Sinew — a sourced Bible connection-graph

An open database of the Bible and its internal connections — text + canonical IDs + versification reconciliation + cross-references in one queryable artifact, every connection carrying its provenance.

"…the sinews and the flesh came up upon them… and they lived." — Ezekiel 37:8,10 Sinew is the connective tissue of the canon — the layer that links verse↔verse with provenance, so others build on reconnected Scripture instead of feeding a PDF to an AI.

🧑‍💻 Code, build & MCP server: https://github.com/LucasGalhardoLima/sinew 🔭 Live explorer (navigate by meaning, or search a theme): https://huggingface.co/spaces/LucasGalhardoLima/sinew-explorer

Why

Anyone building on the Bible (study apps, sermon tools, AI agents, research) redoes the same foundational work — parsing text, canonical IDs, versification reconciliation, cross-reference lookup — and worse, derives connections from text similarity, which is itself an interpretive assumption (similarity ≠ connection). Sinew separates fact from interpretation: every connection is type + source + weight, the dataset attributes, never asserts, and nothing is silently dropped. v1 is entirely public-domain text + CC-BY data → frictionlessly redistributable.

The three tiers (never blurred)

• Tier 1 — Facts: verse text, canonical IDs, book metadata, versification map.
• Tier 2 — Sourced connections: every edge has type + source + weight (+ review_status).
• Tier 3 — Derived (optional): computed embeddings/similarity, "computed, not authoritative" — powers the live explorer's meaning-terrain and its in-browser theme search; built opt-in, never joined to the fact tables (and not part of this published dataset, which is Tier-1/2 only).

What's in v1

Text	World English Bible (WEB), public domain — 31,095 verses / 1,189 chapters / 66 books
Canonical IDs	Book.Chapter.Verse (e.g. John.3.16), eng/KJV numbering base
Versification	eng (identity) + org (Hebrew) per verse, via the Copenhagen Alliance spec
Connections	OpenBible cross-references → 613,998 Tier-2 edges (type=cross_reference, weight=votes)
Formats	sinew.sqlite (all tables + joins) and per-table Parquet (this dataset's viewer)

Files

Path	What
sinew.sqlite	The whole dataset in one SQLite file — all tables, ready for joins
parquet/*.parquet	One file per table (powers the dataset viewer above)
sources.lock.json	Exact upstream retrieval URLs + sha256 pins (reproducible build)

Load it

Parquet, via 🤗 datasets (each table is a named config):

from datasets import load_dataset

edges  = load_dataset("LucasGalhardoLima/sinew", "connections", split="train")
verses = load_dataset("LucasGalhardoLima/sinew", "verses", split="train")
texts  = load_dataset("LucasGalhardoLima/sinew", "texts", split="train")

SQLite, for joins (one file, all tables):

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download
import sqlite3

db = hf_hub_download("LucasGalhardoLima/sinew", "sinew.sqlite", repo_type="dataset")
con = sqlite3.connect(db)

# John 3:16 and its strongest sourced cross-references (with provenance)
con.execute("SELECT text FROM texts WHERE verse_id='John.3.16'").fetchone()
con.execute("""SELECT target_verse_id, source, weight FROM connections
               WHERE source_verse_id='John.3.16' AND review_status='ok'
               ORDER BY weight DESC LIMIT 5""").fetchall()

# Hebrew (org) numbering for an eng verse
con.execute("SELECT scheme_ref FROM versification_map WHERE verse_id='Joel.2.32' AND scheme='org'").fetchone()
# -> ('Joel.3.5',)

Schema (tables)

• verses — verse_id (PK), book, chapter, verse, canonical_order, tier=1 (stable, translation-independent address)
• books — book (PK), name, testament, book_number, chapter_count
• texts — verse_id, translation, text, tier=1 (PK verse_id+translation; v1: WEB only)
• versification_map — verse_id, scheme ∈ {eng,org}, scheme_ref, status ∈ {present,merged,split}, tier=1
• connections — source_verse_id, target_verse_id, type, source, weight, confidence, review_status, turpie_class (NULL in v1), tier=2
• dataset_meta — key, value

Rules: no connections row without source; endpoints reference the canonical address (verses.verse_id), never a texts row; an edge whose endpoint doesn't resolve (≈311, versification gaps) is flagged in review_status, never dropped — the "no silent failure" guarantee.

Sources & license

Source	Provides	License
World English Bible (via getbible.net v2)	PD English text	Public Domain
Copenhagen Alliance versification	eng/org mappings	CC-BY / open
OpenBible.info cross-references	~340k weighted edges	CC-BY

This compilation is licensed CC-BY-4.0 and requires attribution to OpenBible.info; the underlying Bible text is public domain. Exact retrieval URLs + sha256 pins are in sources.lock.json and the dataset_meta table.

Roadmap (P1): typed NT→OT quotations (Turpie 1868, classified A–E); deeper Tier-3 semantic search beyond the explorer (a query/MCP-layer semantic endpoint — the explorer's in-browser theme search already ships); original-language (Macula) lemma/morphology; more PD translations + multilingual alignment.