A Fairness Report
No verse weighted. No book favored.
Random verses on this site are picked with PHP's random_int(), a cryptographically secure generator that takes its entropy from the operating system. This page is the receipt that the picks come out even: every verse has the same chance, and no book is drawn more or less often than chance allows.
The receipts
Old vs New Testament
Does the system favor one over the other?
- Old Testament
- 74% vs 74% expected
- New Testament
- 26% vs 26% expected
Biggest swings
Which books deviate the most from their expected rate?
1 outside ±2σ — all small-sample variance. None anomalous (none past ±3.5σ).
- Zephaniah +7.9% +2.33σ
One day, scattered
What does a day's randomness actually look like?
Narrowed draws
A reader can draw from part of the Bible instead of all of it: a Testament, a few books, the Words of Jesus, the best-known verses or the rest. Each of those draws is recorded as two numbers only: how many verses its pool held, and where in that pool the chosen verse sat. If every verse in a pool is equally likely, those positions spread evenly from the start of a pool to its end, whatever the pool was.
1,298 narrowed draws in the last 50 days, from pools of 9 to 29,611 verses. Chi-square 26.2 on 19 degrees of freedom, p = 0.1248: consistent with an even draw.
- The position is counted within the verses the draw could actually choose from: verses an edition does not have are not in its pool, and when a reader asks not to repeat recent verses, those are left out first.
- Small pools are tested exactly: a pool of 28 verses cannot be cut into 20 equal stretches, so each bar's expected height counts the positions that really fall in it.
- Draws from a reader's own saved verses are shuffled in their browser, so they are not recorded here.
Deviation, all 66 books
Each book's actual selection rate compared to its expected rate based on verse count. Bars right of the midline appeared more often than expected; bars left appeared less. The shape tells the story.
Dataset
- Selections analyzed
- 515,762
- Eligible verses
- 31,102
- Window
- 50 days
Why does Philemon look skewed?
Expected 414.6 hits, got 424 — a +2.3% swing on a 25-verse book. Looks alarming, but it's a difference of 9.4 hits. Small books have tiny expected values, so normal variance creates large percentage swings.
Z-score: +0.46σ (statistically normal).
less than expected more than expected |z| > 3.5 (would be a real anomaly)