Lamp BibleDownload

Bible reading companion

Everything you study,
in one place you own.

Lamp Bible puts translations, lexicons, commentaries, reading plans, your notes, writing and highlights behind a single reader — working offline, with no account, and stored in an open format you can export at any time.

Download on the App StoreRead the docs

Free. A Mac beta is on its way.

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Features

Built for reading closely

Not a verse-of-the-day app. Lamp Bible is for people who read a passage, look up a word, check a commentary, and write down what they found.

A study-grade reader

Eleven public-domain and openly licensed texts — English, Spanish and French translations, the Hebrew and Greek, and the Septuagint in Greek and English. The KJV, the BSB, the Hebrew and Greek, and the Greek Septuagint are tagged with Strong’s numbers: tap a tagged word for its lexicon entry. Red letters, headings, poetry and paragraphs are kept as published.

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Study tools beside the text

Commentary, cross-references, your notes or your own writing in a panel beside the passage, scrolling with the verse you are on.

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Reading plans that keep up

Three public-domain Companion plans, or one you make from the passages you want to read: tick off each reading, see the day and the week at a glance, know how long the day will take at your pace, and get a reminder and a widget.

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Highlights with meaning

Four styles and any colour, kept in sets. Name a colour — “Promises”, “Calling” — and the meaning travels with your highlights.

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Notes anchored to verses

Write on a verse, a range or a whole chapter, in formatted text that sits beside the passage and exports as plain markdown.

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Sync on your terms

Keep everything on the device, sync through iCloud Drive, or use your own WebDAV server. No account, ever.

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Search that reaches everything

One index across translations, lexicons, commentaries, books, notes, writing, plans, quizzes and highlights — by word, part of a word, phrase or Strong’s number, narrowed by book, module, tag or highlight colour.

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See how a word is used

Open the analysis from a word’s lexicon entry or a Strong’s search, and Lamp Bible counts that word across the translation: how often it occurs, how it is translated, where it gathers and what it keeps company with. The King James translates ἀγάπη as “love” 86 times — and as “charity” 27.

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  • Translated as

    Every English word translators chose for it, commonest first, on a ring or as a list.

  • By book

    Where it falls, with each book marked when it holds more or fewer than its length predicts — by a margin chance would rarely give.

  • Found with

    The words that share its verses, the most certain first. Tap one to study it next.

  • Every verse

    Tap a translation or a book to list just those verses, each with the word marked.

Mac beta

More room for it on the Mac

The same analysis — its forms and grammar, every translation that tags the word, and charts by book, section or chapter — opens beside a Strong’s search or beside the passage you are reading, and any of its figures goes on a slide.

Writing

Write, then present

Devotionals, sermons and studies get a proper editor rather than a notes field, and go from manuscript to slides without leaving Lamp Bible.

On iPhone and iPad

  • Footnotes that keep count

    Numbered in order of first mention, with any label you like. Tap a marker to reach its note.

  • Tables and scripture

    Quote a passage, link a reference, and lay a comparison out in a table.

  • Pictures and recordings

    Add photos, or record audio straight into the piece.

  • Present mode

    Full screen, at a size you can read from a lectern.

  • Slides in your pocket

    Open decks made on the Mac, and run a Mac presentation as its remote, with speaker notes, a timer and black-out.

Writing on iPhone and iPad →
Mac beta

An agent at your writing desk

Open a workspace beside any piece of writing and work on it with the AI you already use — Codex, Claude Code or OpenCode, signed in with your own account. It works on the same text you do, and looks things up in your library through read-only tools.

AI features are off until you turn on Show AI Features in Settings → AI & Agents. The workspace syncs with your library, so it follows the writing to your other Macs. Your messages go to the provider you choose, never to Lamp Bible.

How agents work →

  • Chat

    Ask for a draft, a cut or a check, on the model and effort you choose for that chat. Its edits go straight into the draft, and every one lands in Revisions, where you can undo it.

  • Terminal

    Your provider’s own tool, continuing the same session.

  • Context

    Sources, an earlier talk, research notes — read-only copies for the agent to work from.

  • Workspace Skills

    Instructions it can follow. Three come built in: one turns the writing into slides, one checks what scripture establishes against what the writing infers, and one examines the Hebrew and Greek behind a claim.

Or bring Lamp to the AI app you already use

With AI features on, turn on Allow other apps to read my library in Settings, and Claude Desktop, Codex, Cursor or opencode can search your library, read passages and commentary, analyse a word, and check and draw a deck — the same read-only tools a workspace agent has.

Turn on Allow other apps to change my writings as well, and an agent there can rewrite a writing’s draft too. Lamp takes the new draft in when you next open that writing’s workspace, and never lets it overwrite an edit of yours it hadn’t seen. With Allow other apps to add reading plans, it can make you a plan over the passages you name.

Claude Desktop installs Lamp in one step and asks first; the others take a snippet you paste. What those apps read goes to the AI provider they use. Turning AI features off withdraws their access too.

Mac beta

A writing desk on the Mac

Visual and Markdown editing, find and replace, a Details pane for series, tags and key scriptures, footnotes edited beside their marker, companion files as tabs, and a Revision History for every change.

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Mac beta

Slide Studio

Build a deck from the writing — scripture, quotations, charts of how a word is used, and speaker notes drawn from the manuscript — in eight layouts. Present full screen, export a PDF, and drive it from your iPhone.

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On the Mac

Study with room to spread out

The Mac app, now in beta, reads the same library and syncs with your iPhone and iPad, and adds the tools that want a bigger screen and a keyboard.

A reader built for the Mac

Tabs and separate windows, a Today page with your plans and where you left off, a study column with commentary, verse notes, original language and dictionary, up to three other translations side by side, and today’s readings in the menu bar.

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Reader Chat

Ask about the chapter in front of you, or the words you have selected. Answers come from your own modules, through your own Codex, Claude Code or OpenCode account, on the model you choose. Off until you turn AI features on.

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Make your own modules

Drop in module JSON, see it validated, and build an integrity-checked .lamp of any of the nine types, ready to install or share.

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The module system

Every piece of content is a module

Translations, dictionaries, commentaries, books, reading plans, quizzes, highlights, notes and devotionals all use the same container: a compressed SQLite package with a .lamp extension. The app treats what ships with it and what you make yourself exactly the same way.

That has a practical consequence. Your notes are not rows locked inside an app database — they are a module you can export, edit as markdown, back up to your own server, and import somewhere else. So are your highlights, with the colour meanings you gave them.

It also means the library is extensible. Build a .lamp file from the published JSON schemas and the app will install it, index it for search and show it in the reader beside everything else.

Or bring what you already own. Import a Bible as USFM, OSIS, Zefania or a SWORD module — locked ones included — and it gets the same word lookups and search as the bundled translations. Long-form books install the same way, with their contents, footnotes and live scripture references.

How modules workAuthoring reference

Module types

Translation
Verse text with Strong’s, morphology, headings and footnotes
Read-only
Dictionary
Lexicon entries keyed by Strong’s number or lemma
Read-only
Commentary
Verse- or pericope-keyed exposition, grouped into series
Read-only
Book
Long-form publications in chapters and sections
Read-only
Plan
Dated reading assignments across the year
Read-only
Quiz
Age-graded questions tied to a plan’s readings
Read-only
Notes
Your verse-anchored study notes
You edit
Devotional
Your long-form writing, with media
You edit
Highlights
Your highlight spans and colour themes
You edit

Your data

No account. No tracking. No network required.

The app has no sign-in and collects nothing about you. Bundled content is on the device after install, so the whole library works in airplane mode. The Mac app checks for updates only if you allow it.

Offline by default

Translations, lexicons, cross-references, commentaries and plans ship inside the app. Nothing you read requires a connection.

Sync you control

Choose local-only storage, iCloud Drive — where your files stay visible in the Files app — or your own WebDAV server such as Nextcloud or Synology.

Exit at any time

Notes and devotionals round-trip through plain markdown. Modules export as .lamp packages. Nothing is trapped.

Start reading

Free, with a library included. iPhone and iPad, and Mac in beta.

Download on the App Store

Questions or a feature request? Open an issue or email lampbibleapp[at]gmail[dot]com.