Biblical — The Biblical scholar

The Biblical scholar — one text across Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic and English witnesses.

The cross-language scripture hat: the Masoretic shelves and the Scrolls, the Greek NT, Vulgate and WEB, Peshitta and the Syriac corpus, Coptic Scriptorium, the Targums, and the OSHB-BHSA bridging module. The hebrew and syriac language desks coexist with this hat by design.

New here? The Quickstart sets up the library in minutes.

The shelves

A source wears every desk it serves — these twenty-two answer this desk. Holdings are read live from the catalog and dated; a shelf with nothing synced yet says so.

Languages on this desk (live doc-or-entry counts as of 7 November 2026): hbo 30,739 · gez 3,803 · eng 1,135 · syc 728 · cop 505 · arc 411 · chu 153 · lat 85 · ron-Cyrl 79 · oge 74 … and 8 more (nabu axis biblical lists all).

Carried in by multilingual packs (ud — whole-source members whose other languages ride along, as of 7 November 2026): orv 9 · ota 5 · lzh 4 · egy 3 · frm 3 … and 15 more (nabu axis biblical lists all).

The desk’s instruments

• Every alignment work at once. nt: SBLGNT (grc), the Vulgate (lat), WEB (eng), Coptic Scriptorium (Sahidic and Bohairic cop). ot and psalms: OSHB and BHSA (hbo Masoretic), the Sefaria Targum (arc), the Peshitta (syriac), the LXX and the Vulgate, WEB — psalms carries the LXX↔Masoretic renumbering.
• Dictionaries: the Hebrew lexicon (hebrew-lexicon) and the Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (sdbh).
• The contact facet: Coptic Scriptorium is the --loans shelf — search --loans grc keeps only passages carrying Greek loanwords.

Working the biblical desk

The generic desk surfaces — every desk answers to these, in working order (enable once, sync, then query):

nabu enable biblical               # first time: put this desk's shelves in this box's profile
nabu sync biblical                 # fetch/refresh the desk's enabled members
nabu list --axis biblical          # the shelf census, this desk only
nabu axis biblical                 # the desk card: members, holdings, gold coverage
nabu search WORD --axis biblical   # a query scoped to this desk's shelves

This desk’s own surfaces:

nabu align "MARK 2.3"                 # the New Testament verse across up to fifteen witnesses
nabu align "GEN 1.1"                  # Masoretic, LXX, Vulgate, WEB, Targum and Peshitta together
nabu align "PSA 22.1"                 # the Greek psalm number, remapped to the Masoretic witnesses
nabu search ⲛⲟⲩⲧⲉ --lang cop --loans grc  # Coptic passages that carry a Greek loanword
nabu cognates ot --langs hbo,syriac   # same-root verses, Hebrew against Syriac
nabu list coptic-scriptorium --loans  # the donor-language census of the loan tags

Ask your model

With the MCP server connected, this desk answers conversational research questions. Each example ran live against this library:

• “GEN 1.1 across all the versions at once.” → nabu_align "GEN 1.1" (work: ot) — Seven witnesses in one reply: LXX (Swete), Clementine Vulgate, both Masoretic texts (OSHB and BHSA), Targum Onkelos, the Peshitta, and the WEB English — every row carrying its own license class.

Terminal setup

• Hebrew and Aramaic (hbo/arc): nabu strips cantillation, keeps the points and maqaf, and wraps runs in RTL isolates. The terminal must do the bidi: iTerm2 ≥ 3.6.0 has an experimental RTL toggle (Settings → General → Experimental); Terminal.app has no bidi at all. Use Ezra SIL or SBL Hebrew in a dedicated iTerm2 profile (Ezra SIL at +4pt), or Noto Sans Mono in the non-ASCII slot at the ASCII size.
• Syriac (Peshitta): also RTL — the same iTerm2 toggle.
• Coptic: install font-noto-sans-coptic.
• On a bidi-less terminal, --display translit gives the most legible view (SBL-style LTR romanization via Nabu::Hebr).

The full guidance, per script, is on the display page.

One of the 30 research desks; the flat shelf map is The Library and the reasoning is docs/axes.md.