Sources & method

Source basis: Translation ownership, permissions, cases, and policies are taken from rights-holder pages and linked source records. Sources

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Who Owns the Word?

The free way, checked.

The reader hosts public-domain translations alongside openly licensed source-language editions. Here is the provenance behind those texts. For each hosted text: the file the site ingested, the rights record that says it is free, what the processing did to it, and where it serves in the reader. Nothing here is copied from a modern copyrighted translation.

The five hosted texts

Each card is one chain. Follow it link by link: the archive the site downloaded, the page that says the text is free, what was done to it on the way in, and the shelf it serves on.

WEBPublic domain

World English Bible

eBible verse-per-line edition, with Apocrypha and Deuterocanon · completed 2020 · 81 books, 1,425 chapters hosted

Source file
eng-web_vpl.zip — The verse-per-line archive the site ingested.
Retrieved 2026-07-01.
Rights record
Dedicated to the public domain by its makers. The name is a trademark of eBible.org, which may be used here because the text is reproduced unmodified.
World English Bible copyright statement — The public-domain dedication and the trademark terms.
What the processing did
Verse-per-line source file with pilcrows and extra whitespace removed; legacy book codes normalized to standard USFM ids; bridged verse numbers kept as empty slots so numbering matches the printed edition. No words added, removed, or changed.
In the reader
Read John 1 on the Protestant shelf
- Default on
- Protestant: 66 books
- Eastern Orthodox: 28 books
- Ethiopian Tewahedo: 77 books
- Armenian Apostolic: 75 books
- Selectable on
- Catholic: 73 books
- Eastern Orthodox: 50 books

KJVPublic domain

King James Version

1769 Blayney standardized text, eBible 2006 edition · 1611; 1769 text · 66 books, 1,212 chapters hosted

Source file
eng-kjv2006_vpl.zip — The verse-per-line archive the site ingested.
Retrieved 2026-07-01.
Rights record
Public domain by age in the United States and nearly everywhere else. In the United Kingdom the text is still printed under Crown letters patent, which the rights page notes.
KJV (eBible 2006 edition) copyright page — States public domain, with the UK letters-patent exception.
What the processing did
Verse-per-line source file with pilcrows and extra whitespace removed; legacy book codes normalized to standard USFM ids; bridged verse numbers kept as empty slots so numbering matches the printed edition. No words added, removed, or changed. Bracketed translator-supplied words are kept as printed.
In the reader
Read John 1, then switch the reader to KJV
- Selectable on
- Protestant: 66 books
- Catholic: 66 books
- Eastern Orthodox: 64 books
- Ethiopian Tewahedo: 66 books
- Armenian Apostolic: 66 books

DRAPublic domain

Douay-Rheims (Challoner)

1899 American edition, translated from the Latin Vulgate · 1752 revision; 1899 edition · 73 books, 1,349 chapters hosted

Source file
engDRA_vpl.zip — The verse-per-line archive the site ingested.
Retrieved 2026-07-01.
Rights record
Public domain by age, as the hosting record states.
Douay-Rheims 1899 copyright page — States public domain and names the 1899 American edition.
What the processing did
Verse-per-line source file with pilcrows and extra whitespace removed; legacy book codes normalized to standard USFM ids; bridged verse numbers kept as empty slots so numbering matches the printed edition. No words added, removed, or changed.
In the reader
Read Tobit 1 on the Catholic shelf
- Default on
- Catholic: 73 books
- Selectable on
- Protestant: 66 books
- Eastern Orthodox: 71 books
- Ethiopian Tewahedo: 71 books
- Armenian Apostolic: 73 books

BrentonPublic domain

Brenton's English Septuagint

eBible edition of the 1851 translation · 1851 · 53 books, 1,121 chapters hosted

Source file
eng-Brenton_vpl.zip — The verse-per-line archive the site ingested.
Retrieved 2026-07-01.
Rights record
Published in 1851 and now in the public domain, as the hosting record states.
Brenton Septuagint Translation copyright page — Credits Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, dates the translation to 1851, and states public domain.
What the processing did
Verse-per-line source file with pilcrows and extra whitespace removed; legacy book codes normalized to standard USFM ids; bridged verse numbers kept as empty slots so numbering matches the printed edition. No words added, removed, or changed. Bracketed translator-supplied words are kept as printed.
In the reader
Read Genesis 1 on the Orthodox shelf
- Default on
- Eastern Orthodox: 53 books
- Ethiopian Tewahedo: 3 books
- Selectable on
- Protestant: 37 books
- Catholic: 44 books
- Ethiopian Tewahedo: 46 books
- Armenian Apostolic: 46 books

CharlesPublic domain

1 Enoch and Jubilees, R. H. Charles

Charles's translations from The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913) · 1913 · 2 books, 158 chapters hosted

Source file
The Book of Enoch (Charles) on Wikisource — The transcription used for 1 Enoch; its notice states the public-domain basis.
The Book of Jubilees on CCEL — The transcription used for Jubilees, scanned and edited by Joshua Williams, Northwest Nazarene College.
Rights record
Published before 1931, and the translator died in 1931, so public domain in the United States and in countries whose term is the author's life plus 94 years or less.
Charles, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, vol. II (1913) — Scan of the printed Clarendon Press volume. The 1913 publication date is the basis of the public-domain status.
What the processing did
Jubilees keeps CCEL's wording and editorial dates; a source review against the 1913 marginal numbering and the 1917 edition restored 34 verse boundaries and two missing verse markers. 1 Enoch is retained as ingested, with its attribution unchanged.
Jubilees source review — The evidence and the boundary repairs, with a link to the pinned source manifest.
In the reader
Read 1 Enoch 1 on the Ethiopian shelf
- Default on
- Ethiopian Tewahedo: 2 books

Also on the shelf

The reader is more than verse text. These are the other things it hosts, each with the license it actually carries — and two of them are open licenses, not public domain.

Treasury of Scripture Knowledge cross-referencesPublic domain
Parsed into local reader links, so every cross-reference resolves inside the hosted texts. 376,117 cross-reference targets.
tskxref.txt
Nave's Topical Bible (Orville J. Nave, 1897)Public domain
Parsed and verified against the hosted WEB text; references that did not resolve were dropped rather than left pointing nowhere. 5,319 topics.
NavesTopicalDictionary.csv
Open Scriptures Hebrew BiblePublic-domain text; CC BY 4.0 data
Westminster Leningrad Codex text with Hebrew and Aramaic lemma and morphology data. The data is openly licensed, not public domain, so attribution is kept.
openscriptures/morphhb
SBL Greek New Testament + MorphGNTCC BY 4.0 text; CC BY-SA 3.0 parsing
The New Testament source-text layer and the parsing behind the word inspector. Openly licensed, not public domain.
SBL Greek New Testament · morphgnt/sblgnt
Rahlfs Septuagint (1935) + lxx-morphPublic-domain text; CC BY 4.0 morphology
This site adapts and filters the morphology into chapter records and says so, as the license requires; the full data stays at the pinned revision.
lxx-morph · CC BY 4.0
Semantic search indexComputed here from the WEB text
Verse embeddings built locally from the hosted World English Bible. Nothing is fetched from a copyrighted translation at search time. 38,029 verses indexed with Xenova/all-MiniLM-L6-v2.
How the site is built
Chapter narrationGenerated here from the hosted text
Audio read from WEB and KJV chapters by a locally generated voice and served as static files; no text-to-speech service is called when a reader presses Listen. 6 chapters so far.
Narration notes

Where the claim stops

Modern copyrighted translations are discussed in the ledger and the cases. They are never hosted as text.
The original-language editions and their morphology are openly licensed, not public domain. Their attribution and change notices travel with the data.
Wikisource and CCEL are transcriptions of public-domain works. A transcription adds no new copyright to the words, which is why the chain ends at the 1913 volume rather than at a website.
Chapter guides, book briefings, and the search indexes are this site's own work built on the hosted texts. They are not Scripture text and make no claim to be.

The raw manifest behind this page is public/scriptures/SOURCES.md, and the site-wide standard is on the Sources page. If a link in a chain ever breaks, the claim it supports should be read as unverified until it is fixed.