Ang Pulong Sang Dios

Ang Pulong Sang Dios, meaning The Word of God, is the complete Bible in Hiligaynon published by Biblica, Inc., the organization that holds the NIV. Hiligaynon is spoken in the Western Visayas of the Philippines, on islands such as Panay and Negros. The copyright notice records editions in 1996, 2006, 2011 and 2022: this is a text revised over the years, not a one-off project.

In English it is called the Biblica Open Hiligaynon Contemporary Bible, and the word Contemporary tells you the method. It is a meaning-based translation: it aims for the Hiligaynon people speak today, clear to readers without theological training, rather than copying the sentence shapes of Hebrew and Greek. A concrete sign of this: in several places neighboring verses are merged into one block, as in Genesis 1:17-18, so the sentence reads naturally.

It works very well for reading whole chapters, for daily devotions, and for people meeting the Bible for the first time. The honest limit comes from the method itself: a meaning-based translation carries built-in interpretive decisions, and repeated words, wordplay and the structure of the original do not always come through. Merged verses also make it harder to quote a single verse exactly. For close study, compare it with a more literal translation.

Biblica released this edition under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license (CC BY-SA 4.0), and for Hiligaynon it even named it Libre, free, instead of Open. Unmodified copies keep the Biblica trademark and copyright notice. That openness is what lets Midvash offer it here, complete and free.