5 ms·

Show HN: Bible translated using LLMs from source Greek and Hebrew

55 points by epsteingpt 9mo ago

Built an auditable AI (Bible) translation pipeline: Hebrew/Greek source packets -> verse JSON with notes rolling up to chapters, books, and testaments. Final texts compiled with metrics (TTR, n-grams). This is the first full-text example as far as I know (Gen Z bible doesn't count). There are hallucinations and issues, but the overall quality surprised me. LLMs have a lot of promise translating and rendering 'accessible' more ancient texts. The technology has a lot of benefit for the faithful, that I think is only beginning to be explored.

mikemarsh 9mo ago
> The technology has a lot of benefit for the faithful Although written primarily for Orthodox Christians, there are valuable cautions here to consider regardless of your tradition: https://www.jordanville.org/artificialintelligence https://www.jordanville.org/artificialintelligence
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  100% agree, like any technology it's neither inherently good nor evil. In this instance, I think it has the opportunity to democratize deep religious study in ways that used to be reserved for serious scholars. e.g. Do you know what the word "daily" in the Lord's Prayer comes from? Questions like these can engage the mind and spirit. I hope more people use the tools to fully explore their faith, instead of outsourcing prayer and sermon creation to the LLMs.
  - bwestergard 9mo ago
    You say you "100% agree" with the essay, and then say that LLMs are "like any technology it's neither inherently good nor evil." Did you read the essay? It says: "Instead of being merely “agnostic” as many argue, digital technology has amplified the ability of the princes of this world to feed the fallen man, to make him more docile and distracted while installing beliefs, morals, and feelings that are acceptable to the secular spirit of this age. AI may be the final technology that is weaponized to create this new man before the Antichrist arrives, who will be the human manifestation of AI---an ever-helpful problem-solver who people mistakenly feel they cannot live without." Your position is diametrically opposed to this one.
    - epsteingpt 9mo ago
      I did read the essay. Thanks for the discussion! "Those who use AI must always remember that it is psychologically designed to keep you typing and asking. It targets your vulnerabilities to achieve this end without any spiritual concern for your soul. To the creators of AI, your addiction to their platforms is a metric of their success. Many have told us that AI chatbots give “good” spiritual answers that are “correct,” but as long as the underlying programming of the AI is to keep you directed onto itself, the behavior of AI is simply that of a false elder. A false elder may very well teach correctly and coat his words with a spiritual veneer, but ultimately, he wants you to focus more on himself than on Christ. Dealing with a false elder can cause a believer severe spiritual damage by distorting what should be a relationship with the divine to one of dependency with a person who seeks his own glory. Today, AI may share dogmatically correct spiritual answers, but its goal is not your salvation but for you to ceaselessly ask it more questions. The creators of AI want you to love their own creation, not the Lord Himself." This is true with any technology, and often, in many cases many human spiritual leader. My agreement is not to downplay the risk or natural 'amorality' of such a technology--it's clear with Grok e.g. AI can truly do evil. But LLM's are not internet porn or gambling. Just because the current version and incentives of technology are arranged in such a way doesn't mean you can't counteract it. The enemy will find and use new ways to enslave us - we can't reject progress because of that. So yes, I do 100% agree with the current mission and technology. But unlike the author, I personally believe the ultimate work of Christianity in humanity is to turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God, not to reject the sinners.
      - Onawa 9mo ago
        > I personally believe the ultimate work of Christianity in humanity is to turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God, not to reject the sinners. I'm Native American (indigenous, or whatever other moniker you've heard). Both of my paternal grandparents were subjected to the horror of boarding schools. So forgive me if I'm a bit cynical when it comes to the methods deemed appropriate by Christianity to "turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God." I would argue that instead of being a tool to try and convince more people that the Abrahamic god is the "right one", maybe think about using LLMs to challenge your own biases regarding religion and to question the myriad of moral and logical issues presented within your holy book. Just a suggestion from someone also looking at the idea of utilizing LLMs to preserve and explore indigenous language, culture, and wisdom without becoming a slave to the technology.
jqpabc123 9mo ago
What is the "expanse"? Answer: The sky. The ancient people who wrote the bible thought the sky was a solid dome that separated "the water's above" (aka rain) from the water's below. God lived on the other side of this dome. This is confirmed later in Genesis with the Tower of Babel story. They tried to reach this dome by building a tower. And "god" was so offended by their ignorance and stupidity (which he perpetrated) that he decided to punish them. The "faithful" obviously reject this simple interpretation in favor of something more obtuse and mystical.
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  Not here to have a religious debate - though given HN, it may turn into one! Imprecise language is a common human feature of a lack of understanding - something we all suffer from. We call LLM's "AI" without fully understanding what's artificial and what's intelligence. The story of faith is, in some ways, the story about how little we know about the universe. That doesn't mean there's no progress. If anything, it shows there is an end goal. The ancient narratives of Babel and Genesis reduce the incomprehensible (Creation, the Divine) into elements we as humans at that time could understand. How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?
  - jqpabc123 9mo ago
    How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine? There is nothing "divine" in the story to relate to. It is a collection of unscientific, erroneous myths and beliefs that were popular in the culture at the time it was written --- by men. The only reason any divinity can still be subscribed to it is that these basic facts have been somewhat obfuscated through translation. I truly appreciate the fact that they put this right up front in the book. Interpreted for what it is, it succinctly obviates the need for much further consideration or worry.
    - _justinfunk 9mo ago
      I think you would actually find biblical scholarship really interesting. It's way more fascinating than you give it credit for.
jtbayly 9mo ago
What is the difference between the "Adam" translations and the "Eve" translations? Where can I read about this more?
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  Different models only. Same process. There is and will be more details on process in future blog posts (blog is at the very bottom)
mcphage 9mo ago
Stuck with a "Loading..." message. Too much traffic, maybe?
- amitav1 9mo ago
  It was slow to load for me but loaded eventually.
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  The main page? It's a static site on cloudflare - the LLM calls are openrouter and are rate limited so that might be what's going on. If you have more details, we'll investigate.
  - mcphage 9mo ago
    The main page loads fine, but the main content pane just shows “BIBLEX Loading…”
    - epsteingpt 9mo ago
      Strange - loads fine for me. What browser / OS are you on?
      - mcphage 9mo ago
        I’ve tried it in safari on iOS and a Mac.
ubertaco 9mo ago
The Bible is too well-known a text that is too represented in training datasets for this _not_ to be skewed towards poorly reproducing existing translations. Beyond that, >there are hallucinations and issues seems like a deal-killer for a religious text. Yes, all translation by humans is an act of interpretation on some level, and so there's lossiness in all translation – but the difference between a human carefully weighing their reasoning for a particular choice of rendering vs. an LLM that is basically weighted dice that might land totally wrong is a categorically-different thing, not a question of degrees.
- LarsDu88 9mo ago
  This is definitely one area where the training set for the LLM is liable to be polluted by existing translations and even straight memorized english biblical text.
- snickerer 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
    Yes, to complain that a religious text has problems because it was hallucinated is pretty ironic.
- FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
  Weren't some pretty critical points of the Bible, Hallucinated originally? What's the problem?
- HanClinto 9mo ago
  Not to be too much of a devil's advocate (ha!), but I kindof think I _want_ it to have biblical translation data in the dataset. So long as it's not simply copying something like the KJV or ESV into the output, then this should be a good thing, right? Because much of what it produces (especially in the "poetic" mode) does seem to be very much "off the beaten path" for a good number of renditions. I don't think that the goal would be to have a dataset that is completely free from scholarship on the topic of Biblical translation, but rather to synthesize the rules and principles from the collected body of knowledge and apply it (with steering) to the entire Biblical text.
orasis 9mo ago
Is this translation public domain?
- TimorousBestie 9mo ago
  A complicated question. They assert copyright, but whether or not that would hold up in a court of law in any given jurisdiction is still largely an open question.
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  For the moment, no. But it will be in the next few months. There are lingering errors (hallucinations, notes) that need to be removed before it would be reasonable sharing and studying broadly. The other commenter has pointed out novel copyright issues, not that it's likely we'd go to court over this.
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
I would be really interested in this done to the Peshitta Bible, which is roughly as old as the Septuagint. Peshitta is in Aramaic a sister language to Hebrew. Over the years I've found interesting insights about verses that make way less sense in Greek but in Aramaic they make drastically more sense. It seems that somehow the Greek translated from some other source where in Aramaic or Hebrew the word used could have been one of two words, the Greek seemed to pick the worst possible representation in some cases that the Aramaic highlights. For example. It is easier for a Camel to go into the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into Heaven. If you read this, it makes it sound like Abraham cannot get into Heaven, wasn't he wealthy? Heck, there's others who were wealthy in scripture, even kings are they all doomed? In Aramaic the same word that in Greek is said to mean camel, can also mean rope. If you think about a rope going through the eye of a needle, and what it TAKES for a rope to go through the eye of a needle, aka removing all the threads or layers (humbling the person and forcing them to strip themselves down to their core) in order to make it through the eye of the needle. Or in other words, you must be willing to dethatch yourself from all your wealth. Remember the guy who asked Jesus was he must do to be saved and enter heaven, and walked away when Jesus told him to give away everything he owned to the poor? That is the same exact message. There's a few other verses, but that's the main one that always strikes me. Some of them are far more nuanced and I get into hours of debate with people who are ignoring everything I am saying (I don't know why, I try to lay it all out in the most simple way possible) as if I'm breaking the law, but its obvious to me that we don't have perfect copies of the Bible. I still think the overall message is the same though, so nothing wrong with that. It proves yet again that men are all fallible. Sorry for the tangent. I used to deep dive translations and their nuances, and the Aramaic based Bibles are very interesting. There's also an Aleh Tav Old Testament Bible which is fascinating to me. It adds the Aleph Tav anywhere it would be in the Hebrew into the English.
- anonymous344 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    I don't fully know, however, I will note that to my understanding, since Moses wrote the fist five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) if you will note... Moses came long after these events. I don't know what his source material was, but if it was word of mouth or other scrolls, its possible people in his time had access to those other scrolls which are now lost to time. If he felt that anyone could read the other scrolls for more information I could understand why there's not more information about these people. I have no idea why some people do what they do. I will say I am very jealous of the Amish because they don't have the stresses I have, or half of the issues I have. No money for gas? I don't think they need to worry or care about it. The other thing is, what does it really mean that he made a city? It could mean that he started an encampment elsewhere. we don't know how many other people God would have made during Adam / Cains time, I would imagine God would have made Cain a wife at some point.
gnerd00 9mo ago
these books are social in nature.. it takes agreement to make revisions. The agreement process is part of a spiritual path, in multiple ways. One translation by a machine is new but newness is exactly not the point of these works. Stability through generations and resolving open theological questions to some extent, are much more the point than newness. Also, pride and vanity are expressly discouraged. If this is a personal achievement somehow, its not very consistent with the core teachings. You ought to acknowledge your teachers, your spiritual community, their leaders and elders, and other inputs.. because without all of that you would not be able to complete a non-trivial work of scholarship. other ideas missing?
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  Agree. And if we could bring more faithful people into that agreement process, that's a good thing. As for the personal achievement, nothing really is a fully personal achievement in this (or really any) domain.
indigoabstract 9mo ago
I'm not sure how this is accomplished, but I like the "poetic" translation a lot more than the "optimal" one. Which reminds me, do you think it's possible that the stories in the Bible are actually mystic symbolism and "veiled truth" (like the sort of stories that you might get in a dream) and people have mistaken it for actual physical history (with which it's obviously incompatible)? The parables of Jesus come to mind. They weren't meant to be taken literally but to teach, to get a point across.
- deepsquirrelnet 9mo ago
  There are a great many views about this depending on who you talk to. In Christian circles, it’s essentially the infallibility vs inerrancy topic, with fundamentalist denominations leaning toward inerrancy (which is the view that original manuscripts have complete historical accuracy). Obviously, you have to take a strong “religion first” lens to everything about the world from there. But of course, there were ancient cultures that pre-date Judaism (and by extension Judeo-Christian sources), which share many similar stories but with different details and descriptions. Large scale flood myths and arks are common in history. You can read the Mesopotamian version in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is strikingly similar to Noah’s ark.
  - indigoabstract 9mo ago
    Yes, the main churches can only stick to the traditional interpretation. What else could they do? Anything else would be pretty much well, blasphemy. But I think my favourite interpretation that I've heard so far is that the stories in the Bible are like the protective husk that preserves the kernel of truth. The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit. I really like how that sounds like, but of course, there are probably not many others who see it in that light. Luckily for me, these days they don't burn heretics any more (at least where I live :)).
    - 9mo ago
onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago
Can we do the same - but get The Book of J?
vunderba 9mo ago
> but the overall quality surprised me. With all due respect, how are you in any position to be able to objectively evaluate the quality assuming you’re not fluent in Hebrew and Greek?
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  You read multiple English translations and you get your own sense of how biblical text can and is rendered. Admittedly it's an aesthetic judgment on certain verses.
  - vrighter 9mo ago
    so you need someone elso to actually do the real work, so you could build a system that would do a strictly inferior job of it? The bible was already translated well. The quality of your "work", by your own admission, depends on the "problem" at hand already having been solved and you having access to the solution. So it is literally ensloppifying an already existing better version. Why?
    - epsteingpt 9mo ago
      What's your concern? The goal is not ensloppifying the Bible. Quantitative textual analysis is currently painstakingly done, and still has issues (e.g. weighing phrases that mean different things in Aramaic than greek - e.g. the 'eye of the needle'). People have undertaken this work but it is expensive and slow. LLMs can do this. The bigger reason to do this is that the translation can stay 'up to date' in any language ('vernacular') much faster. There's a pretty big use case for that in my opinion.
victorbjorklund 9mo ago
There is 100% chance there are already translations in the dataset (including texts with Hebrew - English side by side etc).
- HanClinto 9mo ago
  I mean, I should hope so? I don't think the point is to create a completely "from scratch" translation -- this feels like a more practical exercise than academic. What's fascinating to me is the suitability of some of the renditions that have been made. I've done a little bit of spot-checking, but some of the renderings (especially in the poetic version) don't seem to be very common translations. Ideally this would be building off of established practice for translation, synthesizing existing human work, and applying those aggregated principles over the entire corpus. It doesn't seem to simply be going with the majority version.
golemiprague 9mo ago
How was the tranlation for the chapters in Aramaic, like in Daniel?
TimorousBestie 9mo ago
Seems heretical.
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  Say more - why?
yayitswei 9mo ago
What's up with these? Genesis 1:13, Eve optimal Replace 'Then' with 'And' in optimal ('And the LORD God said') and poetic_daily to preserve narrative vav-consecutive connective consistently.
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  Thanks for noticing. The blog has more detail; these are first iterations and the verse and editorial notes sometimes slip in :-( Side project, big book. Those will get ironed out soon.
romperstomper 9mo ago
LLMs initial purpose is translation from one language to another, nothing surprising they are good in that.
HanClinto 9mo ago
One Bible translation that I really appreciate is the NET Bible [0] -- in particular, I appreciate its translator's notes. It can be very helpful to read the translator's notes and to understand the reasoning that went into any particular rendition. I.E., something like "The disjunctive clause (conjunction + subject + verb) at the beginning of v. 2 gives background information for the following narrative, explaining the state of things when “God said…” (v. 3)..." Did you use a reasoning model to translate these verses? If so, I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown that the LLM used that went into each verse. I understand that such breakdowns can be hallucinated at many levels also (and final output does not always correspond with the reasoning flow), but I (personally) would find this helpful. [0] https://bible.org/sites/bible.org/resources/netbible/ https://bible.org/sites/bible.org/resources/netbible/
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  Yes agree on translation. The story of arriving at a word is usually more interesting than the word itself. In an ideal world we could ingest the full study Bible's notes. My guess is much of the NET-level (or other study bible) scholarship is part of the base model corpus. Here's a deeper view into the verse process. We did use a reasoning model. { "reference": "Genesis.1.1", "optimal": "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.", "poetic_daily": "At the dawn of all things, God shaped sky and soil into being.", "footnotes": [ { "anchor": "God", "note": "Hebrew אֱלֹהִים (Elohim); plural in form but singular in meaning when referring to Israel’s God." } ], "controversies": [], "connectives_check": [ { "source": "וְ", "rendered": "and", "status": "kept" } ], "consistency_flags": [], "scholars": [ { "name": "Thomas Schreiner", "one_sentence_view": "Emphasizes the verse as the absolute beginning of creation, affirming God's sovereign initiative." }, { "name": "Walter Brueggemann", "one_sentence_view": "Sees the verse as a theological overture introducing God’s ordering power over chaos." }, { "name": "Eugene H. Peterson", "one_sentence_view": "Views the line as the opening note of a grand narrative, inviting readers into God’s creative story." } ], "lexeme_refs": [ { "anchor": "God", "lang": "he", "lemma_id": "430", "note": "אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) chosen per rule preference; conveys the singular Creator without plural nuance." }, { "anchor": "and", "lang": "he", "lemma_id": "c/853", "note": "Connective וְ/ marks coordination between 'the heavens' and 'the earth'; retained explicitly." } ], "review": {} }
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jandrusk 9mo ago
Which set of NT Greek manuscripts is it using? Textus Teceptus? Byzantine? Critical Text?
- epsteingpt 9mo ago
  https://github.com/byztxt/greektext-westcott-hort https://github.com/byztxt/greektext-westcott-hort
  - ofrzeta 9mo ago
    This representation has no diacritics. Is this not a problem?
    - epsteingpt 9mo ago
      Diacritics weren't in the original texts
nashashmi 9mo ago
I heard or read that the LLM translation system is trained upon Bible translations because the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other book.
- gnerd00 9mo ago
  this is an important question. I am not a specialist in this area. I believe what you say was true before the invention of the Transformer ML architecture around 2015. I believe that among practitioners close to the Transformer effort, they passed around "The Common Crawl" because it was standard and basically one file chunk. I suspect that Bible material was just one part of CommonCrawl. more info welcome
cmxch 9mo ago
Nice, but some things do require an informed human touch to really get right.

55 points by epsteingpt 9mo ago

mikemarsh 9mo ago

> The technology has a lot of benefit for the faithful Although written primarily for Orthodox Christians, there are valuable cautions here to consider regardless of your tradition: https://www.jordanville.org/artificialintelligence https://www.jordanville.org/artificialintelligence

epsteingpt 9mo ago
100% agree, like any technology it's neither inherently good nor evil. In this instance, I think it has the opportunity to democratize deep religious study in ways that used to be reserved for serious scholars. e.g. Do you know what the word "daily" in the Lord's Prayer comes from? Questions like these can engage the mind and spirit. I hope more people use the tools to fully explore their faith, instead of outsourcing prayer and sermon creation to the LLMs.
- bwestergard 9mo ago
  You say you "100% agree" with the essay, and then say that LLMs are "like any technology it's neither inherently good nor evil." Did you read the essay? It says: "Instead of being merely “agnostic” as many argue, digital technology has amplified the ability of the princes of this world to feed the fallen man, to make him more docile and distracted while installing beliefs, morals, and feelings that are acceptable to the secular spirit of this age. AI may be the final technology that is weaponized to create this new man before the Antichrist arrives, who will be the human manifestation of AI---an ever-helpful problem-solver who people mistakenly feel they cannot live without." Your position is diametrically opposed to this one.
  - epsteingpt 9mo ago
    I did read the essay. Thanks for the discussion! "Those who use AI must always remember that it is psychologically designed to keep you typing and asking. It targets your vulnerabilities to achieve this end without any spiritual concern for your soul. To the creators of AI, your addiction to their platforms is a metric of their success. Many have told us that AI chatbots give “good” spiritual answers that are “correct,” but as long as the underlying programming of the AI is to keep you directed onto itself, the behavior of AI is simply that of a false elder. A false elder may very well teach correctly and coat his words with a spiritual veneer, but ultimately, he wants you to focus more on himself than on Christ. Dealing with a false elder can cause a believer severe spiritual damage by distorting what should be a relationship with the divine to one of dependency with a person who seeks his own glory. Today, AI may share dogmatically correct spiritual answers, but its goal is not your salvation but for you to ceaselessly ask it more questions. The creators of AI want you to love their own creation, not the Lord Himself." This is true with any technology, and often, in many cases many human spiritual leader. My agreement is not to downplay the risk or natural 'amorality' of such a technology--it's clear with Grok e.g. AI can truly do evil. But LLM's are not internet porn or gambling. Just because the current version and incentives of technology are arranged in such a way doesn't mean you can't counteract it. The enemy will find and use new ways to enslave us - we can't reject progress because of that. So yes, I do 100% agree with the current mission and technology. But unlike the author, I personally believe the ultimate work of Christianity in humanity is to turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God, not to reject the sinners.
    - Onawa 9mo ago
      > I personally believe the ultimate work of Christianity in humanity is to turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God, not to reject the sinners. I'm Native American (indigenous, or whatever other moniker you've heard). Both of my paternal grandparents were subjected to the horror of boarding schools. So forgive me if I'm a bit cynical when it comes to the methods deemed appropriate by Christianity to "turn us all to repentance and bring us closer to God." I would argue that instead of being a tool to try and convince more people that the Abrahamic god is the "right one", maybe think about using LLMs to challenge your own biases regarding religion and to question the myriad of moral and logical issues presented within your holy book. Just a suggestion from someone also looking at the idea of utilizing LLMs to preserve and explore indigenous language, culture, and wisdom without becoming a slave to the technology.

jqpabc123 9mo ago

What is the "expanse"? Answer: The sky. The ancient people who wrote the bible thought the sky was a solid dome that separated "the water's above" (aka rain) from the water's below. God lived on the other side of this dome. This is confirmed later in Genesis with the Tower of Babel story. They tried to reach this dome by building a tower. And "god" was so offended by their ignorance and stupidity (which he perpetrated) that he decided to punish them. The "faithful" obviously reject this simple interpretation in favor of something more obtuse and mystical.

epsteingpt 9mo ago
Not here to have a religious debate - though given HN, it may turn into one! Imprecise language is a common human feature of a lack of understanding - something we all suffer from. We call LLM's "AI" without fully understanding what's artificial and what's intelligence. The story of faith is, in some ways, the story about how little we know about the universe. That doesn't mean there's no progress. If anything, it shows there is an end goal. The ancient narratives of Babel and Genesis reduce the incomprehensible (Creation, the Divine) into elements we as humans at that time could understand. How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?
- jqpabc123 9mo ago
  How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine? There is nothing "divine" in the story to relate to. It is a collection of unscientific, erroneous myths and beliefs that were popular in the culture at the time it was written --- by men. The only reason any divinity can still be subscribed to it is that these basic facts have been somewhat obfuscated through translation. I truly appreciate the fact that they put this right up front in the book. Interpreted for what it is, it succinctly obviates the need for much further consideration or worry.
  - _justinfunk 9mo ago
    I think you would actually find biblical scholarship really interesting. It's way more fascinating than you give it credit for.

jtbayly 9mo ago

What is the difference between the "Adam" translations and the "Eve" translations? Where can I read about this more?

epsteingpt 9mo ago
Different models only. Same process. There is and will be more details on process in future blog posts (blog is at the very bottom)

mcphage 9mo ago

Stuck with a "Loading..." message. Too much traffic, maybe?

amitav1 9mo ago
It was slow to load for me but loaded eventually.
epsteingpt 9mo ago
The main page? It's a static site on cloudflare - the LLM calls are openrouter and are rate limited so that might be what's going on. If you have more details, we'll investigate.
- mcphage 9mo ago
  The main page loads fine, but the main content pane just shows “BIBLEX Loading…”
  - epsteingpt 9mo ago
    Strange - loads fine for me. What browser / OS are you on?
    - mcphage 9mo ago
      I’ve tried it in safari on iOS and a Mac.

ubertaco 9mo ago

The Bible is too well-known a text that is too represented in training datasets for this _not_ to be skewed towards poorly reproducing existing translations. Beyond that, >there are hallucinations and issues seems like a deal-killer for a religious text. Yes, all translation by humans is an act of interpretation on some level, and so there's lossiness in all translation – but the difference between a human carefully weighing their reasoning for a particular choice of rendering vs. an LLM that is basically weighted dice that might land totally wrong is a categorically-different thing, not a question of degrees.

LarsDu88 9mo ago
This is definitely one area where the training set for the LLM is liable to be polluted by existing translations and even straight memorized english biblical text.
snickerer 9mo ago
[flagged]
- FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
  Yes, to complain that a religious text has problems because it was hallucinated is pretty ironic.
FrustratedMonky 9mo ago
Weren't some pretty critical points of the Bible, Hallucinated originally? What's the problem?
HanClinto 9mo ago
Not to be too much of a devil's advocate (ha!), but I kindof think I _want_ it to have biblical translation data in the dataset. So long as it's not simply copying something like the KJV or ESV into the output, then this should be a good thing, right? Because much of what it produces (especially in the "poetic" mode) does seem to be very much "off the beaten path" for a good number of renditions. I don't think that the goal would be to have a dataset that is completely free from scholarship on the topic of Biblical translation, but rather to synthesize the rules and principles from the collected body of knowledge and apply it (with steering) to the entire Biblical text.

orasis 9mo ago

Is this translation public domain?

TimorousBestie 9mo ago
A complicated question. They assert copyright, but whether or not that would hold up in a court of law in any given jurisdiction is still largely an open question.
epsteingpt 9mo ago
For the moment, no. But it will be in the next few months. There are lingering errors (hallucinations, notes) that need to be removed before it would be reasonable sharing and studying broadly. The other commenter has pointed out novel copyright issues, not that it's likely we'd go to court over this.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

I would be really interested in this done to the Peshitta Bible, which is roughly as old as the Septuagint. Peshitta is in Aramaic a sister language to Hebrew. Over the years I've found interesting insights about verses that make way less sense in Greek but in Aramaic they make drastically more sense. It seems that somehow the Greek translated from some other source where in Aramaic or Hebrew the word used could have been one of two words, the Greek seemed to pick the worst possible representation in some cases that the Aramaic highlights. For example. It is easier for a Camel to go into the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into Heaven. If you read this, it makes it sound like Abraham cannot get into Heaven, wasn't he wealthy? Heck, there's others who were wealthy in scripture, even kings are they all doomed? In Aramaic the same word that in Greek is said to mean camel, can also mean rope. If you think about a rope going through the eye of a needle, and what it TAKES for a rope to go through the eye of a needle, aka removing all the threads or layers (humbling the person and forcing them to strip themselves down to their core) in order to make it through the eye of the needle. Or in other words, you must be willing to dethatch yourself from all your wealth. Remember the guy who asked Jesus was he must do to be saved and enter heaven, and walked away when Jesus told him to give away everything he owned to the poor? That is the same exact message. There's a few other verses, but that's the main one that always strikes me. Some of them are far more nuanced and I get into hours of debate with people who are ignoring everything I am saying (I don't know why, I try to lay it all out in the most simple way possible) as if I'm breaking the law, but its obvious to me that we don't have perfect copies of the Bible. I still think the overall message is the same though, so nothing wrong with that. It proves yet again that men are all fallible. Sorry for the tangent. I used to deep dive translations and their nuances, and the Aramaic based Bibles are very interesting. There's also an Aleh Tav Old Testament Bible which is fascinating to me. It adds the Aleph Tav anywhere it would be in the Hebrew into the English.

anonymous344 9mo ago
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- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  I don't fully know, however, I will note that to my understanding, since Moses wrote the fist five books (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) if you will note... Moses came long after these events. I don't know what his source material was, but if it was word of mouth or other scrolls, its possible people in his time had access to those other scrolls which are now lost to time. If he felt that anyone could read the other scrolls for more information I could understand why there's not more information about these people. I have no idea why some people do what they do. I will say I am very jealous of the Amish because they don't have the stresses I have, or half of the issues I have. No money for gas? I don't think they need to worry or care about it. The other thing is, what does it really mean that he made a city? It could mean that he started an encampment elsewhere. we don't know how many other people God would have made during Adam / Cains time, I would imagine God would have made Cain a wife at some point.

gnerd00 9mo ago

these books are social in nature.. it takes agreement to make revisions. The agreement process is part of a spiritual path, in multiple ways. One translation by a machine is new but newness is exactly not the point of these works. Stability through generations and resolving open theological questions to some extent, are much more the point than newness. Also, pride and vanity are expressly discouraged. If this is a personal achievement somehow, its not very consistent with the core teachings. You ought to acknowledge your teachers, your spiritual community, their leaders and elders, and other inputs.. because without all of that you would not be able to complete a non-trivial work of scholarship. other ideas missing?

epsteingpt 9mo ago
Agree. And if we could bring more faithful people into that agreement process, that's a good thing. As for the personal achievement, nothing really is a fully personal achievement in this (or really any) domain.

indigoabstract 9mo ago

I'm not sure how this is accomplished, but I like the "poetic" translation a lot more than the "optimal" one. Which reminds me, do you think it's possible that the stories in the Bible are actually mystic symbolism and "veiled truth" (like the sort of stories that you might get in a dream) and people have mistaken it for actual physical history (with which it's obviously incompatible)? The parables of Jesus come to mind. They weren't meant to be taken literally but to teach, to get a point across.

deepsquirrelnet 9mo ago
There are a great many views about this depending on who you talk to. In Christian circles, it’s essentially the infallibility vs inerrancy topic, with fundamentalist denominations leaning toward inerrancy (which is the view that original manuscripts have complete historical accuracy). Obviously, you have to take a strong “religion first” lens to everything about the world from there. But of course, there were ancient cultures that pre-date Judaism (and by extension Judeo-Christian sources), which share many similar stories but with different details and descriptions. Large scale flood myths and arks are common in history. You can read the Mesopotamian version in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is strikingly similar to Noah’s ark.
- indigoabstract 9mo ago
  Yes, the main churches can only stick to the traditional interpretation. What else could they do? Anything else would be pretty much well, blasphemy. But I think my favourite interpretation that I've heard so far is that the stories in the Bible are like the protective husk that preserves the kernel of truth. The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit. I really like how that sounds like, but of course, there are probably not many others who see it in that light. Luckily for me, these days they don't burn heretics any more (at least where I live :)).
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onlyrealcuzzo 9mo ago

Can we do the same - but get The Book of J?

vunderba 9mo ago

> but the overall quality surprised me. With all due respect, how are you in any position to be able to objectively evaluate the quality assuming you’re not fluent in Hebrew and Greek?

epsteingpt 9mo ago
You read multiple English translations and you get your own sense of how biblical text can and is rendered. Admittedly it's an aesthetic judgment on certain verses.
- vrighter 9mo ago
  so you need someone elso to actually do the real work, so you could build a system that would do a strictly inferior job of it? The bible was already translated well. The quality of your "work", by your own admission, depends on the "problem" at hand already having been solved and you having access to the solution. So it is literally ensloppifying an already existing better version. Why?
  - epsteingpt 9mo ago
    What's your concern? The goal is not ensloppifying the Bible. Quantitative textual analysis is currently painstakingly done, and still has issues (e.g. weighing phrases that mean different things in Aramaic than greek - e.g. the 'eye of the needle'). People have undertaken this work but it is expensive and slow. LLMs can do this. The bigger reason to do this is that the translation can stay 'up to date' in any language ('vernacular') much faster. There's a pretty big use case for that in my opinion.

victorbjorklund 9mo ago

There is 100% chance there are already translations in the dataset (including texts with Hebrew - English side by side etc).

HanClinto 9mo ago
I mean, I should hope so? I don't think the point is to create a completely "from scratch" translation -- this feels like a more practical exercise than academic. What's fascinating to me is the suitability of some of the renditions that have been made. I've done a little bit of spot-checking, but some of the renderings (especially in the poetic version) don't seem to be very common translations. Ideally this would be building off of established practice for translation, synthesizing existing human work, and applying those aggregated principles over the entire corpus. It doesn't seem to simply be going with the majority version.

golemiprague 9mo ago

How was the tranlation for the chapters in Aramaic, like in Daniel?

TimorousBestie 9mo ago

Seems heretical.

epsteingpt 9mo ago
Say more - why?

yayitswei 9mo ago

What's up with these? Genesis 1:13, Eve optimal Replace 'Then' with 'And' in optimal ('And the LORD God said') and poetic_daily to preserve narrative vav-consecutive connective consistently.

epsteingpt 9mo ago
Thanks for noticing. The blog has more detail; these are first iterations and the verse and editorial notes sometimes slip in :-( Side project, big book. Those will get ironed out soon.

romperstomper 9mo ago

LLMs initial purpose is translation from one language to another, nothing surprising they are good in that.

HanClinto 9mo ago

One Bible translation that I really appreciate is the NET Bible [0] -- in particular, I appreciate its translator's notes. It can be very helpful to read the translator's notes and to understand the reasoning that went into any particular rendition. I.E., something like "The disjunctive clause (conjunction + subject + verb) at the beginning of v. 2 gives background information for the following narrative, explaining the state of things when “God said…” (v. 3)..." Did you use a reasoning model to translate these verses? If so, I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown that the LLM used that went into each verse. I understand that such breakdowns can be hallucinated at many levels also (and final output does not always correspond with the reasoning flow), but I (personally) would find this helpful. [0] https://bible.org/sites/bible.org/resources/netbible/ https://bible.org/sites/bible.org/resources/netbible/

epsteingpt 9mo ago
Yes agree on translation. The story of arriving at a word is usually more interesting than the word itself. In an ideal world we could ingest the full study Bible's notes. My guess is much of the NET-level (or other study bible) scholarship is part of the base model corpus. Here's a deeper view into the verse process. We did use a reasoning model. { "reference": "Genesis.1.1", "optimal": "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.", "poetic_daily": "At the dawn of all things, God shaped sky and soil into being.", "footnotes": [ { "anchor": "God", "note": "Hebrew אֱלֹהִים (Elohim); plural in form but singular in meaning when referring to Israel’s God." } ], "controversies": [], "connectives_check": [ { "source": "וְ", "rendered": "and", "status": "kept" } ], "consistency_flags": [], "scholars": [ { "name": "Thomas Schreiner", "one_sentence_view": "Emphasizes the verse as the absolute beginning of creation, affirming God's sovereign initiative." }, { "name": "Walter Brueggemann", "one_sentence_view": "Sees the verse as a theological overture introducing God’s ordering power over chaos." }, { "name": "Eugene H. Peterson", "one_sentence_view": "Views the line as the opening note of a grand narrative, inviting readers into God’s creative story." } ], "lexeme_refs": [ { "anchor": "God", "lang": "he", "lemma_id": "430", "note": "אֱלֹהִים (Elohim) chosen per rule preference; conveys the singular Creator without plural nuance." }, { "anchor": "and", "lang": "he", "lemma_id": "c/853", "note": "Connective וְ/ marks coordination between 'the heavens' and 'the earth'; retained explicitly." } ], "review": {} }

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jandrusk 9mo ago

Which set of NT Greek manuscripts is it using? Textus Teceptus? Byzantine? Critical Text?

epsteingpt 9mo ago
https://github.com/byztxt/greektext-westcott-hort https://github.com/byztxt/greektext-westcott-hort
- ofrzeta 9mo ago
  This representation has no diacritics. Is this not a problem?
  - epsteingpt 9mo ago
    Diacritics weren't in the original texts

nashashmi 9mo ago

I heard or read that the LLM translation system is trained upon Bible translations because the Bible has been translated into more languages than any other book.

gnerd00 9mo ago
this is an important question. I am not a specialist in this area. I believe what you say was true before the invention of the Transformer ML architecture around 2015. I believe that among practitioners close to the Transformer effort, they passed around "The Common Crawl" because it was standard and basically one file chunk. I suspect that Bible material was just one part of CommonCrawl. more info welcome

cmxch 9mo ago

Nice, but some things do require an informed human touch to really get right.