Sojourner
The translations, the original texts, the lexicons, the commentaries and confessions, the four book shelves, and where every one of them came from.
What is inside
All of this installs with the program. Nothing is held back, nothing unlocks later, and none of it needs a connection to open.
The eight older ones are the King James of 1769, the American Standard of 1901, Young’s Literal, Darby, Webster’s, the Geneva of 1599, Douay-Rheims, and Tyndale, which has the New Testament, the five books of Moses, and Jonah. The five modern ones are free because their makers let them be shared. They are the World English Bible, the Berean Standard Bible, the Literal Standard Version, and unfoldingWord’s Literal and Simplified Texts.
The Hebrew Old Testament from the Leningrad Codex, the oldest complete copy of the Hebrew Bible, read right to left. Five editions of the Greek New Testament. The Textus Receptus is the Greek text behind the King James. The Byzantine text follows the great number of later copies, and the Westcott and Hort, Tregelles, and SBL editions weigh the oldest copies most heavily. Also the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, and the Latin Vulgate in its Clementine edition. All of them follow English chapter and verse numbering, so they line up with the English beside them.
A lexicon is a dictionary of the Hebrew or Greek words. Strong’s and Thayer’s are the ones most readers start with. The full Brown, Driver, and Briggs is here for Hebrew, with Abbott-Smith and Liddell, Scott, and Jones for Greek, and STEPBible’s brief lexicons for both. Double-click any word in the text for its entry. There is more on the original languages with the rest of the features.
The six volumes of Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible, the forty-five volumes of Calvin, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, Barnes’ Notes on the New Testament, and Spurgeon’s Treasury of David on all one hundred and fifty Psalms. The footnotes Calvin’s translators added are marked as theirs and kept apart from his own words.
The Confession, the Larger Catechism, and the Shorter Catechism, each with its Scripture proofs and a doctrinal index. Hodge and Shaw on the Confession and Vincent on the Shorter Catechism sit right beside them. For the household there are also the Catechism for Young Children of 1840, written to lead a child on to the Shorter, and the Church of Scotland’s Directory for Family-Worship of 1647.
The Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and Chalcedonian creeds, the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort with their Rejection of Errors, all in old public domain translations.
The 1650 Scottish Metrical Psalter in full, all one hundred and sixty-three settings, on a page of its own. Thirty-nine tunes play in the program, so you can hear the line before you sing it.
A neural voice ships with the program and reads any chapter, commentary, or book aloud with no connection. It starts at the page you are on, or at any passage you select, and a list in the player jumps ahead. Words light up as it reads, there is a sleep timer, and you can correct how it says a name. A reference like John viii. 23 is read as John 8, verse 23.
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Reference
These are counts of very different things, so read them one at a time rather than against each other.
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Many King James words meant something different four hundred years ago. Prevent meant to go before, and conversation meant the whole way a man lived. Noah Webster’s dictionary of 1828 still gives those older senses, and his Scripture citations are linked. Double-click an English word and his entry is there beside the others, even for a word as the King James spells it, such as letteth. The Dictionary page has a switch between the Bible dictionaries and Webster.
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There is more on the shelves below. Once installed, their books are read, searched, and linked exactly like the books you add yourself.
The book library
The books come as four shelves, each a separate download on the releases page, so you take only the ones you want and leave the rest. To install one, open Settings, choose Library packs, and pick Install from file. Once a shelf is in, that button reads Install or update a shelf. Each shelf can be removed there too.
Inside the program, Resources sorts every book by shelf and by subject. Books of sermons, theology, commentary, and the Christian life each sit together, and the Fathers are grouped by series.
Beside each verse, a small count shows how many times the books on your shelves cite it. Click it for the list, and click a citation to open the book at that page. It is a quiet way to find out who else has stood over the verse you are reading.
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Bring in your own EPUB, PDF, and MOBI books and your own audio and video. All of it goes into the search box and is scanned for the verses it cites. You can group it by author, by date, or by topic. Recordings play at the speed you choose, and a passage can link straight to the moment in a recording where it is discussed.
Every text in Sojourner is in the public domain or used under an open license, save one harmony of the Gospels, used by its author’s leave as set out below. The About page in Settings lists each source and its terms, with every Creative Commons credit the licenses ask for.
The Hebrew and Greek texts, the lexicons, and the Factbook’s people and places come from STEPBible and Tyndale House, and the parsing and lexicon data from OpenScriptures. The Berean Standard Bible was given to the public domain by its makers in 2023, and the Literal Standard Version and unfoldingWord’s two texts are used under their open licenses. The timeline draws on the Theographic Bible Metadata, and the atlas on OpenBible.info, with coastlines from Natural Earth. The Terrain pack’s heights come from the Terrain Tiles on AWS, with SRTM and GMTED2010 courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey, ETOPO1 from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and EU-DEM produced using Copernicus data and information funded by the European Union. The Imagery pack’s whole-world view is NASA’s Blue Marble Next Generation, from the NASA Earth Observatory and in the public domain, and the rest of it contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2024. Most of the books on the shelves come from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Others come from Project Gutenberg and from old scans kept at the Internet Archive. Alexander on family worship was made for Sojourner by comparing six of those scans word by word, and it has not yet been proofread line by line. The OpenDyslexic font, and the Ezra SIL font that sets the Hebrew, are under the SIL Open Font License.
Webster’s dictionary of 1828 is in the public domain, and this edition of it comes from DataWar’s under the MIT license. The Psalter’s words come from two public domain editions kept at the Internet Archive, checked against the Free Church of Scotland’s text and the printing of 1650. The dates of the church history on the timeline come from Schaff’s History of the Christian Church and his Creeds of Christendom, the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, and the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia.
The creeds and the Three Forms of Unity come from Philip Schaff’s Creeds of Christendom of 1877. Schaff printed Dort’s Rejection of Errors only in Latin, so its English comes from Thomas Scott’s translation of 1818. Calvin is the Calvin Translation Society’s edition.
The 2020 harmony of the Gospels is the work of Robert M. Sutherland, copyright 2020. His stated terms permit reproduction with attribution, so its order of events and their references are used here with acknowledgment of his authorship. His commentary, his Greek text, and the verse text he sets in parallel are not. The 1922 harmony is A. T. Robertson’s and is public domain.
None of the Bibles, commentaries, confessions, books, or reference data in Sojourner was written by AI. Where a source came with summaries written by AI, they were left out.
None of this is my work. It is the labour of Calvin, Henry, Spurgeon, Barnes, Orr, Easton, Smith, Strong, Thayer, Brown, Driver, Briggs, Schaff, the Westminster divines, and the many people who typed their books into machines and gave them away. Sojourner only puts them on one shelf.
Free, on any device
Sojourner 0.4.1 is free. Open it in the browser on any phone, tablet, or computer, or download it for Windows 10 and 11 or for Linux. It needs no account.