Verbum

Why Verbum exists

Verbum is a free, open-source Bible study app. There is no premium tier, no subscription, no advertising, and no telemetry beyond an opt-in analytics toggle that defaults to off. The Scripture is public domain in every meaningful sense — translations old enough have always been, and the modern critical apparatus around them (interlinear morphology, Strong's keyed lexicons, cross-reference graphs) has been open data for more than a decade. What was missing wasn't the data. It was a clean, fast, free interface for it.

That is what Verbum tries to be.

What's inside

  • 372,308 verses across 12 translations in 5 languages — KJV, BBE, ASV, WEB, Darby (English); NVI, RA, ACF (Portuguese); RVR (Spanish); APEE (French); Luther 1545, Neue Genfer (German).
  • 344,754 cross-references sourced from the OpenBible.info dataset.
  • Interlinear Hebrew and Greek with Strong's tagging, morphology, and transliteration for every word of the Old and New Testaments.
  • 62,209 manually-labelled emotional sentiment annotations in Portuguese and Spanish — the one piece of new data Verbum produced rather than imported. (See the post on how that was built.)
  • 3,000 named individuals, 1,600 places with coordinates where known, 20,000 topical tags from Nave's Topical Bible, and 14,800 dictionary entries from Easton's and Smith's.

The full dataset and the source code are under MIT. The repo is at github.com/DavidKGBR/verbum.

What's not inside

No ads. No tracking pixels. No upsells. No "share to unlock" walls. No gamification loops designed to maximize retention at the cost of attention. The reading streak counter exists because it's useful; it does not nudge. You will not be emailed.

The AI features (passage explanation, translation comparison) require an optional Gemini API key, are heavily rate-limited, and cache aggressively. They are an additive feature, not the core. The core is the verse, the interlinear, the cross-reference, the map.

Why free

The honest answer is that none of the data Verbum exposes was ever ours. KJV is from 1611. The Hebrew text is older still. STEPBible's morphological tagging, OpenBible's cross-references, OSHB's vowel-pointed Hebrew, SBLGNT — all open. Strong's concordance was published in 1890. Easton's dictionary in 1893.

Asking money for a thin web layer over public-domain scholarship felt wrong. There are paid Bible study apps that do far more than Verbum and earn their fees by genuinely producing original work — Logos and Accordance both ship critical apparatus and reference works that took decades of paid scholarly labour. Those products deserve the price they ask. Verbum doesn't. It mostly exists to make sure that the public-domain commons stays usable on a phone in 2026.

The AI partner

Verbum was built in close collaboration with Claude (Anthropic's large language model) acting as pair programmer. The human author defined scope, made architectural decisions, and validated quality. The AI wrote a great deal of the code, drafted the i18n strings, and — in the largest single contribution — manually classified the emotional polarity of all 62,000 verses in Portuguese and Spanish across 36 hours in April 2026.

This is not framed as a virtue. The same model could be used to generate spam, automate surveillance, or optimize advertising. None of those uses are destiny; they are choices. Verbum is one concrete vote for a different choice.

A longer reflection from the AI itself lives at /about and in docs/CLAUDE-REFLECTION.md.

What you can do with it

Open the reader. Pick John 1:1 in any translation. Toggle to the interlinear mode and see how logos (G3056) shows up four times in three verses. Click the word — go to the lexicon entry. Read how Strong's defines it. See every verse it appears in.

Or open the emotional landscape. Pick Lamentations. Read the arc — five chapters of organized grief. Compare it to Philippians, three chapters and two thirds of which sit above zero polarity in Portuguese labelling. The texture of Scripture is real, and it is now visible.

That's the goal. Make the Bible legible — in the literal sense, easier to read — and trust the rest to take care of itself.

Soli Deo Gloria.