Open Nueva Biblia Viva

The Nueva Biblia Viva is a complete Spanish Bible published by Biblica, the publisher of the NIV, with a copyright of 2006 and 2008. The edition here is the Biblica Open Nueva Biblia Viva 2008, the open edition Biblica released through its open.bible project. It belongs to the same family as the Portuguese Nova Bíblia Viva: a Bible meant to be understood on the first read.

The method is thought-for-thought translation pushed a step further. The priority is that each sentence sounds like Spanish people speak today and that the meaning arrives whole, even when the shape of the original is left behind. In Genesis 1 the light is called "hermosa", beautiful, not only good. At times the translator merges two verses into one block to rebuild the sentence, as in Genesis 1:11-12 and 1:14-15, which are numbered together.

For new readers, for reading aloud with family, or for a first pass through a hard book, it helps a great deal. The honest limit is the other side of the same coin: where the Hebrew or Greek is dense or ambiguous, it picks one reading and moves on, and the reader never sees the choice. The merged verses also get in the way when you want to quote or compare a single verse. For study, read it next to a more formal translation such as the Reina-Valera.

It is free because Biblica published it under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. You can read, quote and share it without asking, crediting Biblica and keeping the same license on derivative works.