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.
100% Free · 100% Public Domain
Vellum Free Bible Study Software
Vellum docks Bible, Commentary, Dictionary, and Notes side by side on one screen, in the spirit of classic desktop Bible software like e-Sword, built entirely from public-domain and openly-licensed sources. No account, no subscription, no ads, and it owes nobody anything.
Version 1.14.0 · Windows or Linux · ~275–290 MB
23Bible translations
14classic commentaries + patristic catena
8merged 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.
Bible translations
KJV, ASV, WEB, and BSB side by side on every build. The Windows build adds nineteen more for comparison, from Young's Literal Translation, Darby, the 1599 Geneva Bible, and the Douay-Rheims to lesser-known works like Rotherham's Emphasised Bible, the Bible in Basic English, and the Jewish Publication Society's 1917 translation, 23 translations in total, plus William Tyndale's original 1520s Pentateuch and New Testament in its own reading tab.
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. Hover any word here, or in Compare Translations, and a quick preview of its spelling, pronunciation, and definition shows up before you even click.
Strong's Lexicon
Click any Strong's number to open the full entry: Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, Abbott-Smith for Greek, plus Strong's own Hebrew & Greek dictionaries, each 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 any of 14 classic commentaries instead, from Matthew Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, and Adam Clarke to Calvin, Keil & Delitzsch, Spurgeon's Treasury of David, and the Pulpit Commentary, all selectable from the same menu, or compare two or three of them side by side for the same chapter.
Dictionary
Eight historic Bible dictionaries merged into one lookup: Easton's, Smith's, Hastings', Hitchcock's, Schaff's, the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, Fausset's, and Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words. 14,256 merged terms.
Atlas
3,068 people, 1,271 places, 450 events, and 23 groups drawn straight from Scripture. Places plot on a schematic map, and every entry lists the verses it appears in. Any person's entry can expand into a full character study: where they fall on the timeline, their relatives grouped by tribe, and one click to export the whole thing as a Word document, a PDF, or a print job.
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.
Concordance Browser
Search by English word or by Strong's number and get every match in the KJV with its actual verse text, not just a bare list of references. Type in "love" and read all four hundred-plus occurrences right there.
Search Everything
One search box reaches across Scripture, every commentary, the Dictionary, the Topical Index, and the Non-Canonical Library, plus your own notes, with results sorted into tabs so you can jump straight to whichever kind you're after.
Topical Index
Nave's Topical Bible, roughly 4,500 topics with their scripture references, searchable right alongside the Bible, Commentary, and Dictionary panes.
Notes that stay with you
A real rich-text editor with four kinds of notes: a running Sermon Notes page that isn't tied to any one verse, Study Notes that follow whatever verse is open, freeform Topic Notes, and a Series tool that groups your Topic Notes into a named, ordered collection with its own table of contents. Export any of it as a Word document or PDF.
Lesson Builder
Pull several passages together with your own headings and notes into one multi-passage teaching outline, then export the whole lesson as a single document, ready to hand out or preach from.
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.
Highlight colors
Mark a verse in one of four colors, or set your own, right from the Bible pane. Highlights stay put across sessions, so a passage you flagged last month is still flagged today.
Read Aloud
Have any chapter read aloud in your computer's own text-to-speech voice, with adjustable speed, or download a chapter's real human narration, recorded for LibriVox, for offline listening. Narrated audio downloads once per set of chapters and stays on your computer after that.
Verse Card
Turn any verse into a shareable image: pick a background color and a font, then download it as a PNG or send it straight to X, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Threads, or email with the verse and reference already filled in as the caption.
Backup and restore
Your notes, highlights, bookmarks, lessons, and reading plan progress live on your own computer, no account and no cloud sync. One button exports it all to a single file, and that same file restores or merges it back in on a new machine.
Floating panes
Any pane, Bible, Commentary, Dictionary, or Notes, can pop out into its own window, so you can drag it to a second monitor or size it on its own, apart from the rest of the workspace.
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.
See it in action
A few panes from inside Vellum, running on Windows.
Download Vellum
Windows
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.exePortable
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-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."
Linux
.deb package Debian & Ubuntu
A standard .deb you install with your package manager. Adds a normal application menu entry and uninstalls the usual way, through apt or your software center.
Download Vellum.debAppImage
No installation and no package manager. Make it executable and run it, and it works across most distributions, Fedora and Arch included.
Download Vellum.AppImage
About the AppImage: most file managers don't mark downloaded files
executable by default, so if double-clicking does nothing, right-click the file, open
Properties, and check "Allow executing file as program," or run
chmod +x Vellum.AppImage from a terminal first. The .deb package doesn't need
this step.
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 VellumWhere 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 seven classic commentaries, four more via the CrossWire SWORD Project (Barnes, The People's New Testament, Spurgeon's Treasury of David, and the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge), and three more from StudyLight.org (F.B. Meyer, Marvin Vincent, and the Pulpit Commentary).
- Dictionary: seven historic public-domain dictionaries merged via the bible-dictionary-dataset project, including the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia and Fausset's Bible Dictionary, plus Vine's Expository Dictionary of New Testament Words via StudyLight.org.
- Topical Index: Nave's Topical Bible (1897), OCR'd from a public-domain 1903 printing via the Internet Archive.
- 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, plus William Tyndale's original Pentateuch and New Testament via Project Gutenberg.
- 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).