Free forever · Public domain · Windows

A Bible study library that owes nobody anything.

Vellum docks Bible, Commentary, Dictionary, and Notes side by side on one screen, in the spirit of classic desktop Bible software, built entirely from public-domain and openly-licensed sources. No account, no subscription, no ads.

Download for Windows See what's inside

Version 1.7.0 · Portable or installer · ~240 MB

11Bible translations
7classic commentaries + patristic catena
5merged Bible dictionaries
182non-canonical works
344,756cross-references

Everything a study Bible needs, and nothing it doesn't.

Every pane stays open and resizable at once, so a word study never means losing your place.

Four panes, one screen

Bible, Commentary, Dictionary, and Notes are all visible and resizable at the same time. Double-click a word to look it up in the Dictionary pane; click a verse to jump the Commentary pane straight to it.

Bible translations

KJV, ASV, WEB, and BSB side by side on every build. The Windows build adds Young's Literal Translation, Darby, the 1599 Geneva Bible, the Douay-Rheims, KJVA, the Restored Name KJV, and the English Revised Version, eleven in total.

Original language view

A reverse-interlinear shows real Hebrew and Greek text word by word next to its English gloss. Hebrew Old Testament words carry their own Strong's numbers from the Westminster Leningrad Codex, clickable straight into the Lexicon.

Strong's Lexicon

Click any Strong's number to open the full entry: Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, Abbott-Smith for Greek, both with pronunciation and a clickable list of every KJV occurrence. 13,500 of 14,197 numbers have the full entry.

Commentary

A complete patristic Catena spans roughly AD 100–1700, over 100 authors, 22,537 verses annotated. Switch to Matthew Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, John Gill, Adam Clarke, John Calvin, Keil & Delitzsch, or Tyndale Open Study Notes instead.

Dictionary

Five historic Bible dictionaries merged into one lookup: Easton's, Smith's, Hastings', Hitchcock's, and Schaff's. 8,962 merged terms.

Atlas

3,068 people, 1,271 places, 450 events, and 23 groups drawn straight from Scripture. Places plot on a schematic map; every entry lists the verses it appears in.

Gospel Harmony

The four Gospels laid out side by side across 179 sections covering the life of Christ, based on A.T. Robertson's 1922 harmony.

Cross references

344,756 community-voted cross-references across every verse in Scripture, each one a clickable chip that jumps straight into the Bible pane.

Notes that stay with you

A real rich-text editor with a running Journal, Study Notes that follow whatever verse is open, and freeform Topic Notes. Export any of it as a Word document or PDF.

Non-canonical library

182 public-domain works you can search and read: the Gospel of Thomas, the wider Nag Hammadi writings, the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha, the Apostolic Fathers, and the complete works of Josephus.

Built to be printed

Every pane has its own print button that sends a clean, readable version of just that pane, not the whole app layout, to your printer or a PDF.

Download Vellum

Windows only for now. Pick whichever fits how you work.

Installer Recommended

A normal setup wizard. Installs to Program Files, adds a Start Menu shortcut, uninstalls from Windows Settings like any other program.

Download Vellum-Setup-1.7.0.exe

Portable

No installer. Double-click and it opens. Nothing written to Program Files or the registry, so it runs fine from a USB drive.

Download Vellum-1.7.0-portable.exe
About the security warning: Vellum isn't signed with a paid Windows code-signing certificate, so the first run will likely show "Windows protected your PC" with the publisher listed as Unknown. That's normal for small, independently-built free software, not a sign the file is unsafe. Click "More info," then "Run anyway."

Vellum will always be free.

Every text in Vellum is public domain or carries an explicit open license: nothing is paywalled and nothing ever will be. Building it means tracking down public-domain sources, cleaning up decades-old OCR scans, and untangling licensing on things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, which still has no public-domain text to ship. If Vellum has been useful in your study, a donation goes toward keeping that work going.

Support Vellum

Where the content comes from

Nothing here is pulled from paid or proprietary Bible software. Every source is public domain or carries an explicit CC BY / CC BY-SA dedication.

  • Commentary: the Catena Bible dataset (patristic commentary, AD 100–1700) and the HelloAO Free Use Bible API for the seven classic commentaries.
  • Dictionary: five historic public-domain dictionaries merged via the bible-dictionary-dataset project.
  • Non-canonical library: the Pseudepigrapha and Apocrypha via scrollmapper, and Roberts & Donaldson's 1885 Ante-Nicene Fathers translation.
  • Extra translations, KJV with Strong's, and the Hebrew Old Testament tagging: scrollmapper's bible_databases, kaiserlik/kjv, and the Open Scriptures morphhb project.
  • Atlas: Theographic Bible Metadata (CC BY-SA 4.0).
  • Gospel Harmony: A.T. Robertson's 1922 harmony via Project Gutenberg.
  • Cross references: openbible.info's cross-reference dataset (CC BY 4.0).

Full sourcing and licensing detail is available from the Sources button inside the app.