Open Bible Study

A local, offline, open-source Bible study desktop app — a free "Logos-lite" for deep original-language study. Everything runs on your machine; your notes and highlights stay yours. Installers for macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Features

Reading

• 📖 Translations — KJV, Berean Standard Bible, World English Bible, Young's Literal, Julia Smith (1876), plus the Septuagint (Greek OT) and Masoretic Hebrew as readable, searchable editions. Parallel columns with synced scrolling and a per-column translation picker.
• 🌗 Warm light / dark "paper" theme.

Original languages

• 🔢 Strong's numbers — toggle on/off; click any word (tagged or not) to open its lexicon entry.
• 🔤 Interlinear — word-by-word original with transliteration, Strong's, morphology and gloss; selectable base edition (Masoretic · Septuagint · Textus Receptus · Byzantine · Critical), stack translations under each word, and a "best guess ⇄ all Scripture-attested parses" toggle.
• 📚 Lexicons — Strong's plus scholarly BDB · Abbott-Smith · LSJ, with a full-verse concordance for every word.
• 🔁 Quick Replace — render the original word in place of the English (LORD → Yahweh, love → agape, Christ → Christos), grouped by theme and fully configurable.
• 🅰️ Words tab — hand-browse the entire Greek & Hebrew lexicon by number, transliteration, or meaning.

Textual apparatus

• 🔀 Variants — where the Greek NT editions differ (Critical vs Textus Receptus), and the OT Ketiv/Qere (written vs read) scribal readings from the Masoretic tradition.

People, places & history

• 🌳 Genealogies — browse biblical people; click one to see their family and every verse that mentions them.
• 🗺️ Maps — the places of Scripture plotted by coordinates; click one for its verses (offline).
• 🕰️ Timelines — biblical events in order, each linked to the passage that records it.

Study

• 🔎 Search anything — text, a Strong's number (G26, H430), or a Greek/Hebrew word (accents and points optional — θεος finds θεὸς).
• ✍️ Notes & highlighting — verse highlights and notes in a separate user.sqlite, so app updates never touch your data.
• ✨ AI assistant (opt-in, fully local) — a grounded, offline study assistant that cites the verses it uses (clickable), links Greek/Hebrew words and Strong's numbers, answers "how do I…" questions about the app, lets you select a passage and ask about it, and does RAG over your own PDFs/notes + the verse corpus (semantic search). No account, no cloud.

Tech

Electron 43 · React 18 · TypeScript · electron-vite · Tailwind CSS · Zustand · node:sqlite (Node's built-in SQLite — no native module to compile) · sqlite-vec (vector search) · node-llama-cpp (bundled GGUF inference). Text lives in a bundled read-only resources/bible.sqlite, built by the data pipeline; user data lives in a separate user.sqlite.

Getting started

npm install          # no native builds required
npm run db:build     # download open data + build resources/bible.sqlite (a few minutes)
npm run dev          # launch the app

Other scripts: npm run typecheck, npm test, npm run build (compile), npm run dist:mac (or dist:win / dist:linux) to build an installer. Releases are cut by bumping version in package.json and pushing to main (CI gates on typecheck, tests, data integrity, and a packaged-app smoke test on all three OSes). See docs/RELEASING.md and docs/INSTALL.md.

Data & licensing

Only public-domain / openly-licensed data is bundled, each credited in the app's About screen. Sources include the helloao Free Use Bible API, OpenScriptures Strong's (CC-BY-SA), STEPBible TAHOT/TAGNT + BDB/Abbott-Smith/LSJ lexicons (CC-BY), the Swete Septuagint via First1KGreek (CC-BY-SA), and Theographic Bible Metadata for people/places/events (CC-BY-SA, place coordinates from OpenBible.info). Copyrighted, non-CATSS, and other closed sources are deliberately excluded.

NKJV and NASB are copyrighted and cannot be bundled — the app includes an importer so users who own them (MySword / e-Sword modules) can load their own licensed copies.

The application code is licensed under the MIT License.