Scripture in the Original Languages
Read God’s Word the way it was first written: Hebrew and Aramaic for the Old Testament, Greek for the New, and the ancient Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and Gothic Bibles the early Church read. Pick a passage, put your Bible beside it, and tap any word to hear it, sound it out and see what it meant. It is simple enough for a child and deep enough for a scholar.
Word of the Day
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1Choose a Passage
2Choose Your Bible
Free versions show right here. Copyrighted versions open on Bible Gateway in a new tab.
3Choose the Original
Tap any word for its sound, meaning, grammar and origin. Tap a verse number to share that verse.
How to Use This Study Tool
- Pick a passage. Choose a book and chapter, or use the arrows to move one chapter at a time.
- Put your Bible beside it. The free Berean Standard Bible shows by default. Choose another free version, or open your church’s own translation on Bible Gateway.
- Choose the original. The Old Testament opens in Hebrew, the New Testament in Greek, and the Deuterocanonical books in the Greek Septuagint. You can also switch to the Latin Vulgate and the other ancient Bibles.
- Tap a word. You’ll see how to say it, hear it read aloud, and learn what it meant to the first readers. Choose Full Detail for grammar, word origins, the full dictionary entry and every place it’s used.
Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac are read from right to left, so those words line up from the right side of the screen. The read-aloud voice comes from your own device. Most phones and computers have Greek and Hebrew voices, and Latin is read with an Italian voice, which is close to the way the Church sings it.
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Sources & Thanks
Every text here is in the public domain or shared under an open license, and we’re grateful to the scholars who made them free for the whole Church.
- Hebrew & Aramaic Old Testament (Leningrad Codex) and Greek New Testament, with word-by-word glosses, grammar and transliteration: STEPBible TAHOT and TAGNT by Tyndale House, Cambridge, STEPBible.org, CC BY 4.0.
- Dictionary entries: STEPBible TBESH (Hebrew, from Brown-Driver-Briggs via Strong’s) and TBESG (Greek, from Abbott-Smith), CC BY 4.0; grammar labels from STEPBible TEHMC and TEGMC, CC BY 4.0.
- Strong’s numbers, original meanings, origins and KJV renderings: James Strong’s dictionaries (1890, public domain), digitized by Open Scriptures, CC BY-SA.
- Greek Septuagint: H. B. Swete’s The Old Testament in Greek (public domain), transcribed by the First1KGreek project, with grammar by the QuantForge LXX project, CC BY-SA 4.0. Ezra, Nehemiah and Ecclesiastes are not yet in that edition.
- Latin: Clementine Vulgate (public domain). Dictionary meanings from William Whitaker’s WORDS (free for any use), matched to their dictionary forms with simplemma (MIT license).
- Syriac Peshitta New Testament (public domain), Sahidic Coptic Bible (CC BY-SA), and Wulfila’s Gothic Bible (public domain, courtesy Project Wulfila, University of Antwerp), via the CrossWire SWORD Project and scrollmapper.
- English: Berean Standard Bible (public domain dedication, CC0), King James Version, American Standard Version, World English Bible, Young’s Literal Translation, Darby, and Douay-Rheims Challoner Revision (all public domain). Copyrighted translations are linked to Bible Gateway and are not copied here.
Our pronunciation guides follow the common classroom pronunciation for Greek, the accent marks in the Hebrew text, and Church Latin. Changes we made: we reformatted these texts into small files for fast loading on phones, shortened long dictionary entries, and wrote our own plain-English grammar labels. The Septuagint, Coptic and Latin dictionary matches are automatic and may contain small errors.