Methods
Why another translation
The English Bibles a project may quote freely are the ones copyright has released, not the ones chosen for faithfulness: the King James, the American Standard, the World English Bible. Anyone building a site, a commentary or a dataset that quotes Scripture at length is choosing among them for legal reasons. The Wroot Press Bible is a fresh translation from the Hebrew, the Greek Septuagint and the Greek New Testament, published under a licence (CC BY 4.0) that lets any project use it from its first finished verse, and made under written rules that anyone can read.
The rules did not come from nowhere. They began as a reverse-engineering of the editor's own draft translations: the choices those drafts kept making, word by word, were read back out, written down as rules, tried on trial chapters, and then ruled on one at a time. The rules come first. Before a chapter is translated, the translation guide and a numbered list of rulings fix how the hard choices go: one English word for one Hebrew word wherever the text lets it hold (the "home gloss"), with every departure noted; a crux that English cannot leave open is printed in its stranger reading and the familiar one is given in the note; the Tetragrammaton as Adonai in small capitals; verbs stay verbs; pronouns keep the gender of the Hebrew. There are a hundred and two rulings as of this writing. Every one of them is on this site, and every note that rests on one cites it by number.
How a chapter is made
The translation is written by a language model, Claude Opus, working under those rules, and it is checked by the same kind of model and by the editor. That sentence is the honest one, so it is first. What makes the result a translation and not a paraphrase is the rule book, the apparatus and the gates.
Each chapter is written in one pass: the translation, a reader's edition of it at an eighth-grade level, a tag on every controlled word that links it to the lexicon, and the notes. The notes are written with the verse, at the moment of decision, never backfilled. A decision note says what the King James and Revised Standard read, what the Hebrew does that forced the change, and which ruling decided it. A reading note is the translator's remark on a chain across the canon, a pun the English could not carry, or a reading in the history of interpretation.
A chapter then goes through six gates. The first four are mechanical: the markup is whole; every controlled word is checked against the concordance, so that a word translated one way in Genesis 2 is translated the same way in Genesis 8 or carries a note; every divine name is where the Hebrew has it; every verse is present in both editions. The fifth is a blind read: a second reader, fenced from the translator's notes, checks every negation, every connective, every ketiv and qere, and the reader's edition against the translation, and records what it found, including "nothing". The sixth is the reader's edition's own checks. A chapter that passes all six is reviewed, and only reviewed chapters are on this site. A chapter becomes final after the concordance pass that follows a whole book, when no gloss change is outstanding.
What the site is for
It is a place to read along as the translation is made, chapter by chapter, with its reasons showing; a place to read the rules; and, for other projects, an address to quote from. The verses here are the only published copy. Other sites link to them or call the API, and when a reading is corrected it is corrected once.
What it is not
It is not finished, and it does not pretend to be. The progress page says which chapters exist. It is not a committee translation and does not claim the authority of one. It is not a paraphrase: where the Hebrew is strange, the English is strange, and the note says why. And it is not a product; it is a press's working text, published early because the licence is the point.
Read the rules
- The translation guide, the working rules in full.
- The rulings, every numbered decision with its full text.
- The Reader's edition, how the plain-English edition is made.
- Gates and statuses, what "reviewed" means.