Guides to reading the Bible
Practical explanations of things that are easy to get wrong — including how this site itself works.
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How to read a Bible verse reference
What John 3:16 actually means, how chapter and verse numbers work, and how to read the punctuation in references such as Psalm 23:1-3 or Romans 8:28, 38-39.
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How to find a Bible verse
How to find a verse when you know the reference, when you only half-remember the wording, and when you only know the subject.
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How to read a Bible verse in context
Why isolated verses mislead, and four practical questions that take about two minutes and catch most misreadings.
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What is a Psalm?
What the Psalms are, the main kinds of psalm, why roughly a third of them are complaints, and how to read one.
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What is a proverb?
What the book of Proverbs is, why its sayings are observations rather than promises, and the mistake that causes most of the harm.
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Old Testament and New Testament: the difference
What the two parts of the Bible contain, when they were written, how they relate, and why different traditions count different numbers of books.
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How Bible translations differ
Formal, dynamic and paraphrase approaches to translation, what each is good for, and how to choose one.
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Why Bible wording differs between translations
Manuscripts, ambiguous words, idiom, punctuation and the divine name — the five reasons two Bibles say different things.
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How the verse of the day is selected
The exact method behind this site's daily verse: a fixed rotation, no randomness, no algorithm reading your behaviour, and no AI.
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How random Bible verses are selected
Why this site draws random verses from a reviewed pool rather than from all 31,098 verses, and what that means for what you see.
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