Jewish Bible Stories is a collection of full-length retellings of narratives and parables from the Hebrew Bible. Each one is written to be read the way you would read a short story — in a single sitting, by lamplight or on a train — not studied with a concordance open beside it. The aim is simple: to put you inside the scene and keep you there until the last sentence.
Who it is for
For anyone who wants to meet these stories as stories. You do not need Hebrew, a religious background, or any prior familiarity. A lifelong reader of scripture and someone encountering Hagar in the wilderness or Ruth on the threshing-floor for the first time should both find a way in. We assume curiosity and an evening's attention, nothing more.
How a story is chosen
The collection follows the calendar rather than picking at random. The Hebrew Bible is read on a weekly cycle — the parashat hashavua, the portion read on the coming Sabbath — and a new story is published every day, drawn from the portion belonging to that week. From within that week's reading we take one self-contained episode: a scene with a person, a turn, and a moment of revelation. When a week's Torah portion is law, census, or genealogy with no scene to inhabit, the story is drawn instead from that week's paired reading from the Prophets (the Haftarah). Over a year, the stories move through the year's readings.
Our source
Every story is grounded in one fixed translation: the 1917 Jewish Publication Society English text, The Holy Scriptures: A New Translation, as published by Sefaria. We use a single edition deliberately. Its measured, older cadence sets the register the retellings answer to, and holding to one version keeps the voice steady from one story to the next rather than shifting with each book. The precise verses behind each story are cited on its page, alongside the week's portion and its date in the Hebrew calendar.
How a story is written
The retelling is bound to the cited verses. Names, places, relationships, and the order of events follow the text; nothing that happens is invented or rearranged. What is added is the texture a witness would have seen and not recorded — the heat, the dust, the weight of a thing in the hand, the silence before someone speaks. Where the text is silent, the silence is left to be felt rather than explained. There is no sermon, no moral appended, no stepping outside the scene to tell you what it means. The drafting is assisted by a language model working only from the supplied verses and the standard above; the result is checked against that source before it is published.
Reading it your way
The controls in the corner let you change how the page reads. There are three palettes — parchment, sepia, and a dark night mode — and the text can be made larger or smaller. Your choices are remembered in your own browser between visits; nothing about your reading is sent anywhere or tracked. New stories are also available as an RSS feed. Every story is a plain page at its own address, with the full text in the page itself — readable without scripts, and on any device.
A note on fidelity
These are retellings, not translations or scripture. They are faithful to what the text reports, but they are literary works, and the interior life and sensory detail are the writer's. If a line moves you to go back to the source, follow the citation — that is the better book.