Bible Study in Obsidian Kit (including the Bible in Markdown)

Joschua · February 6, 2021, 9:00am

This starter kit is designed to get you hands on with using Scripture in a connected way in your personal notes. It comes with the Bible in markdown, formatted to get you engaging with Scripture straight away.

NEW: Try out the kit on Obsidian Publish.

Download the Bible Study in Obsidian Kit (2.0 MB)

Version 2 includes:

The Bible in Markdown and a script to download other translation (also on github)
Benefits on practicing connected Biblical thinking in your vault
Getting started connecting Scripture
Inspiration for personal application with practical examples
Turning connected thinking into a discipleship tool

Sneak peak

Support

Wishing to reflect God’s grace, all resources are free without any obligation. When gratitude for God’s Word moves you to give, you can do so on Patreon or by buying me a coffee.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to @j.split, karlpalmer, @Lithou, @Mike and @nickmilo for their willingness to provide feedback. It made this kit a much better one.
A huge thank you also to all supporters on patreon.

I am looking forward to hearing thoughts and use cases below!

Liong1976 · February 6, 2021, 2:51pm

This is great!
Thanks for making this for free.
I was wondering how to replace the Bible translation with another one that I prefer to?
Is it challenging for someone like me who knows nothing about programming to do that?

Joschua · February 6, 2021, 5:54pm

Hey @Liong1976, you can find a program to do this on github. There I also provided detailed instructions to make it as easy as possible for people who aren’t familiar with programming.

Follow the steps and let me know if you need help!

Kuncy · February 6, 2021, 8:38pm

This is good! I’ve been on the look out for something similar for a longwhile, and I’m so glad I found it. I hope to transform this vault into something which resembles this, as I get on with the different books!
Thank You!

Liong1976 · February 6, 2021, 9:09pm

Great, thanks a lot for your kindly help and offer.

Liong1976 · February 6, 2021, 9:31pm

Hi selfire,

I have read the information on github.

I have several questions.

I am using Windows instead of Mac. Do I need to install Ruby? If so, is this the correct link to install it?
I do not know how to use the commands in Terminal that stated in the gitbhub (in my case is Command Prompt) like pwd, ls, cd, and cd . . to navigate to the folder in which the scripts are located
How to run bash bg2obs.sh. just copy and paste the code in my folder in the Command Prompt?

Many thanks in advance

Bhume · February 6, 2021, 10:42pm

This is great. Thank you so much for it!

Liong1976 · February 7, 2021, 4:24am

Hi, selfire
I had run the script and didn’t work. The scripture folder was empty
FYI, I haven’t downloaded the Ruby
Thanks.

Joschua · February 7, 2021, 6:44am

Hey @Kuncy, glad it’s of help! I’d love to have all of the crossreferences linked as well at some point to create a graph view similar to the picture.

Pleasure, glad it’s helpful!

I can’t be of much help for Windows since I am on MacOS but I can point you towards some links. You will need to install both bash and ruby, two programming languages that come with MacOS but not Windows. Luckily, it seems fairly straightforward.

Once you habe installed bash, you can type in pwd to show you the current folder your command line is in, then navigate into folders like this cd Desktop and once you are in the folder run this command: bash bg2obs.sh. Make sure both bg2obs.sh and bg2md.rb are in the same folder.

Liong1976 · February 7, 2021, 1:58pm

Thanks for the links.

I’ll check them out.

jjude · February 8, 2021, 5:12am

Hey @Joschua, thank you for this enormous work and making it free. May God bless you for this. I downloaded and have been playing with this over the weekend. I also loved your “split thinking” notes. Initially when I downloaded it, I was thinking of creating a separate vault, after reading “split thinking” note, I decided to keep everything in a single vault.

Great work and keep being awesome.

Joschua · February 8, 2021, 6:02am

Hey @jjude, happy to hear it’s been helpful for you.

That makes me so glad to hear. Awesome that it’s been insightful. Be blessed and keep on connecting!

mikeschmitz · February 8, 2021, 4:17pm

@Joschua do you have a version of this that splits the text into individual verses per chance? Kind of stuck with Obsidian’s inability to see block references. Ideally, I’d like to be able to embed verse references on my personal study notes pages (which are organized by date) and see the other notes I’ve taken that link to that specific verse (i.e. [[John 3:16]]).

Joschua · February 8, 2021, 7:38pm

A version of this doesn’t exist (yet). It would take me a bit of time and tinkering to create something that would accomplish this. Currently, I’m focusing on other things but that might change in some weeks. Meanwhile, I created a feature request to sort header links by order in backlinks panel which might solve some of your problems, if I understood them correctly.

As a workaround, embedding the verse works well, the only issue is that you have to comb through all of your backlinks to each verse in the chapter:

mikeschmitz · February 8, 2021, 8:01pm

Yeah, that’s the problem… I can get to the Genesis 1 page from the sermon notes page for a specific date, but once I’m there, there is no way to go to the other sermon notes pages that reference the same verse easily. In ~3 years of taking notes, I would have 100s of links to scroll through for the Linked Mentions on a Bible chapter page.

phlind · February 9, 2021, 6:24pm

Thanks for this great kit! Do you have some special css snippet to make the verse numbers appear on the side like in your screenshot? @Joschua

ChrisLi · February 9, 2021, 9:05pm

Thanks a lot for sharing you’re experience and thoughts with us @Joschua.

@jjude, you wrote, that you played over a weekend with the tool. I smiled and thought that the Bible Study in Obsidian Kit isn’t that voluminous. I was mistaken and will enjoy this Kit the next few evenings

@phlind you can copy the css snippet from here: CSS Snippet
In combination with the Minimal Theme in Obsidian it’s beautiful to read.

joebuhlig · February 9, 2021, 9:49pm

Mike decided to get me involved.

I did some work on this in a fork, @Joschua. You likely don’t want to pull it in directly but I made some adjustments for my own purposes.

Instead of relying on the installation of the BG to MD dependency, I installed it as a submodule and then referenced the .rb executable directly in your script.
I removed a lot of the "00 - " numbering and such in your script so that it was cleaner on the output side.
I added a script versesplit.sh that can be run on a version directory and it will split out the chapter markdown files into individual verse markdown files.
I added another script masterfiles.sh that when run will create a file in each book and chapter folder that contains links to the downstream files. So Genesis.md has links to all the chapters. Genesis 1.md has links to all the verses. That way there’s a link between it all.
I then added a final script to add the sorting numbers back to the book folders for sorting them correctly.
Last note, the verse files take on the format Genesis 1.1.md. Colons are no fun in filenames.
Oh! I also changed the root folder name to be just the version text. In my scripts, I have ESV in there. So to use them on a different version, you’ll need to change that bit or alter it to use a variable passed into the script.

Enjoy!

Joschua · February 10, 2021, 5:21am

Thanks @ChrisLi for sharing the link before I could You can also find the CSS snippet in the Bible Kit if you search for “Tweaks, Queries and Plugins”.

Wow, love all of the adjustments and I am happy there is a way to get each verse as a note. When it comes to installing the BG to MD dependency as a submodule, just be aware that the content that is scraped from BibleGateway often changes and the author of the bg2md script updates is frequently accordingly. So if some ugly html rendering comes through, just pull the script again.

It’s amazing what you can do just with a simple bash script Thanks for sharing!

joebuhlig · February 10, 2021, 2:09pm

Makes sense. It would just be a matter of running the update submodule command each time. But that would also mean that you could control when it’s updated or not.

So true! I have so many one-off scripts like this. I don’t normally share them, but this time it seemed appropriate.