The whole canon, queryable.

Install

$ npm install -g @divine-creative-ministries/bible-cli

That is the whole install. The scripture databases (~90 MB, checksummed) download automatically the first time a command needs them. Or try it with zero install:

$ npx @divine-creative-ministries/bible-cli passage "John 3:16"

Data lives in ~/.bible-cli (override with BIBLE_CLI_DATA). To manage downloads manually, set BIBLE_CLI_NO_AUTO_DOWNLOAD=1 and run bible db download. The optional Septuagint layer — which powers bible quotes — is a separate artifact under its own license: bible db download-lxx. Requires Node ≥ 20.

Quick start

$ bible passage "John 3:16"
[BSB] John
  3:16  For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son,
        that everyone who believes in Him shall not perish but have
        eternal life.

$ bible search "living water" --book nt
$ bible search "covenant" --book Genesis --count
23 matching verses

$ bible compare "Rom 8:1" -t all
Romans 8:1
  ASV  There is therefore now no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus.
  BSB  Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
  KJV  There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus,
       who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.
  WEB  There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus...

Where translations diverge — as KJV does above, carrying a longer reading from its Greek source — an interpretive or textual decision is hiding. That is the signal to go one level down.

References are forgiving: John 3:16-18, jn 3 16, 1jn2:5, Psalm 23, Gen 1:1-2:3, and psa 51:title all work. Scope flags accept books, ranges, and testaments: --book Isaiah, --book Gen-Deu, --book ot.

Original languages

$ bible interlinear "John 3:16"
Οὕτως     Houtōs    G3779  Adv       so
γὰρ       gar       G1063  Conj      For
ἠγάπησεν  ēgapēsen  G0025  V-AIA-3S  loved
ὁ         ho        G3588  Art-NMS   -
Θεὸς      Theos     G2316  N-NMS     God
τὸν       ton       G3588  Art-AMS   the
κόσμον    kosmon    G2889  N-AMS     world

$ bible word chesed
H2617  חֶ֫סֶד (chesed) — goodness, kindness
  occurrences: 247 in 241 verses | top books: Psalms (127), 2 Samuel (12) ...
  gloss range: covenant loyalty ×168; loyalty ×41; favor ×3 ...
  [bdb] full Brown-Driver-Briggs entry follows

$ bible grep-morph --stem niphal --tense participle --book Isaiah --count
98 matching words

$ bible original "John 1:18" --edition tr    # Textus Receptus wording
$ bible lemma H2617 --book Psalms            # every occurrence, in scope

The tagged text carries 469,000 Hebrew and Aramaic morphemes and 146,000 Greek words — each with parsing, disambiguated Strong's numbers, and a context-sensitive gloss. Greek variant readings are edition-tagged (NA, SBL, Textus Receptus, Byzantine), so --edition renders real edition wording.

Pattern analysis

Start any study with survey — one call returning the corpus's own structure for a topic before any interpretation:

$ bible survey chesed
H2617  חֶ֫סֶד (chesed) — goodness, kindness
occurrences: 247 in 241 verses  |  OT 247 / NT 0
distribution: Psalms 127, 2 Samuel 12, Proverbs 11, Genesis 11 ...
co-occurring distinctive words:
  H5769  עוֹלָם  "forever" — 57 shared verses

quotes is a computed map of where the New Testament quotes, alludes to, and echoes the Old — built by matching the Greek NT against the Septuagint, in labeled confidence tiers, at both verbatim and lemma level:

$ bible quotes "Psalm 110:1"
Matthew 22:44  ⇐  Psalms 110:1  quotation  14w
Mark 12:36     ⇐  Psalms 110:1  quotation  14w
Hebrews 1:13   ⇐  Psalms 110:1  quotation  14w
Acts 2:34      ⇐  Psalms 110:1  quotation  10w   ... 7 NT citations

$ bible quotes "Rev 1:7" --tier echo
Revelation 1:7  ⇐  Psalms 72:17   quotation  5w
Revelation 1:7  ⇐  Genesis 12:3   allusion   5w≈   lemma-level match
Revelation 1:7  ⇐  Daniel 7:13    echo       3w≈   "coming with the clouds"

$ bible xref "Isa 53:5" --text          # 345k vote-ranked cross-references
$ bible freq --strongs H1285 --by-book  # where does "covenant" concentrate?
$ bible cooccur --strongs H2617 --strongs H1285
$ bible similar "Isa 53:3-7"            # shared distinctive vocabulary
$ bible name Zechariah                  # which of the ~30 Zechariahs?

For AI agents

Every command takes --json, errors are machine-readable with did-you-mean suggestions, output is limit-disciplined with count-only modes, and capabilities are discoverable at runtime (bible books, translations, morph-codes, licenses).

Install the study methodology

$ bible agent-setup claude    # writes .claude/skills/bible-study/SKILL.md
$ bible agent-setup generic   # appends to AGENTS.md (Codex, opencode, ...)

The methodology is a text-first protocol: evidence scaled to the claim (a lookup needs one call; a "theology of" question needs the full canon), discovery before thesis via survey, mandatory attempts to falsify each thesis, and provenance labels separating what is observed, what is counted, and what is inferred — so answers come from the text, not from training data.

MCP server

$ claude mcp add bible -- bible mcp

bible mcp serves the same operations as typed MCP tools over stdio for Claude Desktop, Cursor, and any MCP client. A hosted endpoint for phone and web apps is on the roadmap.

Command reference

Every command documents itself: bible <command> --help.

Data & licensing

The databases are built by a reproducible pipeline with a verification gate — canonical verse counts, versification edge cases, morphology coverage — and full source attribution ships inside each database: run bible licenses.