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Our Data Sources

Why I Use AI in These Studies says every language claim on this site has to "resolve to a real entry in a real dataset." This page is the receipt: what those datasets are, where each one comes from, and what it's licensed to let a study do with it.

For the exact copyright lines the publishers require, see Copyright & Scripture Permissions. For how the code technically pulls this together — the build scripts, the query tools — see How This Site Is Built. This page sits between the two: what's here, in plain terms, and why it can be checked rather than taken on faith.

Three tiers, one rule

Every source below falls into one of three license tiers, and the tier decides how it's used — not convenience, not how useful the source would be to quote at length:

  • Open — public domain, or a permissive license (CC BY, CC0). Cited and quoted freely.
  • Restricted, non-commercial — usable now, since this site doesn't monetize, but flagged by name in case that ever changes.
  • Quotation-only — commercially published, copyrighted text or commentary. Named and cited with a short, attributed quotation; never reproduced or bulk-stored at length.
flowchart TD
    subgraph open["Open — cite and quote freely"]
        macula["MACULA Greek & Hebrew<br/>morphology, lemmas, Strong's,<br/>semantic domains, syntax, coreference"]
        sblgnt["SBLGNT<br/>Greek New Testament"]
        wlc["Westminster Leningrad Codex<br/>+ morphhb tagging"]
        eng["WEB / ASV / YLT / KJV<br/>public-domain English"]
        lxx["Brenton Septuagint"]
        xref["OpenBible.info<br/>cross-references"]
    end

    subgraph restricted["Restricted, non-commercial — usable now, flagged"]
        bhsa["BHSA syntax trees<br/>cataloged, not yet queried"]
        byz["Byzantine / TR Greek text"]
    end

    subgraph quotation["Quotation-only — external, never bulk-stored"]
        esv["ESV Study Bible"]
        cbsb["Cultural Backgrounds<br/>Study Bibles"]
        biblt["NIV Biblical Theology /<br/>CSB Ancient Faith<br/>Study Bibles"]
        na28["NA28 Greek New Testament"]
    end

    twot["TWOT Strong's map<br/>ids & glosses: open<br/>full discussion: quotation-only"]

    btdb[("bible-text.db<br/>built inside this repo")]
    sndb[("study-notes.db<br/>built outside this repo,<br/>never committed")]
    output["Word studies, concordances,<br/>and cross-references in<br/>every published study"]

    macula --> btdb
    sblgnt --> btdb
    wlc --> btdb
    eng --> btdb
    lxx --> btdb
    xref --> btdb
    bhsa -.->|cataloged, not queried| btdb
    byz --> btdb
    twot -->|ids & glosses only| btdb

    esv --> sndb
    cbsb --> sndb
    biblt --> sndb
    na28 --> sndb

    btdb --> output
    sndb -->|short, attributed quotes| output

What each tier is for

Open data does the heavy lifting. Nearly everything a word study depends on — the Hebrew and Greek text itself, morphology, lemmas, Strong's numbers, Louw-Nida/SDBH semantic domains, clause-level syntax and coreference, cross-references, and four complete public-domain English translations — is open. This is also the only tier committed into the repo (as references/open-data/ submodules), so it's the tier a reader could go pull and check themselves without asking anyone's permission. Bible Translations & Source Texts is the deep dive on this slice specifically — translation philosophy, textual-criticism tradeoffs, and a per-edition tracking table for every English translation, Hebrew witness, and Greek New Testament text this site draws on, English translations included.

Restricted data fills a specific gap, carefully. The Byzantine/Textus Receptus Greek text is usable now under its non-commercial terms. BHSA — a deeper Hebrew syntax resource than MACULA provides — is cataloged and license-checked but not yet wired into any query tool; MACULA already covers subject, role, construct state, and coreference for both testaments, so BHSA is reserved for an argument that specifically needs full clause hierarchy MACULA doesn't give.

Quotation-only data checks the work; it doesn't write it. The develop-bible-study skill's own rule is commentaries last, not first — used to check a reading already reached from the text, not to form it. Because that tier carries no blanket redistribution right, its database (study-notes.db) is built and stored entirely outside this repo's directory tree, on a separate volume, and never committed — stronger isolation than a .gitignore line, on purpose.

TWOT: one source, split across two tiers

The Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament doesn't fit neatly into one bucket. Its bare facts — a Strong's number pointing to a TWOT root, lemma, and one-line gloss — are open enough to commit as a plain JSON map and use freely. Its actual discussion prose, the paragraphs of argument behind each root, is quotation-only like any other copyrighted reference work: citable by root number and gloss, quotable a sentence at a time with attribution, never reproduced as a full entry.

The line that doesn't move

Whatever the tier, the same rule governs every study: a language or textual claim has to resolve to an actual row in one of these two databases — not recollection, not a plausible-sounding paraphrase. That's what "checkable" means on the why AI page: the receipt is this page, and the tools to go check it yourself are documented on How This Site Is Built.

See also