About TrulyRandomVerse

Why This Exists

Most of what we read in a day has been picked for us — by a feed, by a schedule, or by our own habits, which tend to bring us back to the same familiar chapters. This site picks at random instead, from the whole Bible, so a verse you would never have turned to comes up as readily as one you already know.

Scripture records God's people seeking Him this way at decisive moments. The high priest carried the Urim and Thummim over his heart for inquiring of the LORD (Exodus 28:30). The land was divided by lot. The apostles filled Judas's place by lot (Acts 1:26), after prayer, because the lot leaves the choosing out of human hands. The draw here rests on the same conviction, and it is uniform across all 31,102 verses, so what's left is the verse, you, and the Holy Spirit. What the site is built on is the hope that at any given moment, one of those verses may matter more to your life than whatever else would have been put in front of you. Often, for me, it's the sequence that speaks: which verse comes up after which, and when it arrives — the timing as much as the verse itself.

This is not a new practice. Since 1731 the Moravian church at Herrnhut has drawn its daily watchword by lot from a bowl of verses, the longest-running daily devotional in the world. The same practice runs here, with each draw written down so you can check it in the Randomness Archive. And once a verse has come up, there are the Bereans, who "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so" (Acts 17:11). The study tools here are for doing the same with whatever you're given.

Who Builds This

My name is Faisal Alsarraf. I built the first version of this site in early 2024, during a difficult time, for myself and a few people in my circle. I wanted a way to read the Bible without a feed or a recommendation in between, and without my own habits steering me back to the same chapters. I shared it, and it grew into what you see now.

I'm a private person, so there isn't much of me on the site. It's meant to be about the verse and the reader, and I still use it the way it was built to be used.

The site is built by one person directing AI. In the early years that meant fragments of code pasted into chat windows and whole pages regenerated in one pass. Today the AI works inside the whole codebase under my direction, and every change is reviewed and tested against the real data. How the AI is kept to its sources is described further down.

What You Can Do Here

Want to see how it all fits together? Learn how to use TrulyRandomVerse

Under the Hood

The draw uses a Cryptographically Secure Pseudo-Random Number Generator (CSPRNG), the same class of algorithm used in banking and encryption, so every verse has an equal probability of coming up. Daily integrity reports go into the Randomness Archive if you'd like to check.

The AI is given its data before it writes anything — the KJV text, Hebrew and Greek Strong's definitions, and established cross-references — and asked to work from that rather than from memory. Where interpretations differ, the summaries reflect what is widely attested rather than one denomination's reading.

The commentary comes to more than 70 million words in total, a study guide for every verse in the Bible, averaging about 2,300 words each. That much is only possible because a machine wrote it against fixed data, and it's meant to sit beside the text as a reference rather than take its place.

By The Numbers

Credits & Sources

Much of what makes this site useful was compiled by other people, and in some cases over lifetimes. Where their work is here, it is named.

• Theographic Bible Metadata — the knowledge graph behind the people, places and topics on this site: who appears where, how they are related, and where on a map a place actually sits. Compiled by Robert Rouse and licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. We have adapted it — normalised into our own tables, with name and attribute corrections of our own — so any errors you find here are ours before they are his.
• Strong's Concordance — James Strong's 1890 exhaustive concordance of Hebrew and Greek, the basis of every lexicon entry and word study on the site. Public domain.
• The Hebrew and Greek word data, and the biblical name index — two datasets from the same hands. The interlinear's text, glosses and grammar are the Translators Amalgamated Hebrew OT and Greek NT; the individuals and places behind the names — which Zechariah, whose son he was, everywhere he appears — are the Translators Individualised Proper Names with all References. Both created by STEPBible.org based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge, and licensed CC BY 4.0. We have adapted both — the interlinear filtered to the KJV's manuscript tradition with glosses reordered into English word order; the name index keyed to our own Strong's numbering, with two references dropped that point to verses the KJV does not contain — so any errors you find here are ours before they are theirs.
• The Church Fathers and the classic commentators — the patristic commentary, Aquinas's Catena Aurea, and Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible. Public domain, and each quotation carries its own source where it appears.
• The Bible texts themselves — every translation here is public domain or openly licensed, and is reproduced unaltered.

The AI commentary is our own, written against that data rather than in place of it. If you maintain something we use and the credit here is wrong or missing, tell us and it gets fixed.