Data Sources & Licenses

Clear, the Bible-study feature on ClearBible.ai, examines the original Hebrew and Greek text of Scripture. That work stands on openly licensed scholarly datasets built by others. This page credits each source and states its license. We are grateful to every team named below.

Sermon Builder also uses a list of Bible cross-references (item 7) and STEPBible’s comparison of printed Greek New Testaments (item 9).

We do not redistribute any of these datasets. We ship small, reformatted extracts built for this one application, and each entry below says what was derived from what.

1. OpenScriptures OSHB / morphhb — Hebrew Old Testament text and grammar

The Hebrew Old Testament word stream Clear examines (the Westminster Leningrad Codex with word-by-word grammar tagging) comes from the OpenScriptures Hebrew Bible project.

Source: github.com/openscriptures/morphhb. License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0). Derived data: Clear's per-verse Hebrew token files (word, lemma, morphology) are reformatted from this source. The Sermon Builder's Scripture check reads each Hebrew verb's grammatical form from them.

2. CNTR KJTR — Greek New Testament text and grammar

The Greek New Testament word stream (a Textus Receptus edition with per-word Strong's numbers and grammar) comes from the Center for New Testament Restoration, © Alan Bunning.

Source: github.com/Center-for-New-Testament-Restoration/KJTR. License: CC BY 4.0. Derived data: Clear's per-verse Greek token files are reformatted from this source. The Sermon Builder's Scripture check reads each Greek verb's grammatical form from them.

3. Brown–Driver–Briggs and Strong's — Hebrew lexicons (possible word meanings)

The range of meanings Clear can report for a Hebrew or Aramaic word comes from the unabridged Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament by Brown, Driver and Briggs (1906), which is in the public domain, in the XML edition prepared by the OpenScriptures project (structure and index files licensed CC BY 4.0). Where that transcription still lists fewer than two senses for a word, the public-domain Strong's Hebrew Dictionary supplies the rest. OpenScriptures notes its transcription is still being completed, especially its scripture references, so the places where BDB itself cites a verse under a sense are fewer than in the printed book.

Clear also reads two small Tyndale-created fields from STEPBible's TBESH file (item 5): the one-word gloss for each entry, and the letters that tell one Hebrew word apart from another spelled the same way. TBESH's longer Meaning field, which its own header says is based on Online Bible's Abridged BDB and needs Online Bible's permission, is not used.

4. Abbott-Smith and Dodson — Greek lexicons (possible meanings and verse-specific citations)

The meanings of a Greek word — and the places where a lexicon itself cites a specific verse under a specific sense — come from the TEI edition of G. Abbott-Smith's A Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament, prepared by the Translatable Exegetical Tools project, which states that the lexicon and its markup are in the public domain. In Clear's sense data, the short plain-English meaning comes from the Dodson Greek-English Lexicon by John Jeffrey Dodson, also placed in the public domain. For a small number of words neither covers, Strong's Greek dictionary supplies a definition (item 8). The one-word gloss stored with each Greek word is not Dodson's: it is the short gloss written by Tyndale House scholars in STEPBible's TBESG file (item 5).

Neither source requires attribution. We credit them because you deserve to know where the evidence comes from. Clear reformats them into per-verse extracts and keeps each citation attached to the specific sense the lexicon listed it under.

5. STEPBible TAHOT — Hebrew sense-activation data

TAHOT (the Translators Amalgamated Hebrew OT) tags every Hebrew word occurrence with the sub-meaning scholars judged it carries in that verse. Clear uses it to say which meaning was assigned to a Hebrew word in a particular verse — not just what the word can mean.

STEPBible attribution (items 3-5): Data created by www.STEPBible.org based on work at Tyndale House Cambridge, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: github.com/STEPBible — please refer there for the original data rather than to our copies.

Changes made (noted as the license asks): Clear does not ship the raw files. It ships reformatted extracts for this application — TBESH's short glosses and sub-entry letters keyed into Clear's Hebrew sense file, and per-occurrence activated senses derived by joining TAHOT's tags to those glosses, paired to the OSHB word stream with written-form validation; and TBESG's short glosses as the one-word gloss on each Greek word. Five common Hebrew glosses are hand-adjusted (beginning, created, God, heavens, earth). Where Tyndale's gloss lists more than one option (“son: child”, “he/she/it”), only the first term is kept, and where a word has several rows only the first row's gloss is used. The Hebrew meanings themselves come from Brown–Driver–Briggs (item 3), not from TBESH, and the Greek meanings from Abbott-Smith and Dodson (item 4), not from TBESG.

Components inside those files carry their own notices, and the CC BY 4.0 statement above covers the STEPBible-created material rather than every component uniformly:

• TBESH's short Gloss field was created by Tyndale scholars and is what Clear uses. Its longer Meaning field is described in the file itself as based on the Abridged BDB by Online Bible, © Larry Pierce of OnlineBible.net, “for guidance only”, with permission to be gained from Online Bible before the definitions are applied in a project. Clear does not read that field.
• TBESG carries no Online Bible notice — it is based mainly on Abbott-Smith with Tyndale corrections, and Clear reads only its short Gloss column; some entries are filled from Middle Liddell material that TBESG attributes to the Perseus Digital Library, whose electronic lexica repository states CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise indicated.
• STEPBible's TAGNT is not used by Clear (the Sermon Builder uses its edition lists — item 9). Its context-sensitive sub-meanings derive from the Open Greek New Testament project (CC BY-SA 4.0), which is why it is not simply enabled alongside the others.

6. CrossWire — King James Version (1769) with Strong's Numbers and Morphology

Clear's word-level link between the King James Version text and the original-language words is derived Strong's-alignment data: exact phrase-to-Strong's-number pairs extracted from CrossWire's OSIS edition of the KJV with Strong's Numbers and Morphology (the SWORD "KJV" module, kjv2011 edition). We do not redistribute the module itself.

Attribution: King James Version (1769) with Strong's Numbers and Morphology, courtesy of the CrossWire Bible Society and the KJV2003 Project, with thanks to The Bible Foundation and Dr. Maurice Robinson. Module information: crosswire.org/sword/modules (KJV).

License: this data is provided for any purpose under CrossWire's stated license. In CrossWire's own words:

"…we in turn offer the KJV2003 Project text freely for any purpose. Any copyright that might be obtained for this effort is held by CrossWire Bible Society © 2003-2023 and CrossWire Bible Society hereby grants a general public license to use this text for any purpose."

GPL notice: the module's distribution license is listed by CrossWire as the GPL — the GNU General Public License. This notice is carried here together with the grant above.

The KJV text itself: CrossWire notes that "the rights to the base text are held by the Crown of England" — the King James Version text remains under Crown rights in the United Kingdom.

7. Bible cross-references — OpenBible.info, the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge and the Berean Standard Bible (Sermon Builder)

When Sermon Builder's Writer or Analyze brings in another passage to support a point, it chooses only from passages linked to the sermon's verses in three published cross-reference lists, merged into one set. Links that two or more lists agree on come first, then links readers voted helpful.

Cross-references from OpenBible.info, licensed CC BY 4.0. OpenBible.info says its list draws mainly from the public-domain Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, with reader votes on how helpful each link is.

The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge (19th century, public domain), from the CrossWire Bible Society's TSK module, which CrossWire lists as public domain. A few misread references were corrected against the 1889 printed edition.

Parallel passages and quotation references from the Berean Standard Bible, which its publishers have dedicated to the public domain. The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible, BSB is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, unfoldingWord, Bible Aquifer, OpenBible.com, and the Berean Bible Translation Committee.

Reformatted by ClearBible.ai: the three lists are matched verse by verse, each link keeps the lists that support it, and links readers voted down are not used.

8. Open Scriptures — Strong’s Greek and Hebrew dictionaries

James Strong’s Greek dictionary (1890) and Hebrew dictionary (1894) are in the public domain. The digital copies we use are the JSON editions published by the Open Scriptures project, which state “Copyright 2009, Open Scriptures. CC-BY-SA.” (Greek) and “Copyright 2010, Open Scriptures. CC-BY-SA.” (Hebrew). Open Scriptures converted them from XML prepared by Ulrik Petersen (Greek) and from a source by David Instone-Brewer, edited by David Troidl (Hebrew).

They supply each word’s short definition and the King James renderings listed for it, used in Clear’s word pages and word data and in the Sermon Builder. The Hebrew meanings in item 3 come from a different edition.

License: the files say “CC-BY-SA” but do not name a version. We offer our adapted copies under CC BY-SA 4.0. Versions 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 of that license let adapted copies be shared under a later version; only version 1.0 does not. If Open Scriptures names a different version, we will follow it.

Changes made: the entries are reorganized into per-word and per-verse extracts, with extra spaces trimmed and a language label added. On Clear’s word pages and word cards, abbreviations are spelled out (“i.e.” becomes “that is,”) and grammar labels such as “transitively” are left out. Clear’s study screens may also shorten a long definition, marking the cut with “…”. The dictionary wording is otherwise unchanged.

9. STEPBible TAGNT — where printed Greek New Testaments differ (Sermon Builder)

The Sermon Builder’s Scripture check reads one extract built from this file: the New Testament places where the Greek text behind the King James Version and the Nestle-Aland text differ by a whole verse or clause, or where the Nestle-Aland text prints words in double brackets. A Scripture-check card may say that Bibles differ at such a verse, or that some printed Greek texts set the words apart, as this data shows.

Attribution: Data created by www.STEPBible.org based on work at Tyndale House Cambridge, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Source: github.com/STEPBible — please refer there for the original data rather than to our copies.

Changes made: we ship a list of verses where those two Greek texts differ, worked out mechanically from TAGNT’s word types and edition lists, with the Greek and TAGNT’s word-for-word English for the words that differ. TAGNT’s grammar column, its context-sensitive sub-meanings and its Spanish glosses are not used, and its own variant notes are kept in the extract but never used or shown.

Components with their own notes: TAGNT’s English glosses are, in its words, “Based on Berean Study Bible, with permission”.

The engineering record behind this page — verbatim license texts, retrieval dates and versions, and the build scripts that derive each extract — is kept in the project's THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES file. Questions about any of these sources or our use of them: contact support@clearbible.ai.