More Interlinears at STEPBible.org

Interlinear Bibles put you in touch with the underlying Greek & Hebrew without needing to know the languages. You don't even need to see the foreign text in order to study the Bible using insights from the original. Only a few Bibles have been tagged in this way, so we are now creating new ones.

As a teenager I became fascinated with Hebrew by using an interlinear book of Psalms. The cover is water-damaged because I even took it on holidays - including the night a river rose and flooded my tent. STEPBible interlinear is even better because you can set it up just like you want, though your computer may not survive flooding!

A couple of new interlinear Bibles have just been finished: The WEB Bible and ASV, as tagged by the CrossWordProject (www.crosswordproject.com). These are important versions, and their hand-tagging took many years. 
* The American Standard Version (ASV) is the American equivalent of the Revised Version (RV) which applied information from earlier manuscripts and modern lexical discoveries to the KJV, without changing its style. It became the basis for all modern translations. 
* The World English Bible (WEB) updated the language of the ASV - e.g. "thou sayest" to "you say". This was done by www.eBible.org who have also done a huge amount of useful work with other versions and translations. 

Try it out.

They can be used alongside other English interlinear-tagged Bibles already available: 
* Authorised Version (KJV) which was tagged by www.Crosswire.org
* New American Standard Bible (NASB), tagged by Crosswire for www.Lockman.org
* English Standard Version (ESV) which was tagged by volunteers for STEPBible
* Apostolic Bible in Engish, tagged to the Greek OT+NT by www.apostolicbible.com
* Revised Webster Bible - I don't know who tagged this. Probably www.onlineBible.org

Knowing who did the work is important, not only to judge the accuracy but also to acknowledge the huge amount of work that has gone into it. 

Understanding interlinear tagging

If you compare different interlinears, you'll find they work in two different ways.  

Try it out.

Some link the Hebrew or Greek to the most significant English word (like the first three here) and some link it to the phrase that best represents the orginal word (like the last four). The very last one is special because it is tagged to the Greek Old Testament instead of Hebrew.

Trying to identify the precise English phrase is very difficult, and ultimately disappointing. Greek and especially Hebrew doesn't work the same as English, so exact line-ups are impossible and sometimes misleading, as anyone trying to translate "Good morning" into another language will realise. 

Identifying the vocabulary behind a translation is, however, key to understanding the structure of a passage and its meaning by finding other places where the same words are used. Any of these Bibles now provide easy access to the original. 

Power behind Interlinear tagging

Tagging translated words with vocabulary is just the start. We can then add grammar, pronunciation, lexicons and searches. 

Try it out.

Options in STEPBible show how to pronounce the Greek or Hebrew as it occurs in the text, or show and pronounce the standard vocabulary form of the word. An outline of the Greek grammar is expanded if you click on the word. (Hebrew grammer is coming soon). In the sidebar, a summary of the grammar is put at the top, and at the bottom it is explained in detail. You can even colour-code words with blue/red for male/female and bold for plural. 

So, for example, you can see here that Paul wasn't setting himself apart as an Apostle - the verb is Passive Perfect so it was in the past and done by someone else, i.e. by God.

More Bibles coming

In STEPBible these versions are marked with a "I" for Interlinear, and "S" if they are linked to the Septuagint Greek OT instead of the Hebrew

Bibles with interlinear tagging are too rare, so we are working on automating this tagging. You won't be surprised to hear it isn't easy, but early experiments have worked surprisingly well. So we can look forward to seeing more Bibles like these. 

David Instone-Brewer