"Give the gift of faith – the smallest Bible ever printed on one surface."
That's how the world's first nano Bible is being marketed.
The Jerusalem Nano Bible includes every single dot, comma, chapter and verse of either the New Testament or the Old Hebrew Bible, printed on a 5mm by 5mm silicon chip.
The Israeli company has worked with TowerJazz Semiconductor to develop the nano technology to allow the Bible to be copied in full onto the tiny chips and then mounted onto precious metals and jewelry such as pendants, watches, bracelets and lockets.
The concept was founded in 2013 by war cameraman and video journalist Ami Bentov. He was inspired by the contrast between faith and prayers for peace, and war and conflicts, and so reached out to Tel Aviv University to develop a product with "a message of comfort for all faiths".
His mission is to "reignite the spiritual dialogue about faith through modern technology", allowing believers to carry the word of God with them wherever they go.
The New Testament includes all 27 books written in Greek, the source of the original translation. The Hebrew Bible contains 24 books, including the Torah.
The chips each come with a certificate of verification. They have been inspected using electron microscopes that showed the Hebrew and Greek texts on the chips, made from silicon "wafer", a semiconductor material derived from sand and normally used in precision printing of electronic circuit boards. For an idea of the scale involved, one nanometer is one billionth of a meter, equivalent to a marble set against the earth.
The Jerusalem Nano Bible cannot however be connected to the internet or read using any computer or other electronic device.
