Read the KJV Apocrypha Online — All 14 Books with Meanings

The Apocrypha is the fourteen books that stood between the Old and New Testaments in the King James Bible of 1611 — Tobit and Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, the Maccabees and the rest. Later editions dropped them; for the Bible's first two centuries in English, this was simply part of the book.

Every book is here in full, in the King James text — all 174 chapters, free to read — with the Apocrypha Companion's rendering beside each passage: its spiritual meaning, in the manner of The Why Bible.

How to read these pages: the text itself comes first, verse by verse, in the volume's own translation. Beneath each verse stands its Meaning — a rendering of what the passage's terms name in the inner life, drawn from the correspondences the text itself uses. The text is never altered; the meaning is offered, not imposed.

1 Esdras

The return from captivity, told again on the pattern of Ezra and the Chronicles — and told inwardly: the exile is the reign of confusion over the mind, the return is consciousness coming home to its center, and the temple's rebuilding, stone by stone and decree by decree, is the inner sanctuary raised again in a people who remember whose they are.

Chapter 1 · Chapter 2 · Chapter 3 · Chapter 4 · Chapter 5 · Chapter 6 · Chapter 7 · Chapter 8 · Chapter 9

2 Esdras

The seer Ezra, in Babylon after the destruction, asks the questions this whole work exists to honor: why is the world given to the many who perish, why are the saved so few, when will the end come and what will it look like? The answers come not as argument but as vision — the mourning woman who is Zion transformed, the eagle from the sea, the man who carves out a mountain and flies to it — the judgment rendered as the divine order confronting every state at once, and the Son shown as the offspring of the Divine Mind through whom the order is restored.

Chapter 1 · Chapter 2 · Chapter 3 · Chapter 4 · Chapter 5 · Chapter 6 · Chapter 7 · Chapter 8 · Chapter 9 · Chapter 10 · Chapter 11 · Chapter 12 · Chapter 13 · Chapter 14 · Chapter 15 · Chapter 16

Tobit

A righteous man in exile who buries the dead at his own risk, gives from his little, and is blinded by the very life he lives faithfully — healed at last when the bitter gall of his own experience is applied to his eyes.

Chapter 1 · Chapter 2 · Chapter 3 · Chapter 4 · Chapter 5 · Chapter 6 · Chapter 7 · Chapter 8 · Chapter 9 · Chapter 10 · Chapter 11 · Chapter 12 · Chapter 13 · Chapter 14

Judith

A besieged city, a widow, and a camp full of empire.

The Rest of Esther

The chapters the Hebrew book of Esther does not contain — and the ones that give that book its voice.

Chapter 10 · Chapter 11 · Chapter 12 · Chapter 13 · Chapter 14 · Chapter 15 · Chapter 16

Wisdom

Wisdom stands at the door of this book and speaks in her own person: the breath of the power of God, the brightness of the everlasting light, ordering all things sweetly.

Ecclesiasticus

A grandfather's teaching, translated by his grandson, whose two printed prologues stand at the head of this book as they stood in 1611 — an apology and an invitation, rendered with the rest.

Prologue · Chapter 1 · Chapter 2 · Chapter 3 · Chapter 4 · Chapter 5 · Chapter 6 · Chapter 7 · Chapter 8 · Chapter 9 · Chapter 10 · Chapter 11 · Chapter 12 · Chapter 13 · Chapter 14 · Chapter 15 · Chapter 16 · Chapter 17 · Chapter 18 · Chapter 19 · Chapter 20 · Chapter 21 · Chapter 22 · Chapter 23 · Chapter 24 · Chapter 25 · Chapter 26 · Chapter 27 · Chapter 28 · Chapter 29 · Chapter 30 · Chapter 31 · Chapter 32 · Chapter 33 · Chapter 34 · Chapter 35 · Chapter 36 · Chapter 37 · Chapter 38 · Chapter 39 · Chapter 40 · Chapter 41 · Chapter 42 · Chapter 43 · Chapter 44 · Chapter 45 · Chapter 46 · Chapter 47 · Chapter 48 · Chapter 49 · Chapter 50 · Chapter 51

Baruch

The confession of the exiles, written by Jeremiah's scribe in Babylon and read aloud to a people learning honesty: we have sinned, and the dispersion is the order of things confronting a state that broke it.

Chapter 1 · Chapter 2 · Chapter 3 · Chapter 4 · Chapter 5 · Chapter 6

Song of the Three Holy Children

Inside the furnace, between Daniel's third chapter and its end, the three who would not bow stand unbound in the fire that was meant to consume them — and they sing.

Chapter 1

Susanna

Purity accused by the very elders sworn to guard it, and condemned on the word of office — until a young man's discernment is awakened, Daniel separating the witnesses and letting each lie contradict the other under its own tree.

Chapter 1

Bel and the Dragon

Daniel the detective, twice over.

Chapter 1

Prayer of Manasseh

Fifteen verses, and the worst king in Judah's history prays them in his captivity in Babylon — Manasseh, who filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, bowing the knee of his heart in iron bands.

Chapter 1

1 Maccabees

The decree goes out from the empire: one law for all peoples, and the inner law surrendered — the altar profaned, the sabbath and circumcision made capital, the sanctuary given to a formed image.

2 Maccabees

The epitome of Jason of Cyrene, and the Apocrypha's book of martyrs: Eleazar at the swine's flesh, the mother steadying her seven sons through tortures she names one by one as passages, Judas praying and offering for the dead who fell with tokens of idols under their tunics.

Chapter 1 · Chapter 2 · Chapter 3 · Chapter 4 · Chapter 5 · Chapter 6 · Chapter 7 · Chapter 8 · Chapter 9 · Chapter 10 · Chapter 11 · Chapter 12 · Chapter 13 · Chapter 14 · Chapter 15

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