If you take Bible study notes in Obsidian, you know the friction of switching between apps just to look up a verse. The Obsidian Bible Reference plugin removes that friction entirely — type double hyphens followed by a reference (like --John3:16) and the full passage appears inline, ready to weave into your notes.^1
Built by developer Tim under the Antioch Tech banner, this free and open-source plugin (MIT license) supports multiple Bible translations including WEB, KJV, NVI (Spanish), CUV (Chinese), DRB (Douay–Rheims), and Korean RNKSV, powered by BibleAPI.com and BollsLifeAPI.^2 It works across every platform Obsidian runs on — desktop and mobile, from Windows and macOS to Linux, iOS, and Android.^1 Beyond the core double-hyphen trigger, the plugin offers a Verse Lookup Modal (accessible via command palette or a book icon), a "Verse of the Day" feature, and customizable formatting options including the newly added custom book/chapter tag formatting.^1 On iOS, where smart punctuation can interfere, users can use ++ instead of -- as the trigger prefix.^2
Silently launched in 2021, the project has grown steadily through a global community of 58 contributors and generous sponsors, surpassing 52,000 downloads — a jump from 32,000 just one year ago.^4 The plugin earned a 74/100 quality score on Obsidian Stats and maintains 326 GitHub stars.^4
Why Christians Love It"For me it is an invaluable tool in my daily Bible and systematic theology studies. Please keep being awesome!" — Chris, sponsor and user^5
"I just got the project up and running in my obsidian notes and it works amazing! This is exactly what I was looking for to take my Bible study notes. God Bless!" — Kyle^5
"I just wanted to thank you for your invaluable work on the OBR plugin, it's been indispensable in my daily Bible studies for several months now. May God bless you powerfully. Grace and Peace!" — Samej^5
Notable- 835 commits and 110 releases as of April 2026, with the latest release (26.03.28) just two weeks prior^2
- Part of the Antioch Tech project family, which also includes Bible Vector Search, an AI-powered semantic Bible search tool^2
- Featured in the Obsidian Hub's guide for religious uses of Obsidian^6
- Developer Tim is an AWS Professional and Arctic Code Vault Contributor on GitHub^2
- Scored 74/100 on Obsidian Stats quality assessment^4
Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android (via Obsidian) Pricing: Free (MIT license, optional GitHub Sponsors donations)
