Skip to content

bible-translations

A Python package and CLI for fetching Bible translations on demand.

bible-translations does not ship any pre-downloaded Bible text. It scrapes publicly available, public-domain translations from BibleGateway at request time, and gives you the result as Python objects (via the API) or as exported JSON files (via the CLI).

Install

Install the CLI with uv:

uv tool install bible-translations

Install with pip:

pip install bible-translations

Run:

bt
# or
bible-translations

If bt isn't found afterward, run uv tool update-shell and open a new terminal.

To use the Python API instead, add bible-translations to your own project:

uv add bible-translations

Quickstart

CLI

bt verse "John 3:16"

API

from bible_translations import get_translation

kjv = get_translation("KJV")
verse = kjv.get_verse("John", 3, 16)
print(verse.text)

Supported translations

Translation Abbreviation
King James Version KJV
American Standard Version ASV
World English Bible WEB
Young's Literal Translation YLT
Darby Translation DARBY
Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition DRA

All are public domain. Pass the abbreviation with --translation / -t on the CLI, or to get_translation() in the API.

See the CLI Reference and API Reference for full details.