This site is inspired by the 1888 Variorum Reference Bible, which can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/holybiblecontain00chey/page/n6/mode/1up

It’s a magnificent work, no doubt, attempting to show all the significant variations in readings and renderings of the Bible, verse by verse, to the extent reasonably possible in a one-volume nineteenth-century work. (The nineteenth century, it seems to me, was the heyday of the ambitious single-volume work.)

But for all its usefulness in exposing the most minute distinctions between texts and interpretations of the Bible, a certain kind of variety is conspicuously missing from its Table of Contents, which see below:

Here it is taken for granted that the thing called a “Bible” contains the sixty-six books that have made up Protestant Bibles for the last few hundred years.

The reader is alerted, as early as the first page of the biblical text, that the Septuagint places the phrase “and it was so” not at the end of 1:7, but at the end of 1:6. The reader is nowhere told that the Septuagint contains entire books not found in the Variorum Reference Bible, such as Judith, Tobit, Sirach, four books of the Maccabees, and the Psalms of Solomon.

It has been said that the internet isn’t made of paper — that is, in digital publications there is no practical limit on pages. As a result, I would hope that an online Variorum Bible would find a place to include, near its beginning, an essay on what the term “Bible” means to the various communities that use it to name various (mostly overlapping) collections of books.