Burning the Word, digitally


I have been following a one year bible reading plan since January and have found it really helpful to have the scriptures read to me before I read them myself. While there are some great audio bibles available for sale, there are a number of freely downloadable audio bible in MP3 format.

The first place to check out is AudioTreasure where there are two different King James versions, a recording of the World English Bible and a number of non-English recordings. The files a fully downloadable for playing or burning to CD.

Another great source for audio bibles is BibleGateway audio resources with six different English translations available and a number of non-English recordings. BibleGateway is setup to let you listen individual chapters on-line or the case of some stream the Old or New Testaments. While realtime streaming is nice, a clever shell script with a few programs like curl and mplayer should be able to grab the SMIL stream definition file, grab the streams one at a time and transcode them to MP3 format. But, I’ll leave that for another time.

I keep copies of the MP3 on my laptop and usually burn a CD of the book I’m currently reading for listen in the car. There is something about hearing the Word and reading it that works better for me than just one or the other. Maybe it has to do with how we process written and spoken language differently so doing both exercises different parts of the brain.


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *