Daily Bible Verse

Start each day with Scripture. This Obsidian plugin adds a daily Bible verse to your daily note as an elegant callout — with the correctly localized verse reference, an attribution line, and an optional emoji (📖 ✝️ 🕊️ …):

> [!bible] Johannes 3,16
> Also hat Gott die Welt geliebt, daß er seinen eingeborenen Sohn gab, auf daß alle,
> die an ihn glauben, nicht verloren werden, sondern das ewige Leben haben.
>
> — Luther 1912

The callout is written as plain markdown into your note: it stays readable on every device, in exports, and even if you uninstall the plugin.

Features

• Offline-first — a curated selection of 526 encouraging verses ships with the plugin in all supported translations. No API keys, no external services, works on mobile.
• 5 languages — German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, each with correctly localized book names and reference notation ("Johannes 3,16" vs. "John 3:16").
• Public-domain translations — Luther 1912, Elberfelder 1905, KJV, Darby 1890, Reina-Valera Antigua (1909), Louis Segond 1910, Diodati 1649.
• Randomness with a system — a seeded shuffled-deck algorithm guarantees no repeats until the whole pool has been used once, then reshuffles: no short-interval repeats, no yearly rotation, and fully deterministic (the same day always gets the same verse, on every device).
• Configurable pool — curated selection (filterable by themes: encouragement, comfort, hope, love, wisdom, gratitude, faith, peace — with a live verse counter), the whole Bible (~31,000 verses, one-time ~5 MB download per translation), or book presets (Psalms, New Testament, Gospels, Prophets, Letters of Paul, …).
• Complete sentences — in whole-Bible mode a verse that ends mid-sentence is continued with the following verses of the same chapter (up to 4).
• Three ways to insert — automatic on daily-note creation, a {{bible-verse}} placeholder in your daily-note template, or manual commands.
• Re-roll — don't like today's verse? Re-roll it; the new verse stays fixed for the rest of the day. In an open daily note, re-roll works on that note's date.
• Verse at a glance — the ribbon icon (📖) or the command Show today's verse opens the verse in a small window with Re-roll, Copy and Insert into daily note.

Installation

Until the plugin is listed in the community directory:

1. Download main.js, manifest.json and styles.css from the latest release.
2. Create the folder <vault>/.obsidian/plugins/daily-bible-verse/ and place the three files inside.
3. Reload Obsidian and enable Daily Bible Verse under Community plugins.

Or install via BRAT with the repository polygonhunter/daily-bible-verse.

Usage

Automatic (default)

With the core Daily Notes (or Periodic Notes) plugin enabled, every newly created daily note automatically receives the verse callout. The insert position is configurable (top, below any frontmatter / bottom).

Automatic insertion only touches a note when

• it was created moments ago,
• it lies in your daily-notes folder (with the vault root as folder: not nested deeper than the date format), and
• its date is within ±7 days of today.

So a file like Meetings/2026-10-06.md and old daily notes that sync onto a new device are left alone. Use the commands for anything else.

Template placeholder

Put {{bible-verse}} anywhere in your daily-note template — the plugin replaces it when the note is created. This also works with Templater templates: for one minute after creation the plugin watches the new note and re-inserts the verse if a template run replaced the content — even when a Templater prompt stays open for a while.

Commands

These IDs are a stable public contract since 1.0.0 — external tools (e.g. slash-menu plugins) can safely call them via app.commands.executeCommandById(...). Commands only show up where they apply (e.g. the placeholder command only in notes with a placeholder).

API (Templater, other plugins)

const api = app.plugins.plugins["daily-bible-verse"]?.api;
const v = await api.getVerse();            // today; or api.getVerse(new Date(2026, 9, 6))
// v = { reference, text, translation, markdown, refKey }

Templater example: <% (await app.plugins.plugins["daily-bible-verse"].api.getVerse()).markdown %>

Reference property

Under More options you can name a frontmatter property (e.g. bible-verse). After the plugin inserts a verse it writes the reference there — handy for Dataview or Bases.

How the daily pick works

The verse pool is shuffled once with a seed (Fisher-Yates) and then consumed day by day like a deck of cards — every verse appears exactly once per cycle. When the deck is exhausted, it is reshuffled with a new seed derived from the cycle number, so the next pass has a completely different order. Everything is derived from the date and a per-vault seed: no history is stored, nothing can be corrupted by sync, and all devices agree on the verse of the day.

Re-rolls are stored per date and freeze the chosen verse for that day (old entries are pruned after 60 days). A re-roll picks the verse of a past day, never one scheduled for the next 30 days, so it does not show up again shortly afterwards.

Whole-Bible mode

Curated mode works out of the box. For whole Bible or specific books the plugin downloads the selected translation once (~4–5 MB) into the plugin folder and then works fully offline. Until the download exists, the plugin transparently falls back to the curated pool (with a notice). Downloads can be deleted again in the settings.

The download lives in the plugin folder and is usually not synced. The settings show the status of this device; on a second device simply download it there as well.

Translations & licensing

¹ Crown patent restrictions apply within the United Kingdom.

Verse data is sourced from the Beblia Holy-Bible-XML-Format repository at build time (npm run fetch-data). Modern copyrighted translations (Luther 2017, Schlachter 1951/2000, Hoffnung für alle, NIV, ESV, …) are deliberately not included — they must not be redistributed without a license.

The plugin code is MIT-licensed.

Compatibility notes

• Daily Notes / Periodic Notes: automatic insertion uses the folder and date format from your Daily Notes settings (via obsidian-daily-notes-interface).
• Templater: supported — see the placeholder section above.
• Mobile: fully supported (isDesktopOnly: false, no Node APIs).
• Without the Daily Notes plugin, automatic insertion stays dormant (a warning appears in the settings); all manual commands keep working.

Manual test checklist

For testing in a real vault (this repo's CI covers unit tests and the build):

1. Fresh vault → enable plugin → create today's daily note → callout appears once.
2. Re-open / re-create the note → still exactly one callout (idempotency).
3. Add {{bible-verse}} to the daily-note template → placeholder is replaced at the configured spot.
4. With Templater enabled and a template that overwrites the note (also with a prompt that stays open > 5 s) → still exactly one callout.
5. Toggle themes in the settings → pool counter updates; verse changes on the next day.
6. Command "Re-roll today's verse" → callout in the open note is replaced; re-running "Insert today's verse" yields the same re-rolled verse.
7. Whole-Bible mode without download → notice + curated fallback; after "Download now" → verses from the whole Bible.
8. Switch language → book names, notation and verse text follow.
9. Mobile app: repeat steps 1 and 7.
10. Create yesterday's daily note via the calendar → it gets yesterday's verse.
11. Create Other/2026-10-06.md outside the daily-notes folder → no callout.
12. Open yesterday's daily note → "Re-roll" changes yesterday's verse only; Ctrl/Cmd+Z undoes it.
13. Ribbon icon → window shows today's verse; Copy, Re-roll and Insert work.

Development

npm install
npm test           # vitest unit tests
npm run build      # type-check + production bundle (main.js)
npm run dev        # esbuild watch mode
npm run fetch-data # regenerate data/generated/ from the source Bibles (needs curl)
npm run validate-refs  # structural checks + pool statistics for the curated list

Architecture: everything under src/core/ is pure TypeScript (no Obsidian imports, enforced by a test) and unit-tested; the files in src/ are thin Obsidian glue. Curated verse references live in data/curated-refs.json; the verse texts are generated into data/generated/ at build time and committed.