Resource Review13 min read

Parabible

4.0Editor rating

Parabible puts the BHS, the Rahlfs Septuagint, the SBL Greek New Testament and the NET in parallel columns with ETCBC morphology on every Hebrew word and no Strong's numbers anywhere. It is free, donation-funded, built by one biblical-studies PhD - and its search still only works in the Hebrew Bible.

Visit official site ↗
Starting price
Free
Free tier
Yes
Platforms
Web - installable PWA - separate phone client at m.parabible.com
Developer
James Cuenod
Launched
2017
Updated
Jul 26, 2026
4 columns - BHS, LXX, SBL GNT, NETTexts on the live site
Hebrew Bible onlyMorphological search coverage
500 maximum, full hit count reportedSearch results returned
23 editions, 5 lexiconsNext-generation API
Free, funded by Donorbox donationsPrice

The verdict

The best free browser tool for anyone who already reads Hebrew and wants to query the ETCBC syntax database - clause-level, phrase-function search that Blue Letter Bible, Bible Hub, STEP Bible and Scripture4All do not offer. Skip it if you need Strong's numbers, a lexicon, a searchable Greek New Testament, or any way to save your work.

Try Parabible ↗

Opens parabible.com

Parabible is a single-page web app showing four texts in parallel columns: the BHS Hebrew Bible, the Rahlfs Septuagint, the SBL Greek New Testament and the NET as the English control. Click any word and a panel opens with its parsing. The Old Testament view defaults to BHS, NET and LXX; the New Testament view to SBL GNT and NET. There is no login, no paywall, no advertising and no commentaries.

It is the work of one person. James Cuenod holds a PhD in Old Testament from Wheaton College on Sabbath theology and has worked at Clear Bible, Biblica and Seed Company, where he is Senior AI Translation Technologist. On his own site he calls Parabible "a tool that aids in original langauge exegesis" that "uses Clickhouse (OLAP DB) and a UDF written in Rust to do pretty sophisticated queries blindingly fast." The predecessor was qBible; a repository created in September 2017 reads "qbible is dead, long live parabible."

The texts are the point, so name them exactly. The Hebrew is the ETCBC's morphologically and syntactically annotated BHS - the licence panel calls it "Tagged BHS with Syntax Trees" and credits the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computing, formerly WIVU, under CC BY-NC 4.0 with a DANS DOI. The Greek Old Testament is the Rahlfs Septuagint tagged by CATSS at the University of Pennsylvania, the Greek New Testament the SBLGNT with MorphGNT tagging cited to Tauber's version 6.12 dataset, the English the NET Bible.

What Parabible does not have is a lexicon, and what it will not do is search anything but the Hebrew. Both are disclosed by the vendor - one by an error message, one by a roadmap promise dated 2019 that has not been met. Those gaps, against an unmatched search engine, are the review.

✓ The good

  • Clause- and phrase-level syntactic search over the ETCBC syntax trees - four scopes (Phrase, Clause, Sentence, Verse) and roughly thirty phrase functions including Subject, Predicate, Object, Complement and Fronted element, a query no free Strong's-based site can express
  • Every module is named, dated and licensed in the app - the panel prints "Septuaginta, ed. A. Rahlfs (Stuttgart: Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935; repr. in 9th ed., 1971)" and the NET copyright line in full, more provenance than most paid platforms show
  • The LXX lexeme is attached to each Hebrew word - clicking Elohim in Genesis 1:1 returns the Greek lexeme theos, so you can search the Hebrew Bible by how the Septuagint rendered it
  • Word lookups go past parsing - the Hebrew panel adds consonantal root, state, definiteness, pronominal suffix, an SDBH semantic domain and the Masoretic accent with its quality
  • Copy control for Hebrew - two settings copy the text with or without vowels and pointing, the difference between pasting a citation and pasting a mess
  • Free with no advertising and no gate - one Donorbox button, no subscription, no registration, no rate limit and nothing held back for donors

✗ Watch out

  • Search does not work outside the Hebrew Bible, and the vendor's deadline for fixing that was 2019 - clicking a Greek word returns "Sorry, parabible does not yet support searching outside the BHS (but it's coming...)", while the about page still reads "Updates that will enable searching the whole Bible will be coming by the end of 2019"
  • No lexicon on the live site and no Strong's numbers at all - a lookup gives a short gloss and an SDBH domain, with no BDB, Liddell-Scott, Mounce or concordance entry
  • The licence panel contains a copy-paste error - the NET Bible entry carries the Septuagint's description text, "The LXX data is derived from work especially by CCAT", under a heading for the English translation, and the Hebrew entry still calls the app qBible, a name retired in 2017
  • Nothing you do is saved - no accounts, saved searches, notes or highlights; state lives in browser local storage, so clearing site data loses your setup and nothing syncs across devices
  • Search scoping is five presets, not a range - None, Current book, Pentateuch, Minor Prophets or Wisdom Books, the last meaning Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes only
  • No privacy policy and no terms of service - every path on parabible.com returns the same single-page app, while Google Analytics events fire on lookups, searches and outbound clicks

Best for

  • Students who can already read unpointed Hebrew
  • Hebrew Bible morphosyntactic and phrase-function queries
  • Comparing the BHS against the Rahlfs LXX word by word
  • Exegesis papers needing citable, credited critical texts

Avoid if

  • You depend on Strong's numbers to reach the original
  • You need a searchable Greek New Testament
  • You want lexicon entries, commentary or cross-references
  • You need saved notes, highlights or an account

What Parabible is

Parabible is a browser-based parallel reader and search engine for the original-language texts of the Bible. Four columns are added and removed from the header: BHS, LXX, SBL GNT and NET. Clicking a word opens a morphology panel - docked to the side on a wide screen, sliding up from the bottom on a narrow one.

The second half is search. You click a word, pick which attributes to match - lexeme, stem, tense, person, gender, phrase function - add it as a term, then choose whether the terms must co-occur within a phrase, clause, sentence or verse. That is query building by example, and it only runs against the Hebrew.

The ETCBC database, with a usable front end

The Hebrew data here is not a gloss layer bolted onto a reading text. It is the ETCBC linguistic database, the Amsterdam annotation of the BHS carrying clause and phrase boundaries and a controlled vocabulary of phrase functions on top of word-level parsing. Parabible's credit line describes it as generated by a partnership between the German Bible Society and the Netherlands Bible Society and archived for open access.

SHEBANQ expects you to write MQL queries. Parabible's contribution is making the same corpus searchable by clicking a word in Genesis and ticking the features you care about. Ask for a Hiphil imperfect anywhere in the Hebrew Bible and 314 clause-level hits come back in a second. That is the thing Blue Letter Bible, Bible Hub, STEP Bible and Scripture4All do not do: all four are built on word-level indexes, and none can ask a question about a clause.

What a word lookup actually returns

For Hebrew the panel is dense. Clicking the fourth word of Genesis 1:1 returns the pointed and unpointed forms, the consonantal root, the ETCBC lexeme code, part of speech, number, gender, state, definiteness, any pronominal suffix, the accent Atnach marked disjunctive, a gloss, the SDBH domain Deities, and the Septuagint lexeme theos.

For Greek the panel is thinner: part of speech, lexeme, gloss, case, number and gender, with mood, tense, voice and person on verbs, plus a textual-criticism note where the SBLGNT apparatus has something to say. The LXX adds declension. No lexicon sits behind any of it and no Strong's number, so the Greek side is parsing plus a two-line gloss.

Search, and the ceiling it stops at

Terms are built by clicking a word and selecting attributes, then combined at one of four scopes: Phrase, Clause, Sentence or Verse. Scope is the interesting control - two lexemes in the same clause is a different question from two in the same verse, and few free tools can express the difference. Results pop out into a separate window for copying.

Two hard limits. Results cap at 500: a clause search for the lexeme of Elohim reports 2,546 total hits and returns 500, warning that it displays only some. And scoping is by preset - None, Current, Pentateuch, Minor Prophets, or Wisdom Books, the last meaning Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. If you want Psalms only, the tool cannot say so.

The version behind the version

Parabible has a next generation running in public but unlinked from the front page. A rebuilt API at api.parabible.com/v1 lists 23 editions against the live site's four, and five lexicons where the live site has none: bdb, mlsj, mounce, sdbg and sdbh. Four editions carry word-level tagging - the BHSA with syntax data, the Rahlfs LXX, the SBLGNT with apparatus and syntax data, and a Greek Apostolic Fathers based on Kirsopp Lake. Alternate Septuagint texts are broken out for Daniel Old Greek, Judges A, Joshua A and Tobit S.

That API also drives m.parabible.com, whose repository is named mobile-client-alpha. It registers a service worker, defaults to the BHSA, SBLGNT, NET and two Apostolic Fathers editions, and has dark mode and lexicon panels with Strong's cross-references. So the phone client is in some respects ahead of the desktop site while carrying an alpha label, and the two do not share data.

Pricing

Free

Free

Everything on parabible.com: the BHS with ETCBC morphology and syntax, the Rahlfs LXX with CATSS tagging, the SBL Greek New Testament with MorphGNT tagging, the NET Bible, word lookups, phrase, clause, sentence and verse search across the Hebrew Bible, five book-scope presets, Hebrew copy settings and hand-off links to SHEBANQ and BibleBento. No account is required and no feature is reserved. Funding is voluntary donations through a Donorbox button pointing at donorbox.org/support-parabible. No suggested amounts, tiers, nonprofit registration or grant funders are published, and there is no advertising.

There is one tier and it is free. No registration, no paywall, no advertising, no rate limit, no donor-only feature. The API endpoints the site calls - term-search, word-search, chapter-text and word-lookup - accept unauthenticated requests.

Funding is voluntary donations through a Donorbox button reading SUPPORT PARABIBLE. No suggested amount, tier, total raised or target is published, and there is no nonprofit identification, denominational parent, institutional host or named grant.

The licensing side costs something other than money. The ETCBC Hebrew data is CC BY-NC 4.0, non-commercial, and the newer API records the Rahlfs LXX as "CCAT Non-Commercial (registration required)" - compatible with a free donation-funded site, incompatible with building a commercial product on the same modules. The NET entry is plain "All rights reserved".

The practical risk is a single maintainer with no disclosed revenue. The live client's repository was last pushed in March 2023 and the live server's in December 2022, while the newer server, phone client and data compiler were touched as recently as December 2025. The product works today and is quietly being replaced, on no published timeline.

Where Parabible falls behind

No searchable Greek, seven years after the promise. This is the gap that matters most, because a tool built for original-language exegesis lets you query half the Bible. The about page still says whole-Bible search is "coming by the end of 2019", and the app still answers a Greek search with "Sorry, parabible does not yet support searching outside the BHS (but it's coming...)". STEP Bible searches Greek today.

No lexicon, and no Strong's bridge to one. Blue Letter Bible pairs Strong's with Thayer's and Gesenius; Bible Hub stacks Strong's, BDB, Thayer's and HELPS Word-studies on every verse; STEP Bible ships BDB, Liddell-Scott and Mounce. Parabible gives a few words of gloss and an SDBH domain, which its own credit text calls "still needing a lot of revision".

One English translation, and no choice about it. The NET is a defensible control text with famously extensive notes, but it is the only English on the live site - no ESV, no NASB, no KJV, no interlinear line, against Bible Hub's thirty-plus versions. The newer API lists Berean Standard, JPS 1917, Brenton, unfoldingWord, Reina-Valera Gomez, Chinese, Hausa, Kiswahili, Malayalam, Shona and Chichewa; none has reached parabible.com.

Open source in the loose sense only. The GitHub organisation holds ten repositories and exactly one carries a licence file - pb-rendertron, a rendering helper last pushed in March 2019, under GPL-3.0. The client, server, data compiler and every data module have no licence, so there is no grant of reuse rights however public the code is. Directory listings calling Parabible open-source run ahead of the evidence.

A Septuagint alignment flaw flagged by outside reviewers. The Digital Orientalist, surveying freely available primary sources in October 2020, called Parabible "a powerful, yet more straightforward site" but noted that "the text of the Septuagint is coded to match the versification of the Hebrew text, meaning that lengthy plusses in the Greek do not appear where they should." Anyone working on Greek pluses should check the reference against a Gottingen edition rather than trusting the column position.

Parabible vs. Blue Letter Bible vs. STEP Bible vs. Bible Hub vs. Scripture4All

Three of these five are built for a reader who does not know the languages. Blue Letter Bible, Bible Hub and Scripture4All work the same way underneath: an English word is keyed to a Strong's number, the number opens a lexicon entry, and a concordance lists the other places it appears. Bible Hub adds an interlinear line and thirty-plus English versions; Scripture4All puts the same idea in interlinear PDFs plus a Windows program. That model has a ceiling: Strong's indexes lexical forms, so it identifies a lemma and says nothing about the clause.

Parabible starts on the other side of that line. There is no Strong's number in it, because it addresses the ETCBC lexeme directly and assumes you can read the form on the page. In exchange you get what the other four cannot do: search the Hebrew Bible for combinations of morphological and syntactic features scoped to a phrase, clause, sentence or verse, over an annotation layer that includes phrase functions, with the Septuagint's rendering of each Hebrew word attached so you can hunt by Greek equivalence.

STEP Bible is the closest and fairest comparison, because Tyndale House also serves people who read the languages. It beats Parabible on nearly everything except the one thing: it searches Greek as well as Hebrew, ships BDB, Liddell-Scott and Mounce, carries the THGNT and Vulgate, has an offline Android app, and publishes code and data under a permissive licence. What it lacks is clause-level querying over a syntax-annotated Hebrew Bible. If you are writing on Hebrew word order, Parabible answers the question; keep STEP Bible open for the rest.

The bottom line

Parabible does one hard thing better than any other free tool: querying the ETCBC syntax-annotated Hebrew Bible by clicking on words, with the Rahlfs LXX and the SBLGNT in the next column and every edition properly credited. It is also unfinished in ways the vendor states plainly - no lexicon, no Greek search, nothing saved, no legal pages, and a 2019 roadmap promise still on the about page. Keep it in a second tab next to STEP Bible, and watch m.parabible.com, where the version with 23 editions and five lexicons already runs.

Alternatives to Parabible

STEP Bible 4.6Tyndale House Cambridge's free tool, and the nearest rival: searchable Greek as well as Hebrew, BDB, Liddell-Scott and Mounce built in, the THGNT and Vulgate, an offline Android app, and licensed open source. No clause-level syntax search.Blue Letter Bible 4.7Strong's on every word with Thayer's and Gesenius behind it, interlinear views, concordance searches and a deep commentary library, free from a 501(c)(3). Word-level throughout, no syntactic query layer.Bible Hub 4.6Strong's-tagged interlinear for every verse plus BDB, Thayer's and HELPS Word-studies, and more than thirty English versions on the parallel page. Broader than Parabible everywhere except syntax.Scripture4All 4.4Free interlinear PDFs of the whole Bible plus the Windows-only Interlinear Scripture Analyzer. Works offline, which Parabible does not, but the interactive half is Windows only.Biblearc 4.6Paid workspace for arcing, bracketing and phrasing the text, with original-language layers. Complementary rather than competing - it diagrams an argument; Parabible interrogates a corpus.

Frequently asked questions

Which critical texts does Parabible actually use?

Four, all named in the app's licence panel. The Hebrew is the ETCBC's morphologically and syntactically tagged BHS, credited to the Eep Talstra Centre for Bible and Computing, formerly WIVU, under CC BY-NC 4.0 with a DANS DOI; the data module notes it follows BHS where that differs from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. The Greek Old Testament is "Septuaginta, ed. A. Rahlfs (Stuttgart: Wurttembergische Bibelanstalt, 1935; repr. in 9th ed., 1971)" with CATSS morphology, marked "Copyright (c) 1988 University of Pennsylvania". The Greek New Testament is the SBLGNT tagged by MorphGNT version 6.12. The English is the NET Bible.

Is the whole corpus tagged, and can I search all of it?

The texts are tagged; the search is not. All three original-language modules carry word-level morphology, and the BHS adds syntax trees with clause and phrase boundaries. But search runs only against the Hebrew Bible: clicking a Greek word to build a term produces "Sorry, parabible does not yet support searching outside the BHS (but it's coming...)". Aramaic sits inside the BHS module - the feature set includes stems such as Peal, Pael, Afel and Haphel, which is the Aramaic of Daniel and Ezra, not the Targums or Peshitta.

Does it have a lexicon or Strong's numbers?

Neither, on the live site. There is no Strong's number in parabible.com, by design - it addresses the ETCBC lexeme directly. A lookup gives a short gloss plus, for Hebrew, a semantic domain from the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew. No BDB, no Liddell-Scott, no Mounce, no Thayer's. The newer API does list five lexicons - bdb, mlsj, mounce, sdbg and sdbh - and the phone client opens entries with Strong's cross-references, but none of that has reached the main site.

Is the licensing and attribution done properly?

Yes, and unusually visibly: every module has an in-app entry naming the edition, rights holder, licence and source-data link, which is more than most paid platforms show. Two caveats. The panel has a copy-paste error - the NET Bible entry carries the Septuagint's description text, and the Hebrew entry still calls the app qBible, a name retired in 2017. And the licences constrain reuse rather than access: the ETCBC data is CC BY-NC 4.0 and the newer API records the LXX as "CCAT Non-Commercial (registration required)".

Is it really free, and who pays for it?

It is free with no account, paywall, advertising or donor-only feature. Funding is voluntary donations: the site loads a Donorbox popup script and shows a SUPPORT PARABIBLE button linking to donorbox.org/support-parabible. No suggested amounts, tiers, totals or targets are published, and there is no nonprofit registration, denominational parent, institutional host or named grant. Nothing states that Cuenod's employers fund it.

Is it open source, and under what licence?

Source-available rather than licensed. The GitHub organisation holds ten repositories covering the client, server, data compiler and data modules, and exactly one carries a licence file: pb-rendertron, a rendering helper last pushed in March 2019, under GPL-3.0. The rest have no licence at all, so there is no grant of reuse rights however public the code is. The about page says only "All the code is available on github, feel free to peruse it and make a pull request!"

Does it work on a phone?

It works, with real compromises. A web app manifest set to standalone display means parabible.com installs to a home screen, and the layout responds at 430px, 500px, 700px and 1100px. Below 500px the column headers disappear and morphology arrives in a popup from the bottom instead of a docked sidebar; below 700px text selection is switched off entirely, so you cannot copy a verse on a phone; and the viewport disables pinch-zoom. The separate phone-first client at m.parabible.com adds dark mode and lexicon panels, but its repository is named mobile-client-alpha and runs on a different API, so the two do not share your setup. There is no iOS or Android app.

Sources & further reading

More Greek & Hebrew Tools

Blue Letter Bible 4.7The serious-study site for everyone who can't afford Logos - and a surprising number of people who can.Bible Hub 4.6The most-cited free Bible study site on the internet - a thirty-translation parallel view, a Strong's-tagged interlinear, and a wall of classical commentaries on every verse, all one click apart and all completely free.STEPBible 4.6A free, open-source original-language Bible study site built by actual textual scholars at Tyndale House Cambridge - and the best-kept secret in serious Bible study.BibleArc 4.6The diagramming workbench seminarians swear by and most casual readers have never heard of - and the reason that gap exists is the same reason its fans will not give it up.Scripture4All 4.4A quiet, donor-run project that gives the whole Bible away as a word-for-word interlinear - Hebrew and Greek under a literal English gloss, with grammatical parsing on every word, free and downloadable.Biblingo 4.2Biblingo teaches biblical Hebrew, Greek and Latin by immersion rather than by parsing charts, and it charges for it. Fifty-two lessons per language, a Hebrew University doctorate behind the curriculum, and one uncomfortable fact - every tool it competes with is free.
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