The newest repository for Bible translations for the Crosswire Bible Society’s Sword Project applications is at ftp://ftp.eBible.org/sword. It is also the largest, because it has all of the Bible translations that I have permission to distribute freely and have processed, so far (677 of them as of today). This new repository has just been added to the official master repository list for all Sword Project applications (which they call “front ends”). There are many of them, but here are my favorites:
- Xiphos (for Windows or Linux)
- Eloquent (for Mac OS X)
- PocketSword (for iOS, available in the App Store)
- AndBible (for Android, available in the Play Store)
Unfortunately, as I write this, AndBible doesn’t use the master repository list, and doesn’t have a mechanism to add another repository manually. However, you can manually add modules from the eBible.org repository via the Android file system. Just copy modules to a jsword directory on your sd card. Expand the module so that the .conf file is in sdcard/jsword/mods.d and the bible files in a subdirectory of sdcard/jsword/modules e.g. sdcard\jsword\modules\texts\ztext\engWEB2014eb. Hopefully, AndBible will eventually be upgraded so that this “side loading” of modules isn’t necessary.
Another issue currently is that PocketSword may report that no search index is available for any or all of these modules. Hopefully, that will be corrected before too long. In the mean time, Bible reading will work fine.
Other than that, the Sword Project Bible study applications provide an awesome way to read, study, and search the Holy Bible in many languages, all offline, and without paying more than whatever your Internet access and device(s) that you probably already have cost.
For some front ends, or to use the eBible.org beta repository, you might need to enter the following parameters:
- Name: eBible.org
- Protocol: ftp
- Server: ftp.eBible.org
- Directory: /sword
- User name: anonymous or ftp
- Password: insert any email address here
For the eBible.org beta repository, the directory name is /swordbeta. All of the other parameters are the same. You can also access the same repositories with http protocol, using the server name eBible.org.
For more details, please see the documentation for each front end program on its own web site.