2 Esdras | Ezra | 2 Esdras |
| 1 Esdras | 1 Esdras | na | 3 Esdras |
| 2 Esdras | 3 Esdras+ | na | 4 Esdras |
+Note: 3 Esdras is technically not in the LXX but the Slavonic Bible
Books in Greek and Hebrew for the OT sometimes vary wildly. People are most often familiar with Daniel and Esther, but that’s only because the Roman Catholics preserved the differences. However, other books present wild changes in structure. Jeremiah, for instance, is in a different order and is about 20% shorter in Greek. If you look up a verse reference in Jeremiah, it very often will not be remotely close to the Greek version.
As a consequence, books that vary wildly are named with a g and h appended to the end of the book name. I am including a “pers” Bible directory to create a custom list of books that let you choose favorite translations from any given book and a Lisp script for quick lookup there. As a consequence, some people might want both versions, so making them distinct is useful.