“Your word is a lamp to my feet
and a light to my path.”
A complete, carefully typeset edition of the Berean Standard Bible — free to read, free to copy, free to give away. It works offline, on any device you already own. There is no account, no email, and no price.
Take it with you
Two choices: which edition — what is in the book — and which format, which is how it is set. Nothing here costs anything, so neither is a choice you can get wrong.
Three editions, one text
The Scripture is identical in all three, word for word. What changes is the apparatus around it — footnotes, outlines, cross-references, and the topical index.
Standard Most people
- Footnotes at the foot of the page that cites them
- 67 pages of book outlines, and cross-references after each section heading
- The only edition offered in every page size and layout
Reference For study
- Everything the Standard has, plus a topical index of 46,592 topics
- For finding what Scripture says on a subject, not just where a word appears
- Two-column tablet and tabloid only, to keep the size reasonable
Reader’s For reading
- No footnotes, no outlines, no cross-reference lists
- Set for reading straight through rather than looking things up
- Compact only — 580 pages shorter than the Standard compact
The ePub is for reading, the PDFs are for writing on
Which one you want depends less on the device you own than on how you mean to use it.
Take the ePub Any screen
- Opens in Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books and most e-reader apps
- Reflows to the screen — you pick the type size and it repaginates
- The smallest download by a wide margin
Take a PDF Handwriting
- For handwritten notes with an Apple Pencil, an S Pen or a similar stylus
- Fixed pages that never reflow, so a note stays where you drew it
- The annotation editions give a third of the page over to margin you can write in
A PDF is only as good as the app you open it in. For handwriting you want pencil annotation and a reader that follows the file’s table of contents — without the second you are scrolling by hand through a few thousand pages. On an iPad the built-in Preview will not do both; Goodnotes will, for a nominal subscription. A reMarkable does both as it comes. Each PDF is cut to the smallest screen in its class, so every device in that class scales the page up rather than down.
The Standard edition
The whole apparatus — footnotes, outlines and cross-references — in every size and layout it is made in.
| Format | Page size | Layout | Pages | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ePub | Reflows to any screen | — | — | 3.2 MB | Download |
| Compact · 105×140 mm | Single column | 3,291 | 7.2 MB | Download | |
| Tablet · 148×210 mm | Single column | 1,782 | 6.1 MB | Download | |
| Tablet · 148×210 mm | Two column | 1,338 | 6.2 MB | Download | |
| Tablet · 148×210 mm | Annotation margin | 2,124 | 6.6 MB | Download | |
| Tabloid · 179×265 mm | Single column | 1,305 | 5.7 MB | Download | |
| Tabloid · 179×265 mm | Two column | 928 | 5.7 MB | Download | |
| Tabloid · 179×265 mm | Annotation margin | 1,508 | 6.0 MB | Download |
The Reference edition
The Standard edition with the topical index bound in at the back. Two-column tablet and tabloid.
| Format | Page size | Layout | Pages | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ePub | Reflows to any screen | — | — | 5.1 MB | Download |
| Tablet · 148×210 mm | Two column | 2,088 | 16.1 MB | Download | |
| Tabloid · 179×265 mm | Two column | 1,420 | 15.6 MB | Download |
Two columns, two sizes, for one reason: size. An index of this scale added to a whole Bible makes a large book however you set it, and two columns is what keeps it reasonable — these are already the biggest downloads here. It loses nothing by being set narrow; its lines are short to begin with. All 140,571 of its verse links are checked before release, and none points anywhere that does not exist.
The Reader’s edition
Scripture and section headings, and nothing else on the page. Compact size only.
| Format | Page size | Layout | Pages | Size | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ePub | Reflows to any screen | — | — | 2.7 MB | Download |
| Compact · 105×140 mm | Single column | 2,711 | 7.1 MB | Download |
Compact only, because the compact page is the one that suits reading. A line you read continuously wants to be short enough that your eye finds the next one without hunting — which is why a novel is the size it is and not the size of a newspaper. On a larger page the line grows too wide, and an edition built for reading straight through would be working against itself.
Page counts are exact and fixed by the build. File sizes are approximate.
Still not sure? Take the Standard ePub — you can always come back for another. One caution if you print: these are whole Bibles, and the shortest edition runs 928 pages. Print the passage you need, not the book.
A whole Bible, made easy to actually use
The Berean Standard Bible is a modern, readable translation that its translators placed in the public domain. This edition takes that text and gives it the navigation, typography and care that a book you read every day deserves.
A complete Bible
- All 66 books and 1,189 chapters, Old and New Testament
- A modern translation, reproduced without alteration
- Footnotes preserved and linked both ways, in the editions that carry them
Built to navigate
- A book-level table of contents that works
- An alphabetical book list, for when you don’t know the order
- Valid anchors on every chapter and verse
Works offline, forever
- Every link resolves inside the file itself
- No account, no server, no connection needed
- A file you own, that cannot be revoked
Set like a real book
- Poetry indented at two levels, read from the print edition
- The body face travels with the file, so pages break the same everywhere
- Column widths held to a measured floor, never narrower than reads well
Nothing watching you
- No account to create and no email to hand over
- No telemetry, analytics or tracking of any kind
- We do not know who downloads it, and would rather not
Free to give away
- Public domain — genuinely, not “free to try”
- Copy it, share it, host it on your own church’s site
- No permission or attribution required
Checked, not just converted
An edition of Scripture is worth only as much as its accuracy. Every release is rebuilt from the official text and refuses to publish unless all four of these hold.
Every verse is diffed against the official Berean Standard Bible text before a release is allowed out, and the ePub has to pass the W3C’s own validator with zero errors. That last number is the one worth dwelling on: no link in this book points anywhere but inside it. Nothing to load, nothing to track you, and nothing that stops working the day a website goes down.
Public domain, in earnest
Not a license with conditions attached. The text and this edition of it are both dedicated to the public, permanently.
The Holy Bible, Berean Standard Bible is produced in cooperation with Bible Hub, Discovery Bible, OpenBible.com and the Berean Bible Translation Committee, who dedicated this text of God’s Word to the public domain in April 2023. Attribution is not required of us; we give it gladly.
The typographic design, formatting, navigation structure and linking apparatus prepared for this edition are dedicated to the public domain under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. You may copy, modify and redistribute them, in whole or in part, for any purpose, without permission and without attribution.
The book outlines and the topical index are reproduced from reference works published by Bible Hub and are used by permission; they are not covered by that dedication.
Learn more about the translation at berean.bible.
Apps, when they are ready
We are building app editions with extended study features — search, notes, reading plans and cross-references. They will be free too, on every platform we can reach. We are not naming a date, because a date we miss helps nobody.
Everywhere we can list it, it will be listed at no cost. Where a store will not permit a price of zero, we will not be there.
Please give it away
Copy it onto a family member’s tablet. Print a chapter for a study group. Put the files on your church’s own website and never mention where you got them. That is what it is for, and you do not need to ask.
The CC0 dedication waives copyright and related rights in the apparatus this project authored. It does not extend to the book outlines or the topical index, which are reproduced by permission, and it does not grant any rights in the name “The Lantern Bible”, in “Lacy Digital Labs”, or in any associated marks — copy and redistribute the work freely, but publishing a different text under this name would misdescribe it. The Lantern Bible is published as a ministry of Lacy Digital Labs, LLC and is not sold.