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What is the World English Bible?The World English Bible is a Modern English update of the American Standard Version of 1901, which is in the Public Domain. The revision is also in the Public Domain, which sets it apart from other revisions of the American Standard Version, like the New American Standard Bible and the Revised Standard Version. There are more than 40 English translations of the Holy Bible. Unfortunately, all of them are either (1) archaic (like the KJV and ASV of 1901), or (2) covered by copyright restrictions that prevent unrestricted free posting on the internet or other media (like the NIV and NASB). The Bible in Basic English (BBE) was in the Public Domain in the USA (but not all countries) for a while, but its copyrighted status was restored by GATT. (The BBE used a rather restricted subset of English, anyway, limiting its accuracy and readability.) In other words, there is NO OTHER complete translation of the Holy Bible in normal Modern English that can be freely copied (except for some limited "fair use") without payment of royalties. This is the vacuum that the World English Bible is trying to fill. The first phase of the translation, which has already been done, was to convert about 1,000 archaic words and word forms to modern equivalents using a custom computer program. The second, third, and fourth phases are now going on in parallel. The second phase is manual revision to add quote marks (the ASV1901 had none) and update other punctuation, update usage, and spot check the translation against the original languages in places where the meaning is unclear or significant textual variants exist. The third phase is the review of the results of the second phase by volunteers who read them, looking for typos, unclear passages, etc., then report back to the senior editor (Michael Paul Johnson <mpj@ebible.org>). The fourth phase is considering all suggestions and editing the master copy of the WEB text accordingly, then publishing revisions at the WEB ftp site and the WEB web page. The fifth phases is ongoing consideration of corrections and revisions. The use of the name "YAHWEH""Yahweh" is the most probable best transliteration of this most holy proper name from the Hebrew consonants YOD HE WAW HE, or YHWH. This holy name is sometimes rendered "Jehovah" based on the mixture of the vowels for "Adonai" (Lord) with the consonants "YHWH" as it is written in some later Hebrew manuscripts. The original Hebrew manuscripts had no vowels, and we believe that the vowels for "adonai" were added to reflect the tradition of avoiding pronouncing God's name, and saying "Lord" instead, and was not an indication of how the name should be pronounced by those so bold as to actually utter God's name. This is a break from the tradition of the KJV and others that use "LORD" or "GOD" with all caps or small caps to translate "YHWH", and use "Lord" (normal mixed case) to translate "Adonai" and "God" (normal mixed case) to translate "Elohim." That tradition gets really confusing in some places, especially since "Yahweh" is used in conjunction with "Lord" and "God" in many places in the Old Testament. Since God's proper name really is separate from the titles "Lord" and "God" in the original Hebrew, we wanted the English translation to reflect that fact, even when read aloud.
The Old TestamentThe 5 books of Moses -- the LawHistoryWisdom LiteratureThe Prophets
The New TestamentThe Life of Jesus and the Early ChurchLetters from the Apostle Paul
General Letters from Apostles and ProphetsProphecy - messages from God for the present and the futureTo get daily Bible readings from the World English Bible emailed to you, subscribe to the Bible mailing list. The World English Bible is available for download in various formats:
You can use Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) and MD5SUM to verify the integrity of the above .zip archives. Revision status is given in seal.txt. |