Eight complete English translations are included with A Biblical Lens. They are part of the app, and each can be downloaded for reading without an internet connection.
The seven additional datasets come from Scrollmapper Bible Databases. Dataset license · Exact source revisions and checksums. Text and verse numbering are preserved from those datasets; empty verse entries are omitted rather than filled from another translation.
NIV and NKJV are licensed translations, loaded chapter by chapter through API.Bible. They need an internet connection and are not saved for offline reading, as their licence requires. The publisher’s copyright notice appears below each chapter. Listen plays the NIV audio Bible read by David Suchet, or, while you read the BSB, the BSB read by Michael, an AI voice made with Kokoro-82M; offline, your device’s voice reads the translation on screen instead.
The study notes and articles shown for a selected verse, People of the Bible, and the book introductions are adapted from Tyndale Open Study Notes, © 2022 Tyndale House Publishers, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The original work by Tyndale House Publishers is available for free at tyndaleopenresources.com. The text is unchanged; its markup is reformatted, some styling is dropped, and verse references become links in the reader. The reformatted notes are shared under the same license; source and checksum.
Commentaries in the library are public-domain works: Matthew Henry’s Commentary, the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary, John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible, Adam Clarke’s Commentary, Keil and Delitzsch’s Commentary on the Old Testament, and John Calvin’s Commentaries. They load a chapter at a time from the Free Use Bible API (bible.helloao.org), and chapters you’ve read are kept for offline reading. That source’s copy has mistakes: some chapters hold another chapter’s or another book’s commentary, and some chapters the authors wrote are missing. A Biblical Lens checks every chapter before showing it, shows misfiled commentary under the chapter it belongs to when that’s clear, and otherwise says the chapter isn’t available; a chapter marked unavailable may still exist in the printed commentary. Verse references are linked by A Biblical Lens (Keil and Delitzsch’s Hebrew verse numbers link to the English verse), and a few broken characters are repaired; the text is otherwise unchanged. Matthew Henry’s commentary on Romans through Revelation was completed by other ministers after his death in 1714.
Tap any word in the reader to see its English definition and the Greek or Hebrew word behind it. English definitions come from Princeton WordNet 3.1 (WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University; used under the WordNet License, reproduced in the dictionary’s source notes), kept for the words found in the bundled translations. Names and abbreviations are shown only when they are biblical (so “he” is never helium, and “Aaron” is Moses’s brother), and slang, informal, sexual-practice, trademark, sports and computing senses are left out. A Biblical Lens defines some words itself, and shows those meanings first: older English forms (thou, art, wilt, wherefore), words the KJV uses in an older sense (charity means love, prevent means go before, suffer means allow, corn means grain), and Bible words WordNet lacks or defines poorly (ephod, Selah, Sheol, cherubim). The word card labels them “older English”, “in the KJV” or “Bible”. Fuller Hebrew definitions come from James Strong’s A Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Hebrew Bible (1894, public domain), in the JSON edition by Open Scriptures (CC BY-SA); source and changes. The original word matched to an English word comes from STEP Bible’s word-by-word English glosses (below). When no gloss matches, the card shows the word it’s usually translated from, marked “Best match”. Either way it can pick a nearby word, so the card always lets you choose another. LORD and GOD in capitals are matched to God’s name (YHWH). Small words (the, of, not) often belong to another word’s grammar, so they match only a word glossed with exactly that word.
Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic word data are credited to STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House Cambridge, under CC BY 4.0. Exact source files, revision, checksums and conversion notes.
Greek: TAGNT word forms, transliterations, grammar, edition markers and variants, with TBESG lexical entries based on Abbott-Smith and other identified sources. Hebrew/Aramaic: TAHOT word forms and grammar, with TBESH dictionary forms, transliterations and STEP lexical glosses. The separately restricted longer Hebrew Meaning column is excluded.
Data is reformatted into per-book JSON. Words are filed under the verse numbers English Bibles use: where the Greek edition numbers a verse differently (Galatians 2:19–20, Philippians 1:16–17, Revelation 12:18/13:1, 3 John 14–15 and about 30 more), its words move to the English verse, and Psalm titles are part of verse 1. Grammar is described in STEP’s own words, from its expansions of each morphology code (TEHMC and TEGMC). When a word’s exact sense isn’t in the lexicon, the word’s own STEP note gives its headword and gloss. Greek definitions come from Abbott-Smith, whose references to the Septuagint’s books of Kingdoms are given as 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings; Greek lexicon markup is converted to plain text, and long definitions end with “…”. Word-omission variant rows without a word form are skipped. The word card notes Greek words found only in some editions (such as the Textus Receptus alone) or missing from the text the KJV was translated from, Hebrew words supplied from ancient versions, and read (Qere) forms. Numbers beyond Strong’s range, and STEP’s finer sense numbers, are labelled STEP. These are scholarly source editions and annotations, not surviving original manuscripts. Ask AI answers from the WEB text of the chapter, not from these records, so check its answers against them and against Scripture.