Credits
Scholia costs nothing to use and carries no adverts, no paid tier and no data sales. That is a deliberate choice, not a launch promotion. Building software is expensive; the way to make a study tool that stays free is to build it on data that is already open, and to credit the people who opened it.
Nothing here is original scholarship. Scholia arranges other people's work - a translation, tagged Hebrew and Greek texts, lexicons, cross references, geography, and a knowledge graph of people and events - so those layers can be read against a single verse. The value is in their work. This page exists so the credit lands where it belongs.
The English text of every verse Scholia shows, quotes and searches.
Used for: Every verse shown in the reader, every verse quoted into a note, and the full-text search index.
The Berean Bible texts were placed into the public domain on 30 April 2023, which is why a free project can carry a modern, readable translation at all.
Word-by-word original-language data behind the Lexicon tab: the underlying word, its dictionary entry, its grammar, and how references line up across traditions.
By STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Used for: The Hebrew text of the Old Testament word by word, with prefixes and suffixes separated, disambiguated Strong's tags and ETCBC morphology.
Based on the Leningrad Codex, with variants and translator-followed readings marked in the data.
By STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Used for: The Greek text of the New Testament word by word, with Strong's tagging and morphology.
By STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Used for: The short gloss and grammatical summary shown for each tagged word.
The Hebrew brief lexicon is based on the Abridged BDB from Online Bible; its own header asks that permission be sought from Online Bible before those definitions are relied on in a project, and describes them as guidance only.
By STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Used for: The longer Greek dictionary entries, edited from Liddell-Scott-Jones by Tyndale House scholars.
By STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Used for: Turning terse morphology codes into readable grammar, so a parsing reads as words rather than letters.
By STEP Bible, based on work at Tyndale House, Cambridge
Used for: Reconciling chapter and verse numbers between the English, Hebrew, Latin and Greek traditions so a reference lands on the right verse.
The connections between one passage and another in the Cross references tab.
Used for: Every suggested cross reference, ordered by the community votes that come with the dataset.
The votes are readers' opinions about how useful a link is, not a scholarly ranking.
Identifying where a biblical place actually is, drawing it on a map, and illustrating it.
Used for: Matching biblical place names to real locations, their coordinates, alternative identifications and the verses they appear in.
Many identifications are disputed among scholars; the data records competing proposals and a confidence score rather than a single settled answer.
Used for: The outlines of rivers, regions and settlements attached to many places, and the map tiles the Geography tab renders.
By Wikimedia Commons contributors
Used for: The site photographs shown alongside places.
Each photograph carries its own photographer credit and licence, shown with the image and linked back to its page on Wikimedia Commons.
Who appears in a passage, when it happened, and the reference and background articles behind the History tab.
By Robert Rouse
Used for: People, people groups, events, dates, the verse-by-verse links between them, and the timeline in the People, Events and History tabs.
A ShareAlike dataset: anything built on it has to be shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 - see the note below on what that means here. The quoted Wikipedia articles carry the same condition.
By Compiled for Scholia, with regnal dates checked against Wikidata
Used for: The foreign rulers, world events and era background pieces in the History tab — who ruled Rome, Assyria, Babylon and Persia while a passage was unfolding.
Names and dates are facts and carry no licence; the background prose was written for Scholia. Dates follow conventional scholarly chronology, which differs from the traditional chronology the verse dates use — which is why this material is attached to a whole era rather than pinned to a single verse.
By Matthew George Easton, via the Theographic dataset
Used for: The dictionary articles shown for people, places and terms.
A nineteenth-century work. It is out of copyright, and also out of date in places - read it as a historical reference, not as current scholarship.
Used for: The quoted articles under “Outside the text” and “Texts from the same world” in the History tab - the empires, foreign rulers, cities, inscriptions and archaeology surrounding a passage.
Each card quotes the opening of its article word for word and links back to the page and the revision quoted, so nothing here is a paraphrase. Which article is attached to which passage was decided by an automated process rather than by an editor: a language model proposed candidates and filtered them, but every candidate had to resolve to a real Wikidata entity with a real article or it was dropped, and the model wrote none of the text shown.
Used for: Resolving a proposed article title to an actual entity before anything is quoted, and checking regnal dates for the world context.
Wikidata releases its statements under CC0, which waives copyright entirely. It is used here as the check that turns a suggested search term into a citation: a term that names no real entity never reaches a reader.
Scholia itself is built on open-source software.
By Their respective maintainers and communities
Used for: The website, the note editor and the maps.
Four kinds of terms cover everything above. In plain English, and without pretending this is legal advice:
Please take it from the people who made it rather than from Scholia. STEP Bible specifically asks that others be referred to github.com/STEPBible as the source rather than redistributing their files, so that corrections reach everyone from a single place. The same courtesy applies to the others: each entry above links to its publisher.
Corrections to the underlying data belong with its publisher too - STEP Bible asks for proposed corrections by email so they can be verified. If something is wrong in how Scholia presents that data, that one is on us: tell us at clement@ishimwe.dev.
Open data is not infallible data. Place identifications are contested, dates in the timeline follow one chronology among several, cross references reflect readers' votes, and Easton's dictionary is over a century old. Scholia shows these layers to help you study a passage, not to settle it. Where a claim matters, follow it back to the source.
See also our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.