How we write our chapter summaries

This page explains how we produce the chapter summaries on Bible1.org — the editorial standards, the writing process, the rubric we check every summary against, and how we handle corrections. We publish this because we think transparency about editorial standards is a basic responsibility for any site that asks readers to trust it.

If you’ve ever read a Bible summary online and wondered who wrote it and how, this is our answer.

What we’re trying to do

Each chapter summary answers one question: what happens in this chapter?

That’s a narrower goal than most Bible-summary sites set for themselves. We don’t try to tell you what the chapter means, what God is saying through it, how it applies to your life, or how it fits theologically into the rest of the Bible. Other sites do those things. We just describe the contents of the chapter — the events, the speakers, the structure — in clear modern English, in the same register a journalist would use to describe a historical document.

The standard is “could this summary be read out at a college lecture, a synagogue, a church, and a coffee shop, and feel appropriate in all four?” If not, we’ve gone wrong.

The writing standard

Every summary follows the same rules:

Plain modern English. Calibrated to the reading level used by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Pew Research, and National Geographic — the standard for adult journalism aimed at general readers. Not Sunday-school simple. Not academic-paper complex.
Present tense throughout. “Jesus tells the disciples…” not “Jesus told the disciples…”
Third person. No “we,” no “you,” no “I.”
150 to 350 words. Long enough to be useful, short enough to be read.
Describes what happens, not what it means. The summary tells you the events; we don’t tell you what to make of them.
No theology, no doctrine, no denomination. A Catholic, a Methodist, an Orthodox Jew, and a skeptical historian should all read the same summary and find nothing to object to as a description.
No emotional adjectives. A summary should not call a chapter “powerful” or “beautiful” or “tragic.” Those are reader responses, not summary content.
No mirror of the source. The Berean Standard Bible uses some elevated translation language (“the expanse of the sky,” “the waters teem with creatures”). Our summaries translate that into clear modern English (“the sky,” “the seas fill with creatures”). We’re a layer of clarity over the text, not an echo of it.

The full editorial rulebook is several thousand words long. The summary above captures the spirit.

How a summary gets written

Every summary on this site goes through the same process:

1. Drafting. A first draft is written against the chapter text using the editorial rulebook, eight gold-standard example summaries we wrote by hand, and the full text of the chapter being summarized. The draft has to match the voice, length, and structural rules set out above.

2. Mechanical checks. Every draft is automatically checked against a rubric: word count within range, reading-level within the target band, no banned phrases (we maintain a list of about 30 phrases that signal voice drift — phrases like “we learn that,” “this teaches us,” “the chapter unfolds”), no first-person pronouns, no overly long sentences. Drafts that fail mechanical checks are rejected and rewritten before they move to review.

3. Editorial review. Every draft that passes mechanical checks is then read against the chapter text by a human editor. The review checks facts: are the names spelled the way the BSB spells them? Does the order of events match the chapter? Are the verse counts right? Are numbers exact? Is the voice consistent with our published standards? Has the summary stayed descriptive, without sliding into interpretation or theological framing? Drafts that fail editorial review go back for revision or get rewritten from scratch.

4. Publication. Only summaries that pass both mechanical and editorial review are published. Unpublished chapters render with the Bible text alone and are marked noindex in their HTML so they don’t dilute the site in search results.

Accuracy

Every chapter summary is checked for factual accuracy against the source text before publication. Specifically:

Names match BSB spellings. If the BSB renders a name as “Lazarus,” the summary renders it as “Lazarus” — not “Lazaros,” “Eleazar,” or any variant. The same applies to place names, titles, and proper nouns of every kind.
The order of events matches the chapter. A summary that describes events out of order is rejected and rewritten. The narrative sequence in the summary must match the verse sequence in the chapter.
Numbers are exact. Verse counts, ages of patriarchs, days of creation, sizes of armies, lengths of journeys, dimensions of buildings — every number in a summary is checked against the original. If a chapter says forty days, the summary says forty days — not forty-some, about forty, or roughly forty.
Quoted phrases are accurate. Any phrase placed in quotation marks within a summary must appear verbatim in the BSB. We do not paraphrase a verse and present it as a quotation.
No imported details. Summaries reference only what is in the chapter itself. We do not import context from other chapters, study Bible notes, commentaries, or other translations. If a chapter mentions a character without explaining who they are, the summary does the same.
BC/AD dating throughout. We date events in BC/AD form (not BCE/CE), matching how the BSB itself dates events and how most American readers encounter biblical chronology.
Reading level held to a Flesch-Kincaid grade band of roughly 10 to 12. This is the band used by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Pew Research, and National Geographic for general-audience adult journalism. Drafts measured outside this band are rewritten before they move to review.

If a summary is wrong about a fact in the chapter, that’s an editorial failure on our part. See “Corrections and updates” below for how to report it.

Corrections and updates

To report an error in a summary (a wrong name, a missed event, a sentence that reads as interpretation rather than description), email hello@bible1.org with the chapter reference and the issue. Corrections are made within a few days. We don’t currently maintain a public corrections log.

Summaries on the site are revisited periodically. If a summary no longer meets the current editorial standard (voice has drifted, length is off, a fact reads as interpretation), it is rewritten. The summary on a given chapter page today may not be word-for-word the same one that’s there a year from now; the underlying facts and the editorial standard are the constants.