Sojourner, Bible Study Companion
Scripture beside the commentaries, confessions, and reference works of the Reformed church. It runs on your own Windows machine, it works with the network off, and it is free.
What it is
Sojourner is a free, offline Windows desktop application for reading the Bible beside the commentaries, confessions, and reference works the Reformed church has been handing down for four hundred years. The Hebrew and Greek lie underneath, and the tools for preparing a sermon and leading family worship sit on top. All of it is on your own machine. None of it asks you to sign in.
Most study software wants something from you first. An account. A subscription. A connection. A tier that hides the good commentaries until you pay. Sojourner wants none of it. You install it, and the Bibles, the commentaries, and the reference works are already there.
The word sojourner is what the saints called themselves while they were still walking. You are passing through, and you need the road marked. That is the whole idea behind it.
It is a servant, not a substitute. A program cannot preach to you, baptize you, or feed you at the Lord’s Table. Use it through the week, and be under the Word in your own church on the Lord’s Day.
Download
One installer with everything but the book library inside it. No account to make and nothing to buy. The books come as four shelves, each its own download. They are on the releases page too, further down, under Sojourner Library Pack.
The installer bundles the Microsoft Edge WebView2 runtime that Sojourner draws with, so it installs on a machine that has never been online.
If you already have an earlier version, run the new installer over the old one. Your notes, highlights, sermons, prayers, bookmarks, and installed shelves are all kept. Even so, make a backup first. You will find it in Settings, under Data and backups.
This version was made from readers’ letters. Read-aloud now starts where you are and no longer fails on a long book. The Psalter has a page of its own, the timeline carries the history of the church, every Greek and Hebrew word shows its grammar in plain English, and Webster’s dictionary of 1828 gives the older senses of the King James words. Popups stay on the screen now, and a handful of faults are fixed.
The book shelves have not changed, so the ones you have work with this version as they are. The one exception is a Sojourner Library shelf downloaded before September 25. The copy there now has one more book, so download it again if you want it, then open Settings, choose Book library, and pick Install or update a shelf.
New to the program? A tutorial built into it walks through every feature. You will find it in Settings, under Tutorial.
Neither of these is a problem with the program, but you should know about both before you double-click anything.
Windows will warn you. The installer is not code-signed, because a certificate costs money this work does not have. So SmartScreen shows a blue box the first time you run it. Click More info, then Run anyway. The release page lists the installer’s SHA-256 checksum, a kind of fingerprint for the file, so anyone who knows how can confirm the file is the one that was published. The installer is built by GitHub from the public source code, not on anyone’s own computer, and the release page links the record of that build. If the warning makes you uneasy, that instinct is a good one, and you are welcome to pass on it.
It is a large download. About 584 MB, because the texts and the reading voice are all inside it rather than fetched from a server later. That is the trade. One long download once, and then the program never needs the network again.
Version 0.3.4 means what it says. This is early, real, and in use, but it is not finished. Things will change and some of them will break. If something goes wrong, tell me and I will fix it.
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 this below.
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.
Reference
These are counts of very different things, so read them one at a time rather than against each other.
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.
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 Book library, 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.
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.
How it works
This is the part worth understanding, because it is what the picture at the top of the page is showing. You can open up to eight panes and split the window however you like. Drag a pane to dock it, stack tabs inside it, pick a ready-made arrangement, or save the whole layout as a named workspace that survives a reinstall. The lists that sit beside a page, such as the encyclopedia’s index or a commentary’s contents, can be narrowed or folded away, so even a thin pane keeps room to read.
Then you link them. Click a verse in one pane and every linked pane turns to it. The commentary, the cross references, the confession proofs, the encyclopedia article, and the atlas map all land on the same verse at once. So do the people and places the verse names, its place on the timeline, and the books on your shelves that cite it. You stop hunting and start reading.
One click, and the whole shelf opens to the same page.
You can also set translations side by side, or hold one verse up against every translation at once. Every Scripture reference anywhere in the program, in a commentary or a confession or your own notes, shows the verse on hover.
Greek and Hebrew
Every phrase of the King James text is tagged with its Strong’s number, through both testaments. Turn the interlinear on and it is laid out the way Blue Letter Bible lays it out, in a compact table with one row for each English phrase. Beside the phrase sit its Strong’s number, the Hebrew or Greek word as the text has it, the word’s root and how to say it, and its grammar. Small words the King James leaves untranslated, like the Greek article, share the row of the word they go with. A switch puts the words back into the original order when you want to see the sentence as it was built, and another hides the Hebrew accent marks while keeping the vowels.
The grammar is spelled out in plain English, such as aorist active indicative, third person singular, rather than in code letters. Hover over a word to see it, or open the word’s card, where a Parsing section explains each term. It tells you what the aorist is, what a piel does, and why a noun is genitive. The Hebrew and Greek were checked word by word against their sources through both testaments, and a new Hebrew font sets the vowel points where they belong.
Double-click any word, anywhere in the text, and its entry opens in the lexicon you choose. You can search the Greek and Hebrew without typing accents or vowel points.
Pick any Hebrew or Greek word and Sojourner lays out the facts about it. How often it occurs, how the King James renders it, the forms it takes and the grammar of each, the words related to it, and every place it stands.
Every Hebrew and Greek word is parsed, which means its grammar is labeled, such as its tense or whether it is a command. Search by grammar finds every word of one kind, such as every command in Ephesians. You choose from lists rather than typing code letters, so you do not need to know how the labels are written.
Set the five Greek editions side by side on a verse and see where they read differently. At 1 John 5:7, the words about the three that bear record in heaven, known as the Comma Johanneum, stand only in the Textus Receptus.
None of this asks you to have studied the languages. That is the point of it. A man with a concordance and some patience has been able to do real work in the text for two hundred years, and this only makes the same work quicker.
Who, where, and when
A page of text cannot easily show you who a man was, where something happened, or how it lines up with everything else happening at the time. The Factbook, the timeline, the atlas, and the harmonies are for that.
A page for each of four thousand two hundred and seventy five people, places, and things in the Bible. The Bible has several men named Zechariah, and the Factbook tells them apart by the verses that name them. Each one gets his family, every verse, and what the encyclopedia and the dictionary say about him. Double-click a name in the text and it opens the person that verse means.
Four hundred and sixty four events, from the Creation to Paul in Rome, on a line you can zoom. The eras are marked, the kings of Judah and Israel run side by side, and a strip beside the text shows where the chapter you are reading falls. The dates are approximate, taken from a traditional chronology.
Turn on Church history and the line runs on past the apostles to the present, with two hundred and ninety-six events in ten eras. There are councils, creeds and confessions, lives, writings, and missions. Every date comes from a source, mostly Philip Schaff’s History of the Christian Church, and each event quotes it. Where the sources give no date, the event is left out rather than guessed. A creed or confession opens its text, and a writing opens its book if it is on your shelves. A strip beneath the timeline shows where you are, and you can drag it to move along.
One thousand three hundred and forty two places, each with its coordinates, its modern identification where there is one, and every verse that names it. Fourteen journeys are traced across the map, from Abraham leaving Ur to Paul reaching Rome, and each stop carries its own reference and a line saying what happened there. The old regions are shaded as a soft wash inside a dashed line, since no one ever surveyed their borders and a crisp line would claim more than anyone knows.
Two harmonies of the Gospels, both laid out in four columns. Robert M. Sutherland’s of 2020 runs to a hundred and thirty six events, and A. T. Robertson’s of 1922 to a hundred and eighty five. Each event is titled and paired with where it is told in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, with Acts 1 brought in for the ascension. Where an event appears in more than one Gospel, one button sets the accounts side by side.
One box searches Scripture, the commentaries, the lexicons, the Factbook, the confessions, the encyclopedia, your books, and your own notes, prayers, sermons, and illustrations, with the same rules everywhere.
Put an exact phrase in quotation marks. Ask for either of two words with OR, or leave a word out with a minus sign. Group words in parentheses, ask for words near each other, match the start of a word, or, for those who know them, use regular expressions. A plus sign asks for the exact form and its capitals, so +LORD finds the covenant name as the King James prints it, and skips the ordinary word Lord.
You can also narrow a search by typing a filter into the box itself. There are filters for a book, a translation, a Strong’s number, the words of Christ, and the verses you have notes on, and they are saved with the search. Older spellings match, so shew finds show. Results can be counted by book and by translation, or laid out like a printed concordance, one line for each place the word appears.
Book and chapter navigation, paragraph mode, verse numbers on or off, red letters, five named highlight colors and an underline, bookmarks, a find bar for the open chapter, a focus mode that clears everything else away, and printing.
Seven themes, including sepia, true black, and two built for high contrast. A font made for dyslexic readers, text you can size, and reduced motion for anyone who needs the screen to hold still.
The voice that ships with the program will read any chapter, commentary, or book aloud. In a book it starts at the page you are on and carries on from there, and the page follows the voice. Select a passage and choose Read aloud from here to start somewhere else. A commentary is read a verse or a paragraph at a time, and a list in the player jumps to any piece of it.
Write on a verse, on a chapter, or on a highlight. Templates are there when a blank page is the problem, for observation and interpretation and application, for question and answer, for a sermon outline, for a prayer in response. Type a reference inside any note and that verse is marked in the text from then on.
Highlighting works the same way. Five colors and an underline, each one named for what it marks rather than for its color. Promise in yellow, command in green, doctrine in blue, warning in orange. Then you can pull up every promise you have ever marked, across every book, in one list.
The Mine pane gathers everything you have written on the chapter that is open. Notes, prayers, sermons, and illustrations you delete wait thirty days in a trash before they are gone.
For preachers
The sermon editor treats your points as the outline, so the structure comes out of the manuscript instead of being kept beside it. Passage blocks render live in the translation the sermon is set to. Drag a point to a new place in the outline and it takes its sub-points, and everything written under them, along with it. Open another page while you write and it comes up in a new tab beside the sermon instead of in its place, so the manuscript is only a click away.
Part of a point can be set apart as a block for the explanation, the illustration, or the application. A block can also mark a transition, or carry a name you give it. Each kind has its own color, and the colors carry through to preaching mode and print, so you can find the application under any point at a glance.
Every verse, commentary entry, confession section, lexicon entry, word study, encyclopedia article, and book selection carries a small microphone button. Press it and that text drops into the open sermon with its source line already attached. You never lose track of where a quotation came from.
Thoughts about a text seldom wait for the week you preach it. A single shortcut catches a sermon idea from anywhere in the program, and a selection in the Bible can start one with its verses already attached. Ideas wait in an inbox beside every manuscript and on the Sermons page, until you drag one into a sermon or start a new sermon from it.
Illustrations go into a file of their own, each with where it came from and where you have used it. When you reach for one you have already told in this series, it says so before you put it in.
Twelve templates give you somewhere to begin when the page is blank. One sets out three points, each with an explanation, an illustration, and an application. Others give a verse-by-verse outline, a defender’s outline for answering an objection, and an outline for preaching to children and youth.
Around that sit a six-stage preparation track, timed rehearsals that measure your speaking rate, and a preaching mode with pulpit-sized type and a clock. It will generate slides and export them to PowerPoint, and any line you mark gets a slide of its own. It builds fill-in handouts, prints, and exports to Markdown. Sermons group into a series with a reading plan for the congregation, and a series can give the church a verse a week to learn, printed on cards to hand out. When a sermon has been preached, there is a place to write down how it went.
If you preach from a phone or a tablet, there is a podium file. It is the whole manuscript as one small web page with every passage written into it, so it needs no internet and no program but a browser. A tap turns the page, the text grows or shrinks to suit your eyes, and a clock keeps time against the minutes you meant to take.
The Today page gathers what is actually in front of you. Where your reading left off, today’s portion of your plan, the sermons coming up, the memory cards that are due, and the people you meant to pray for. A new install opens on it. Once your household has begun family worship, it also shows what you will read and learn the next time you gather.
Reading plans come with catch-up tools for the weeks you fall behind, and you can build your own. The prayer journal follows the ACTS pattern, keeps a list of people, nudges you toward the ones you have not prayed for in a while, and prints.
Memory covers Scripture and the catechism together, on a spaced repetition schedule, with three ways to practice. One leaves you only the first letter of every word, which is harder than it looks and works better than reading it over again.
A whole psalm or chapter is learned a part at a time. The next part comes once you have recalled the one before twice in a row, and last of all you say it through from the top. A card can also be turned around, to show you the words and ask where they are found. Ready-made sets will get you started, from the Romans Road and the Ten Commandments to a handful of short verses for little ones.
The Heidelberg Catechism and the Catechism for Young Children can be learned beside the Shorter and the Larger. For the Westminster catechisms, one button turns a proof text for each question you are learning into a Scripture card. The program will read a Scripture card aloud, or every one that is due, so you can practice with your eyes shut or your hands busy. In place of a streak there is a calendar of the days you practiced.
The Psalter is there for singing too, on a page of its own under Devotion. Open a psalm, choose a tune, and press play. The words are set under the melody one stanza at a time, and each psalm remembers the tune you last sang it to. The page opens on the last psalm you had, the music can be made larger, and a long line breaks onto a second staff in a narrow pane.
The words are set line by line as the book of 1650 prints them, checked against two old editions and the Free Church of Scotland’s text. Nothing is modernised, so chuse, shew, and heav’n stay as the book has them.
For the household
Matthew Henry preached a sermon on family religion and called it A Church in the House. Sojourner has a page for keeping that church, and it is made for the one who leads it, who may feel the least ready of anyone.
A gathering takes a few minutes. You read a short passage, sing a psalm, go over the catechism, and pray. If you choose a verse to learn by heart, you say it together before you pray. The Family worship page walks through each step in order, so nothing has to be prepared ahead and no one has to preach.
And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7 (KJV)
If you have never done this before, begin with the first four weeks. That is twenty-eight short readings that tell the story of the Bible, from the creation to the new creation. Each week has a psalm from the 1650 Psalter with its tune to play, and a new catechism question comes every other time you meet. You start with the Catechism for Young Children or the Shorter Catechism. The Heidelberg can be chosen in their place, and the Larger, with its long answers, is there for when the children are older.
Each reading comes with three questions to talk over, one each for faith, love, and hope. What does this passage teach us to believe about God? How does it call us to love God and our neighbour? What does it give us to hope for? You can reword them, add one, or take one away in the family settings, and your own go on the printed sheet too. Tonight’s catechism question comes with its answer, to say together until the children have it. Earlier questions come round again with the answer hidden until someone has had a try, so they are not lost. At prayer time the page offers three names from your prayer list, the three you have gone longest without praying for. The Lord’s Prayer is there for the nights when words will not come.
The Gather round button puts the same steps on the whole screen in large type, for the kitchen table or the television. Press Amen at the end and the reading and the catechism move on to the next place. The page counts the times you gather, not the days on the calendar, so a missed night costs nothing. You pick up where you left off. There is no streak to break, only a quiet mark for each day you met.
The Print this week button puts the next seven readings, the psalm, the catechism questions, the memory verse, and the names to pray for on one sheet. For the one leading, the page gives a little plain counsel and points you to the old helps. The Directory for Family-Worship, which the Church of Scotland approved in 1647, is on the Confessions page beside the Catechism for Young Children of 1840. James W. Alexander’s Thoughts on Family-Worship is on the Sojourner Library shelf.
For Windows
If you are looking for a free Bible program for your Windows PC, Sojourner is one. It costs nothing, it needs no account, and once it is installed it works with no internet connection at all. It is a Bible study app for the desktop, not a phone app or a website.
Anyone who has used e-Sword or theWord will know the idea. The Bible sits in one pane and the commentaries follow along in another. Sojourner differs in what comes in the box. Matthew Henry, Calvin, the Westminster Standards, the Three Forms of Unity, the Psalter, and the Hebrew and Greek with their lexicons are there when it opens, chosen for readers in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition. Nothing has to be hunted down and added one module at a time.
Logos and Accordance do far more, and they cost far more. Sojourner is not trying to be them. It is for the pastor, the elder, the family, and the student who want Scripture and the best of the old books close at hand without a bill.
It runs on Windows only, and nothing syncs between computers. It does not update itself either.
It cannot include the ESV, the NIV, or the NASB, because they are under copyright. The same is true of BDAG and HALOT, the standard scholarly lexicons for Greek and Hebrew. If you own a modern translation as a Zefania XML file, you can add it yourself.
Convictions
Sojourner uses the network for exactly one thing. You press a button on the About page to check whether a newer version exists. That is all. There is no account, no sync service, and no telemetry of any kind. Nothing you read, search, write, or pray is reported anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to go. Even the book shelves install from files you download yourself, so they can just as well arrive on a USB stick.
Everything you write lives in one file on your machine. Snapshots and automatic backups run in the background. You can export the whole database and import it again, run an integrity check, keep a copy in a OneDrive or Dropbox folder if you want one, and look at your own reading statistics on a heatmap. If the program ever crashes, the log stays on your computer.
This is not a marketing position. It is the only arrangement that makes sense for a book you are supposed to read for the rest of your life. Companies fold and services shut down. A file on your own disk does not.
Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path.
Psalm 119:105 (KJV)
No program does that. But a good tool can keep you from setting the lamp down.
Every text in Sojourner is in the public domain or used under an open license. 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. 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, reproduced here with acknowledgment of his authorship as his terms ask. 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.
If something does not work, or a text is wrong, or you want the program to do a thing it does not do, write to sojourner at gentleking.org. Bug reports are genuinely welcome and corrections to the texts most of all.
Sojourner is published by Gentle King and given away free. It always will be. The same site sets out the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Reformed faith, and Scripture for the hard hour.