Terms

The short version

• Free to read — every page and every tool on this site is free, and nothing here asks you to pay to read it.
• No account — there is no signup, no password and no profile. Nothing you do here creates a record of you on any server.
• The texts are open — every translation here is public domain or openly licensed. What you may do with a passage depends on which one, and the licence is always shown.
• Ads, and blocking them — this site carries advertising. Blocking ads is your call, and nothing here is withheld from you for doing it.
• Money is Patreon’s — supporting the site is optional, and every pledge, charge, change and cancellation happens on Patreon, not here.
• No verdicts — the analysis sections report positions and attribute them. GEBible reaches no conclusion of its own.
• One person, no company — this is a one-person project. It can go down and it can be wrong, and this page says so plainly rather than in capitals.

What this is, and what using it means

GEBible is a free Bible reading and study website. It serves public-domain and openly-licensed translations, cross-references, historical commentary, and a set of Scripture Analysis sections that set the text beside other kinds of evidence.

Using the site means these terms apply to your use of it. There is nothing to sign, nothing to click and nothing to accept. If you would rather they did not apply, do not use the site.

They are written in the first person because there is one person behind this, not a company. No lawyer wrote them. They are meant to be read.

There is no account

Nothing on GEBible asks you to sign up. There is no signup, no password and no profile, so most of what a terms-of-service page usually spends its length on does not apply here. There is no account for you to secure, none for me to suspend, and nothing of yours for me to lose.

What the site remembers, it remembers on your machine. Your translation, theme and reading mode live in cookies; your notes, saved passages and recent trail live in your browser’s own storage and are never sent to this server. Clearing your browser data deletes all of it. What is stored, and where, is set out in the privacy policy — that page owns those facts and this one does not repeat them.

Signing in with Patreon is the one exception, and it is optional. It is not an account: it is a signed cookie that says which support level you are on, and it expires. Signing out clears it.

The texts, and what you may do with them

The short answer: check the licence, and it is always shown. GEBible ships no text whose licence it does not name. Every translation’s licence is on Sources & licenses; every commentary voice’s licence and required credit is on Commentary sources; each Scripture Analysis section carries its own source-and-licence notice on the page. Those lists are generated from what the site actually serves, so they cannot drift out of date — which is why they are not copied here.

Three different kinds of thing are served, and they are not interchangeable:

• Public domain. Most of the translations, and most of the commentary. Quote it, copy it, print it, republish it, sell it. You need no permission from me and I grant none, because none is required.
• Openly licensed. Some translations, two commentary voices, the cross-reference dataset and the Commandments dataset are used under Creative Commons licences. You may reuse those too, but the licence carries conditions — credit, and for the ShareAlike ones, releasing your version on the same terms. The exact licence and the exact credit are on the pages above.
• My own writing — the introductions, the methodology pages, the summaries and the framing prose. Quote it with attribution. Where a section presents ShareAlike material, my presentation of that material is offered under the same terms, and the section says so on its own page.

What this site does not claim. It claims no copyright in any public-domain text, and it does not claim to have written scripture. That is why the Copy and Cite controls on a verse page name the edition and its licence rather than naming this site as the author.

What it cannot give you. Permission for a translation it does not carry. Modern copyrighted translations are not served here, and nothing on this site is a licence to one.

What the Scripture Analysis sections are, and are not

GEBible presents the Bible as a primary source. The Scripture Analysis sections set a passage beside another body of evidence and report how different traditions and scholars have read it, each position attributed to the voice that holds it.

They reach no verdict, and neither do I. Where two readings conflict, both are given, in the same register and at comparable length. Where a question is genuinely open, the page says so. Where a source applies its own evaluative label to something, that label is reported as that source’s, never adopted as mine.

They are not exhaustive, and an absence is not a verdict. These are curated selections. A passage that is not covered has not been examined and cleared; it has not been written up yet.

None of it is advice. Not theological, not legal, not medical, not historical certainty. It is source material, cited so that you can go and check it against the sources it names. If you are making a decision that matters, do not make it on the strength of a page on this website.

Advertising

When this site shows you an ad, it is served by Google AdSense. What Google’s ad system does, which cookies it sets, and how to opt out of personalised advertising are set out in the privacy policy. That page owns those facts, is written from a live check of the site, and is the one to read — this page does not restate them.

Blocking ads is your call. This site does not make seeing ads a condition of using it, and it withholds no page, no tool and no text from a reader who blocks them. If ads are being blocked, the site may show a short note saying so, which you can dismiss for good. That is the whole of it.

If you would rather not see them at all, a paid level switches them off for you. See below.

Supporting on Patreon

Supporting GEBible is optional and changes nothing about what the site contains. The levels, and what each one does, are on Support.

The money is Patreon’s, not mine. Pledges are taken by Patreon. No payment reaches this site, no card details are held here, and I cannot charge you, refund you, or cancel for you. Starting, changing and cancelling a pledge all happen in your Patreon account, under Patreon’s own terms and its own refund policy. If something is wrong with a charge, Patreon is who to ask — not because I am passing you along, but because I have no access to it.

What a paid level does here. Signing in with Patreon tells this site which level you are on. From Ad-free ($3 a month) upwards, ads are switched off for you. The two levels above it, Autodidact and Seminary Student, also get new work sooner. That is the whole of what money changes on this site.

If a pledge lapses, the site stops recognising it and ads come back. Nothing of yours is deleted, because nothing of yours was stored.

What I can and cannot promise

This is one person’s project, run on a small budget and given away. Here is the honest shape of that.

It can go down. There is no availability guarantee and no support contract. If the site is not answering, the remedy is to come back later.

It can be wrong. The texts are transcriptions of public-domain editions; the cross-references, commentary and datasets are other people’s work, compiled. Errors exist. Where a page can tell you which edition it is quoting, it does; where something cannot be verified, the page says so rather than guessing. If you find an error, tell me and I will fix it.

It can change. Pages, features and addresses may be added, changed or removed. Where a page is meant to be cited, its address is meant to keep working — breaking one is a bug, not a plan.

It is not a substitute for the sources. Everything here names where it came from precisely so that you do not have to take this site’s word for it.

I am not offering a warranty and I am not taking on liability for what you do with what you read here. That is not lawyer’s throat-clearing — it is the actual position of a free site run by one person in his own time.

Changes to these terms

If these terms change, the date at the top of this page changes with them. That date is the whole record: it moves when the text moves, and it does not move otherwise.

There is no mailing list to notify you from and no changelog. The date is the notice. What will not happen is a quiet rewrite with the date left where it was.

Which site these terms cover

These terms cover gebible.app, and nothing else.

Lemma (lemma.gebible.app) is a separate app, for original-language work — interlinear text, Strong’s numbers and word-by-word morphology, none of which GEBible does. GEBible links out to it, and one Patreon sign-in is recognised by both. It does not share this page: Lemma’s own terms apply there.

The same goes for everywhere else a link takes you — Patreon, the source archives credited on Sources & licenses, and anything else. Once you follow a link, that site’s terms govern what happens there.

Unfinished versions of GEBible are sometimes served at a separate address to supporters on the upper levels. Same project, same terms, deliberately rough.

How to reach me

Email john@godlessengineering.com. One person, not a ticket system.

That is the address for a text error, a broken page, a licensing question, or a complaint about anything on this page. There is no form, no ticket queue and no legal department, because there is nobody to staff them.