This assumes you have access to a working mysql client/server setup, with create database priveleges. You can download MySQL for free from the official MySQL site at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#downloads .

Creating the Bible SQL database

Download either bible.mysql.gz or bible.mysql.txt from this site's Download page. Linux / Mac users will probably want the former, Windows users the latter.

1. If you have the .gz file, unzip it at the command line with
   

   gunzip bible.mysql.gz
   

   Your 3M zipped file should morph into an 11M file called bible.mysql.
   
   

2. Feed the bible database dump file through your mysql client program.
   
   mysql < bible.mysql
   
   Or, if you started with the plain text file the command will be
   
   mysql < bible.mysql.txt
   
   The dumpfile will create the database for you, if it doesn't already exist. It takes about 7 secs to create on my box, and my hardware is not particularly souped up. The database tables under the mysql data directory take up approx 20M of disk space. You can of course delete the dump file after creating the database to free up some space.
   
   
3. Presto! You have a new database called bible. Open your mysql client program with

   mysql -u username -h hostname -pxxxxx bible

   Check that you have all four tables:

   mysql> show tables from bible;
   +-----------------+
   | Tables_in_bible |
   +-----------------+
   | apoc            |
   | bible           |
   | bible_basic     |
   | books           |
   +-----------------+
   

   The King James Version is contained in the bible table, the Basic English bible is in the bible_basic table, the Apocrypha is in the apoc table, and the books table contains mappings of book abbreviations to book names. It also says which testament a book belongs to.

   Do a desc tablename on any table to see the structure. They're all pretty simple.

That's it. Now get playing with some queries.

Problems

With a brand new MySQL installation, it might bomb out with an error

ERROR 1044 (42000) at line 18: Access denied for user 'richselby'@'localhost' to database 'bible'

This means that your mysql user doesn't have permission to use the bible database which it has just created. The solution to this is to run mysql preferably as root or any user with a high degree of privilege, and run the command

CREATE DATABASE bible;
GRANT ALL ON bible.* TO 'richselby'@localhost;

Obviously, stick your own username and host in the command, not mine.