Bible API
Self-hosted Bible REST API on Cloudflare Workers + D1 — WEB, KJV, WLC Hebrew, TCGNT Greek, full-text search, and 80+ books including Apocrypha.
A free, public Bible API built for study tools and AI clients. The whole stack runs on Cloudflare’s free tier: Workers at the edge, D1 (SQLite) for storage, and Hono as the web framework.
What it does
curl "https://bible-api.dws-cloud.com/v1/verses/John%203:16"Flexible references (John 3:16, Jn 3:16, Romans 8:28-39, comma-separated ranges), full chapters with prev/next navigation, full-text search via FTS5, random verses, and book/translation listings.
Verse and chapter requests can add ?segments=1 for speaker-tagged words-of-Jesus segments. The default response omits that field, so existing clients keep the original JSON shape.
Translations
| ID | Name | Scope |
|---|---|---|
web |
World English Bible | Full canon + Apocrypha |
kjv |
King James Version | Full canon + Apocrypha |
wlc |
Westminster Leningrad Codex | Hebrew Old Testament (~23,000 verses) |
tcgnt |
Text-Critical Greek New Testament | Greek New Testament |
Only public-domain texts — no licensing maze for a free open tool.
Stack highlights
- Edge deployment with aggressive caching (immutable verse content, 30-day edge TTL)
- FTS5 search, including unpointed Hebrew for WLC queries
- 66 canonical books plus Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical books
- Rate limits on database-heavy endpoints (
/v1/search,/v1/random)
Related
- Powers Bible Web, Bible CLI, and the Bible MCP Server