Müqəddəs Kitab

The Azərbaycan dilində Müqəddəs Kitab ("The Holy Scripture in the Azerbaijani language") appeared in 2008, copyright Müqəddəs Kitab Sirkəti, the Bible Society. It was translated by the Institute for Bible Translation (IBT), which translates the Bible into the non-Slavic languages of the former Soviet Union, with the Bible Society of Azerbaijan as partner. eBible catalogs it as South Azerbaijani and offers it to readers in Azerbaijan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey.

We found no detailed public account of its method. The text reads as present-day literary Azerbaijani, clear and unadorned: Psalm 23 opens with Rəbb mənim çobanımdır, möhtac olmaram, "the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want", and John 3:16 speaks of the only Son (vahid Oğlunu). It is written in the Latin alphabet.

It serves anyone who reads Azerbaijani and wants the whole Bible in current language. The honest limit lies in script and variety: the text follows standard Azerbaijani written in Latin letters, as used in the Republic of Azerbaijan, while in Iran Azerbaijani is usually written in Perso-Arabic script and has its own regional color. Iranian readers who read only that script may struggle.

The rights holder released the text under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license. It allows anyone to read and share it for free, as long as the text stays unaltered and is not used commercially. That is why the 2008 Azerbaijani Bible is here in full to read for free on Midvash, but is left out of the public API, audio and AI features, which would go beyond what the license allows.