Which Bible we use

The short version

Scripture does two different jobs here, and they need opposite things. A psalm prayed at a bedside needs to sound like the one you memorised. A passage you are studying for the first time needs to be clear. Trying to serve both with a single translation means failing at one of them, so we do not try.

Prayers you already know

Psalm 23, Psalm 91, the Lord’s Prayer, the Song of Simeon, the blessing. These appear in their familiar wording and they never change. No settings, no toggle, no improvements. If you are reading Psalm 23 at four in the morning beside someone you love, the words should be the ones already in your mouth. That is the whole point of them.

The wording we use is the one most people carry, which is usually the traditional form and sometimes is not. The blessing is a good example: almost everyone knows “The Lord bless you and keep you,” not the older “bless thee, and keep thee,” so that is the form we print, with the older one underneath.

Two prayers, two forms, both correct

Some of us learned “forgive us our trespasses.” Some of us learned “forgive us our sins.” Some of us learned “lead us not into temptation” and some “save us from the time of trial.” Both are in current use in Lutheran churches, and neither is the corrected version of the other.

So we print both, side by side, every time. We do not hide one behind a preference. Pray the one you learned, and know that the person praying the other one is not doing it wrong.

The daily prayers

The psalms, the Gospel readings and the three Songs (of Zechariah, Mary and Simeon) in Morning, Evening and Night Prayer and Four Minutes are in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). It is the translation in the ELCA’s red hymnal, which means a prayer said here at night sounds like the reading you will hear on Sunday.

Each one shows a single wording. Before it, a line “in plain words” says what is going on, and long readings come in short scenes. For Psalm 23, Psalm 91 and the Songs, which many people know by heart in the King James wording, that form is one tap away under “Older wording.” Two wordings of the same verse side by side is hard going for a lot of readers, so we no longer print them that way.

Sunday’s readings

For the appointed readings we give you the reference, the season, and a line on what the passage is doing, then the full text on the page in the World English Bible. The ELCA uses the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, and that is where our links point by default. But every scripture passage on this site carries a link to read it elsewhere, so if the Bible in your memory is the one you grew up with, or the one on your shelf, or the one on your phone, use that one. We would rather you read the Bible you trust than the one we happened to pick.

The name of God

Some modern translations spell out the divine name as “Yahweh” where older ones print “the LORD.” We use “the LORD” throughout. It is what almost everyone reading this has heard in worship their whole life, and it respects the long Jewish practice of not pronouncing the name, a practice Christians have too often treated carelessly. Given what we say elsewhere on this site about Luther’s writings against the Jews, that carelessness is not something we want in our psalter.

Where the older words are harder

We are not sentimental about this. Older English is sometimes simply less clear, and where a modern rendering says the thing better we use it and show the older one underneath. Romans 8 is the obvious case: the traditional “nor any other creature” sounds like a mistake to a modern ear, when what Paul means is nothing that has ever been made. Clarity wins there. Familiarity wins in Psalm 23. Both judgements are deliberate.

What this costs you

Nothing. Almost every text we host here is in the public domain, which is why we can print it in full, let you make it larger and let you print it, without charging you for it. The one exception is the NRSV in the daily prayers. Its publisher lets anyone quote up to 500 verses without asking, as long as the words are unchanged; we use 81, and a check in the way this site is built stops it from ever going past 400.

This Sunday’s four appointed readings show their full text on this site in the World English Bible, the same public-domain translation as the daily psalms, drawn from the same library as Free Scripture, a sister project under Hope for Americans. The ELCA’s own standard translation is the NRSVue, which is under copyright; every reading links out to it as well, so you can read the appointed text in either.