Church Publishes LDS Edition of the Holy Bible in Spanish

The LDS edition of the Holy Bible in Spanish will be available in September in print, electronic, and audio formats. The First Presidency has invited Spanish-speaking members of the Church to view a special 25-minute orientation about the new edition of the Bible. The orientation will be broadcast via satellite between the morning and afternoon sessions on both Saturday and Sunday of the upcoming October general conference.

More than 800,000 copies of the new edition of the Bible are being printed at the Church’s printing center in Salt Lake City and will be sent to Church distribution centers all over the world. The printed versions are available in paperback, hardcover, and bonded leather as well as in Braille and an oversized print format. A quadruple combination is not available at this time.

The electronic text of this new edition, including the study helps, will be available at Escrituras.lds.org, allowing members with Internet access to perform keyword searches. The audio recordings of the Bible and the triple combination are available on CD through Church distribution centers or as MP3 files at Escrituras.lds.org.

Under the direction of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, a team of translators prepared and reviewed the new edition. They were aided by General Authorities, Area Seventies, professional linguists, and Church members. The LDS edition of the Holy Bible in Spanish is based on the 1909 Reina-Valera edition of the Bible, an earlier version of what Spanish-speaking members have used until now.

The dignified language of the 1909 Reina-Valera Spanish Bible, comparable to that of the King James Bible, has been conservatively modernized by replacing some of the outdated grammatical constructions and vocabulary whose meaning and acceptability have shifted.

New chapter headings, footnotes, cross-references to all the standard works of the Church, maps, and other study aids included in the back pages of the publication will make the scriptures more helpful to Spanish-speaking Saints. The new edition will be titled “Santa Biblia: Reina-Valera 2009.”

It is expected that the 2009 LDS edition of the Holy Bible in Spanish with its study aids will make the scriptures more accessible to Spanish-speaking members of the Church in the same way that the 1979 LDS edition of the King James Bible did for English-speaking members.

“We encourage members to obtain their own copies of this new edition of the Bible and to use it in regular personal and family study and in Church meetings and assignments,” a letter from the First Presidency reads. “As members prayerfully learn and teach from the scriptures, their testimonies will grow and they will receive greater direction in their daily lives.”

Additional information is available in Spanish and English at SantaBiblia.lds.org.