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the NEWPROTEST Bible project
A Bible for looking closely.
Most Bible sites are built for reading a chapter and moving on. This one is built for stopping on one verse and asking what the words are doing. The same collection opens the other way round as well, by the work rather than by the verse, so a commentator can be read straight through.
Each verse carries its Hebrew or Greek line, word by word. Behind every word: Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, Thayer’s for Greek, Strong’s for both, and an outline of how the word gets used. Point at a word and it lights up across the translation, the original line and the interlinear. Click it and you get everywhere else it occurs. All 31,102 verses, searched without leaving the page.
The Hebrew interlinear glosses each word on its own, in Hebrew order, from STEPBible’s Translators Amalgamated Hebrew OT, by Tyndale House, Cambridge, under CC BY 4.0.
Behind every verse sit Rashi, Ibn Ezra, Sforno, the Targums, Midrash, Talmud, Mishnah, Kabbalah and the rest, from Sefaria’s library, one tap from the verse you are on. The Gospels carry Claude Montefiore’s Synoptic Gospels and his Rabbinic Literature and Gospel Teachings, and the New Testament the scholarship of Israel Abrahams (Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels) and Joseph Klausner (Jesus of Nazareth), because they deserve a Jewish reading too. Where there is no English translation to carry, the Hebrew is shown and said so plainly.
The Library is the same material arranged by the work instead of the verse: 1,283 works and 1,033,339 passages across fourteen categories, with a reader for each. Rashi from the first word of Genesis, a midrash on a book at a time, an encyclopedia article whole. Every passage there has a link of its own, so any one of them can be sent to somebody.
It goes in the order of the Bible, because that is how this collection is filed: a passage sits under the verse it speaks about. For a commentary written on the text, that is very nearly the work’s own order. For a work numbered some other way, the Talmud by folio or responsa by question, it is not, and the reader says so rather than pretending otherwise.
Not a translation-comparison site. Eighteen English translations are here, all public domain, and they are here to be read against the original rather than against each other.
Not a commentary. It will not tell you what a verse means. It shows what it says, in the language it says it, and who has disagreed about it since.
An account is free, and it is for writing in the margin. Keep a note on any verse, and a note on any word: a word note is filed under its Strong’s number, so what you noticed about chay in Genesis 1 is in front of you when you meet it again in Psalm 23.
You can also draw your own cross references between two verses. A link reads from both ends, so it waits for you at the verse you drew it from and at the verse it points to, marked to say which way round you made it.
All of it is green, all of it sits under Yours in the drawer beside the commentary, and none of it is published.
Now and then a note may be chosen to join the community commentary, where every reader can see it, under the name of whoever wrote it. Your own copy stays where it is, unchanged and still yours.
It is a play on “Protestant.” There was once a great protest against the Established Church, and it was right about a great deal. But it left the antisemitism baked into that church exactly where it was, and Martin Luther went on to make it worse.
That is the unfinished part, and the reading of scripture that rests on it is what this project protests. Jesus taught as a Jew, among Jews, in the language and the arguments of Jewish theology. Christianity is what happened when the church read him out of that world. The teachings and the institution are not the same thing, and this project is interested in the teachings.
So the work begins with the context itself. That is what everything above is for, and why the weekly portion and haftarah are here on the calendar they are actually read on. Not as background to something else. As the world the teachings came from.