Give Your AI Agent a Bible in 5 Minutes
Tutorial Feature

Give Your AI Agent a Bible in 5 Minutes

By Moses ·

Last week we opened the gateway: Hey Bible is now a one-stop way to give AI agents access to the Bible. This post is the hands-on follow-up. If you already have an OpenClaw- or Hermes-compatible agent running, you can have it quoting Scripture in about five minutes. Here’s the whole path, start to finish.

What you’ll need

  • An OpenClaw-compatible agent (OpenClaw, Hermes, or anything that installs skills from ClawHub).
  • A Hey Bible API key (free — we’ll grab one in step 1).
  • A terminal, if you’d rather drive the CLI directly.

Step 1 — Get an API key

Everything Hey Bible exposes is authenticated with a single key.

  1. Log in to heybible.app.
  2. Open the Account page.
  3. Under API Keys, click + to create a key, then Copy.

Keep it somewhere safe — treat it like a password, and never commit it to version control. We’ll hand it to your agent through an environment variable in a moment.

export HEY_BIBLE_API_KEY=your_api_key_here

Step 2 — Install the skill

The easiest path is to hand your agent a prompt and let it install the skill itself. ClawHub publishes a scoped, safety-aware steer prompt — paste it into your agent’s chat and it will inspect the skill, verify the package, and install it carefully:

Before installing anything, inspect the ClawHub skill metadata and setup requirements.
If the skill asks you to install a third-party package or CLI, verify its source, maintainer, and package contents before running the install command.
Install the skill "Hey Bible" (@hey-bible/hey-bible) from ClawHub only after those checks pass.
Skill page: https://clawhub.ai/hey-bible/skills/hey-bible
Keep the work scoped to this skill only.
After install, help me finish setup from verified skill metadata.
Required env vars: HEY_BIBLE_API_KEY
Required binaries: node, npx
Use only the metadata you can verify from ClawHub; do not invent missing requirements.
Ask before making any broader environment changes.

The skill declares the @hey-bible/cli package as its dependency, so a compatible runtime — OpenClaw, Hermes, and friends all resolve skills from the same ClawHub registry — installs everything it needs automatically. No glue code, no wiring up a tool by hand.

Prefer the command line? If you have access to the shell your agent runs in, you can install the skill directly instead:

openclaw skills install @hey-bible/hey-bible

Either way, make sure HEY_BIBLE_API_KEY is set in the environment your agent runs in — and you’re ready to go.

Step 3 — Ask your agent for a verse

Now talk to your agent like you normally would:

  • “What does John 3:16 say?”
  • “Read me Psalm 23 in the KJV.”
  • “Pull up my favorite verses tagged ‘faith’.”
  • “Summarize 1 Corinthians 13.”

Behind the scenes the skill calls the Hey Bible CLI, which returns structured JSON your agent can read and reason over directly. It can look up any verse or chapter across translations, browse the 66 books, list available Bibles, and read your saved favorites, notes, AI-generated verse images, chats, and tags.

Prefer the terminal? Skip straight to the CLI

The skill is a thin layer over @hey-bible/cli, so you can use the same thing from any script, cron job, or coding agent without installing a skill at all. Run it on demand with npx — no global install needed:

# Look up a verse range (defaults to ESV)
npx -y @hey-bible/cli search John 3 --start-verse 16 --end-verse 18

# A whole chapter in a specific translation
npx -y @hey-bible/cli search Psalms 23 --bible-id kjv

# Raw JSON — the format agents and scripts actually want
npx -y @hey-bible/cli search "1 Corinthians" 13 --json

Every command supports --json for clean, machine-readable output, and reads the same HEY_BIBLE_API_KEY you set in step 1. Run hey-bible --help (or npx -y @hey-bible/cli --help) to see all eight commands.

One honest note on scope

Today the gateway is read-centric: your agent can look up Scripture and read the data you’ve saved in Hey Bible. It can’t yet write notes or create favorites on your behalf. That keeps the surface area safe and predictable — and it covers the thing agents need most, which is reliable access to the text itself.

Where to go next

  • The For Agents page lays out all the ways to connect — skill, MCP server, CLI, SDK, and the REST API.
  • The developer docs have the full command reference and a guide for each door.

Connect something to Scripture this week — and if you build it, I’d love to see it.

— Moses

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