The Souldiers Pocket Bible

The Souldiers Pocket Bible (aka Cromwell's Soldiers' Pocket Bible, The Soldier's Pocket Bible, Cromwell's Soldier's Bible) was a pamphlet version of the Bible that was carried by the soldiers of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army during the English Civil War.

The Pocket Bible was first issued in 1643. A copy of it was discovered by an American book collector in 1854, in the form of an octavo booklet (5½ × 3″, 136 × 78mm). The pamphlet was only 16-pages-long, containing about 150 verse quotations from the Geneva Bible,all of them related to war topics. A number of the quotations intended to inspire the morale of the soldiers derived from the Book of Deuteronomy and the Book of Exodus, promising that God fights for his people against their enemies.

There are only two surviving copies of the original 1643 edition of the pamphlet. An 1693 version, with alterations reflecting the King James Version, has only one surviving copy. Several copies of the text survive in American reprints dating to the American Civil War of the 1860s, because the American Tract Society had decided to produce thousands of copies for use by the soldiers of the Union Army. About 50,000 copies of the Pocket Bible were printed for the Union soldiers.