About
A promise box is an old, simple thing: a container of verses on folded cards that you draw from one at a time. This is that, on the web — with the addition that every card here opens into a page worth reading.
Why a box
The appeal of a promise box has never been randomness for its own sake. It is that being handed a verse you did not choose interrupts the habit of only reading what already fits your mood. You get the one about waiting when you wanted the one about deliverance, and occasionally that is the more useful verse.
So the draw here is genuinely random and runs entirely on your device. Nothing about what you draw is sent anywhere or recorded.
The verse text
Every English quotation is from the World English Bible, a modern translation released into the public domain. The Malayalam site uses the Indian Revised Version (IRV) — modern Malayalam, in place of the 1910 Sathyavedapustakam it was built on first, whose century-old idiom asked more of a reader than the verse itself does.
The IRV Malayalam text is copyright © 2017, 2019 Bridge Communication Systems, contributed by Bridge Connectivity Solutions Pvt. Ltd., and made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence via eBible.org. It is reproduced here unaltered, and it stays under that licence wherever it appears on this site. The reflections beside it are our own writing and are not part of that text.
Both editions were chosen so that the verse can be quoted in full: this site is intended to carry advertising, and reproducing an all-rights-reserved translation at length on an ad-supported page is not something we would be entitled to do. That rules out most of the translations a Malayalam reader will know best, including the POC edition.
The reflections
Each promise page carries a short piece of original writing — some background on where the verse sits, and a reflection on what it does and does not claim. These are written to be useful to someone reading in a difficult week, not to be devotional filler. Where a passage is commonly misused, the reflection says so.
They are not a substitute for a commentary, a pastor, or the surrounding chapter. They are an invitation to read the passage itself.
Two sites, one project
Bible Promise Box is one of a pair. The same collection exists in English and Malayalam, each on its own domain, so that neither reads like a translation of the other. Use the language link at the foot of any page to switch.
Install it
The site works as an installable app and, once visited, works offline. There is an install button in the header on devices that support it; on an iPhone, use Share → Add to Home Screen.