Hear the Word: Audio Bibles Online

Next to praying, reading the Bible is the most inspirational and encouraging activity. It’s important to take time to do both: talk to God through prayer and let God talk to you through His Word, more than 15 or 20 minutes a day! How do we fit these essential things into our busy lives?

You can pray while you’re driving or vacuuming or doing many other things, but you just can’t read the Bible when you’re using your eyes and hands for other things! The solution is simple and it’s online in many places. You can even download it to your computer to listen to offline.

Audio Bibles were once limited to the realm of libraries of recorded tapes or cds, but with more efficient computers and faster connections to the internet, almost anyone can listen to them on the internet.

You have to admit, too, that having several versions of the Bible and a few commentaries around comes in handy sometimes, even if you don’t tend to check every word you read.

It’s good to have a variety of references handy, because there will come a time when it strikes you that your pastor, your Sunday School teacher and the author of that article you just read seem to disagree on the meaning of some phrase or verse!

The easiest way to hear an audio Bible is at, aptly enough, The Online Bible. Alexander Scourby narrates the entire King James Version chapter by chapter. You’ll need the RealAudio player to hear it.
http://www.audio-bible.com/bible/bible.html

What’s great about listening to the Bible Gateway Audio Bible is that you can choose how many chapters you want to hear and it will keep going until all of them are finished – a real boon if you want to listen while doing something away from your computer.
http://www.biblegateway.com/resources/audio/

And if you’re looking for Tagalog, Cantonese, Polish, Russian… Audio Treasure has those and more in MP3 format. Yes, they have English, too – the King James Version and World English Bible. Download them to your computer or MP3 player.
http://www.audiotreasure.com/#download

Looking to buy a Bible on cd to carry along with you? “James Earl Jones Reads the Bible” is superb. The rich voice of this man makes the King James Version even more poetic and meaningful.
http://www.learnoutloud.com/Catalog/Religion-and-Spirituality/The-Bible/James-Earl-Jones-Reads-the-Bible/4500

As far as computer generated voices go, this is good! Using UPDV release 2.09, the entire Bible is downloadable in MP3 format. You can get a free daily Bible chapter podcast here. They have a link to the free “Juice” Free Podder Podcast Receiver Software. It can’t get much easier than that.
http://media.updated.org/audio/

This is just the tip of the iceburg and it leaves us with no excuse. God’s Word is all over the internet, so let’s take advantage of it.