biblatex-sbl — SBL style files for biblatex

This package provides biblatex support for citations in the format specified by the second edition of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) Handbook of Style including updates on the SBLHS Blog (https://sblhs2.com/).

All example notes and bibliography entries from the handbook, student supplement and blog are supported. Posts from the blog supersede the handbook and student supplement and more recent blog posts supersede older blog posts.

Documentation

• biblatex-sbl.pdf: Style usage and documentation summary.
• biblatex-sbl.bib: Database entries for all example citations in the handbook, student supplement, and on the blog
• biblatex-sbl-blog-examples.pdf: Example usage for all example citations on the blog.
• biblatex-sbl-handbook-examples.pdf: Example usage for all example citations in the handbook.
• biblatex-sbl-studentsupplement-examples.pdf: Example usage for all example citations in the student supplement to the handbook.

Installation from TeXLive, or MiKTeX

biblatex-sbl is in TeXLive and MiKTeX and can be installed in the usual way through your distribution. E.g., in TeXLive by running:

tlmgr install biblatex-sbl

Installation from Git source

biblatex-sbl uses the l3build system.

Clone the git repository using:

git clone https://github.com/dcpurton/biblatex-sbl.git

Change to the biblatex-sbl directory and the style files and documentation can be installed by running:

l3build install --full

Note: Although supporting fallbacks, for best results the documentation uses several fonts not found in a standard TeXLive installation. You can download and install the non-standard fonts if you want to rebuild the documentation:

• The SBL biblical fonts available from https://www.sbl-site.org/resources/fonts/
• The Brill fonts available from https://brill.com/page/resourcesbrilltypeface/brill-typeface
• Estrangelo Edessa available in the Meltho font bundle at https://bethmardutho.org/
• Miriam Libre available from https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Miriam+Libre
• Noto Serif Armenian available from https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Serif+Armenian
• Noto Sans Syriac available from https://fonts.google.com/noto/specimen/Noto+Sans+Syriac

Backwards compatibility

The SBL Handbook of Style blog has now made SBL style a rolling style that changes with each blog post. Because of this, preserving backward compatibility between releases is not feasible for time I have available to maintain this style and neither is it possible to provide options to vary the style to cater for different seminaries and theological colleges.

In particular, version 2.0 and later of biblatex-sbl completely breaks compatibility with the version 0.x releases. If you need to access a legacy release, you should download it from the GitHub repository and place the style files locally in your project. See https://github.com/dcpurton/biblatex-sbl/releases for legacy releases and https://github.com/dcpurton/biblatex-sbl/tree/legacy for legacy source code. Legacy 0.x versions are no longer maintained or supported.

Licence

Copyright 2015-2026 David Purton

This work may be distributed and/or modified under the
conditions of the LaTeX Project Public License, either version 1.3
of this license or (at your option) any later version.
The latest version of this license is in
    http://www.latex-project.org/lppl.txt
and version 1.3 or later is part of all distributions of LaTeX
version 2005/12/01 or later.

This work has the LPPL maintenance status `maintained'.

The Current Maintainer of this work is David Purton.