Sources & Licenses
(Prefer introductions over licenses? Meet every book on Ruth's Library.) Everything Ruth reads from — every Scripture text, model, and dataset — with its exact license. Only public-domain or openly licensed texts are hosted (verified against each publisher's own license page, 2026-07-17); modern copyrighted translations (ESV, Bible du Semeur, NIV…) are offered as outbound links to Bible Gateway, never hosted.
Scripture texts (hosted & searchable)
| Language | Translation | License |
|---|---|---|
| English | Berean Standard Bible (BSB, 2016+) | Public Domain |
| Français | Louis Segond 1910 | Public Domain |
| Deutsch | Lutherbibel 1912 | Public Domain |
| Español | Reina-Valera 1909 | Public Domain |
| Italiano | Riveduta 1927 | Public Domain |
| Русский | Синодальный перевод (1876) | Public Domain |
| 日本語 | 口語訳聖書 (Colloquial, 1954/55) | Public Domain (Japanese copyright expired 2006) |
| 한국어 | Korean Bible 1910 | Public Domain |
| فارسی | Biblica® Open Persian Contemporary Bible 2022 | CC BY-SA 4.0 · details |
| 简体中文 | Biblica® 圣经当代译本开放资源 (CCB open edition) | CC BY-SA 4.0 · details |
| 繁體中文 | Biblica® 聖經，當代譯本開放資源 (CCB open edition) | CC BY-SA 4.0 · details |
Biblica attribution. The Persian Contemporary and 当代译本 (CCB) open editions are Copyright © Biblica, Inc., and are used unmodified under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license, with the Biblica® trademark retained as the license requires. Texts are grouped into passages for search — the wording itself is verbatim.
Christian classics (the Library — hosted & searchable)
All Public Domain, from Project Gutenberg. Inclusion is by a doctrinal allowlist: authors from traditions confessing Jesus as God, one person of the Trinity — when unsure, excluded (no sect materials).
| The Pilgrim's Progress | John Bunyan (Puritan) | Public Domain |
| The Practice of the Presence of God | Brother Lawrence | Public Domain |
| The Imitation of Christ | Thomas à Kempis | Public Domain |
| The Confessions of St. Augustine | Augustine of Hippo | Public Domain |
| Orthodoxy | G. K. Chesterton | Public Domain |
| Practical Religion | J. C. Ryle (Anglican Evangelical) | Public Domain |
| Foxe's Book of Martyrs | John Foxe (Anglican) | Public Domain |
| The Saint's Everlasting Rest | Richard Baxter (Puritan) | Public Domain |
| The Everlasting Man | G. K. Chesterton | Public Domain |
| Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners | John Bunyan (Puritan) | Public Domain |
| The Holy War | John Bunyan (Puritan) | Public Domain |
| In His Steps | Charles M. Sheldon (Congregationalist) | Public Domain |
| Table Talk (Selections) | Martin Luther (Lutheran Reformer) | Public Domain |
| Power Through Prayer | E. M. Bounds (Methodist) | Public Domain |
| The City of God (Vols. I–II) | Augustine of Hippo (Early Church Father) | Public Domain |
| Institutes of the Christian Religion (Vols. 1–2) | John Calvin (Reformed) | Public Domain |
| Selected Sermons | Jonathan Edwards (Puritan/Reformed) | Public Domain |
| The Apostles', Nicene & Athanasian Creeds | The early Church — traditional English text (Book of Common Prayer) | Public Domain |
| The Definition of Chalcedon (451) | Council of Chalcedon — Schaff, NPNF II/XIV, via Wikisource | Public Domain |
| Westminster Shorter & Larger Catechisms (1647) | Westminster Assembly, via Wikisource | Public Domain |
| 輕世金書（效法基督，1640 文言） | 陽瑪諾 譯 · Thomas à Kempis — via Chinese Wikisource | Public Domain; our labeled modern-Chinese renderings (all 119 sections) are CC0 |
| Pensées（法文原文，Brunschvicg 编本） | Blaise Pascal (Jansenist/Port-Royal, d. 1662) — édition Léon Brunschvicg (Hachette 1897), via French Wikisource | Public Domain |
| 使徒信經（中文，1936 普天頌讚 wording） | Early Church — the 1936 Hymns of Universal Praise collective translation, via Chinese Wikisource | Public Domain (anonymous 1936 work; PD in China, US & EU) |
| 真道入門問答（1882 淺文理） | 楊格非 Griffith John (LMS, d. 1912) — Hankow 1882, via Chinese Wikisource (the NLA scan of the 1882 printing is linked there) | Public Domain |
Note (library v9, 2026-07-18). An earlier release listed Andrew Murray's Absolute Surrender; the Project Gutenberg entry turned out to be the audiobook edition (no usable text), so it was withdrawn until a clean public-domain text source is found.
The reading corner (/read — hosted readable editions)
Every library work above, plus the story shelf's Christian literature (Ben-Hur, George MacDonald's stories, Paradise Lost, Longfellow's Divine Comedy, Curtin's Quo Vadis, and the Victorian children's classics), is served as chaptered reading editions with our cleaned source text hosted beside each book (dataset faith-books-v2). All Public Domain, same provenance chain as the library; 輕世金書 keeps both registers — the 1640 original and our labeled CC0 modern rendering.
《天路歷程官話》 — the first Chinese Pilgrim's Progress (dataset faith-tianlu-v1). William Chalmers Burns' (賓為霖, 1815–1868) Mandarin translation, transcribed by SpecEnvoy from a verified scan: HathiTrust uc1.b3399126, the 1894 蘇松上海美華書館 (American Presbyterian Mission Press) stereotype reprint of the 1869 third edition. The translator's own 自序 is dated 京都 (Peking) 1865 and records that he first rendered the book into 文言 in 1853, then into 官話 — so both are his. Public Domain (translator d. 1868; the 1894 printing predates all subsisting copyright). We transcribe the text (public domain) and host cropped, colour-reduced copies of the edition's own woodcut plates (e.g. 入美宮圖, 入窄門圖) — Chinese-style engravings by an anonymous artist, published in the 1894 printing and public-domain by age; a faithful reproduction of a public-domain 2-D work carries no new copyright. We do not redistribute the full page scans. Three registers per section: the traditional-character original (verbatim), a mechanical simplified conversion, and our labeled modern rendering (本站试译·非原文, which drives read-aloud). 卷一 is live (with 自序 and 原叙); 卷二–卷五 are being transcribed and will arrive as data updates. It is the shelf's first cross-language pair, linked both ways with Bunyan's English original (pg131). Full provenance sits in the book's own footer. This translation contains no unidentified modern text — only Burns' verified 1865/1894 edition, per the corpus's positive-identification rule.
Commentary (the "Bible + commentary" scope — hosted & searchable)
| Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary on the Whole Bible | Matthew Henry (Presbyterian, d. 1714; one-volume concise edition) | Public Domain |
| "Questions people ask" — curated chapter Q&A | SpecEnvoy original text; every answer cites its passages (BSB wording; quote-verified at build time) | CC0 |
Edition. The text is the Bible Foundation e-text (Mark Fuller, 1993 — released "Public Domain—Copy Freely", matching the Moody Press printing), preserved by the Internet Archive's 1998 capture of the Bible Foundation's own site. Comments are indexed per verse-range block, keyed to the chapter they expound.
Reference shelf (topic chips & "who was…" cards — hosted & searchable)
| Nave's Topical Bible | Orville J. Nave (U.S. Army chaplain, Methodist Episcopal; early 1900s) — 5,322 topics, ~29,000 subtopics with their Scripture references | Public Domain |
| Easton's Bible Dictionary | M. G. Easton (Presbyterian) — Illustrated Bible Dictionary, 3rd edition, Thomas Nelson, 1897; ~4,000 entries | Public Domain |
| Outbound study links (we host nothing) | Each passage card links out to BibleHub (public-domain commentaries, interlinear) and Blue Letter Bible (interlinear, lexicons), plus Bible Gateway for other translations. These are links, not content — nothing is copied or hosted, so no licence applies. They are aggregators of public-domain scholarship rather than a single voice, chosen so that following one hands a reader a library rather than an opinion. The ESV Study Bible is deliberately NOT linked: its notes require an account even on esv.org, and they are arranged by pericope and book introduction rather than by verse, so a per-verse link to them does not exist. | n/a — outbound links |
| STEPBible lexicons (word meanings) | TBESG (Greek, from Abbott-Smith) and TBESH (Hebrew, from an abridged BDB), edited by scholars at Tyndale House, Cambridge. Used for a curated 107 terms a reader may ask about — agape, koinonia, hesed, ruach — that a 19th-century dictionary does not carry. Modified: a subset selected from ~14,000 entries and long definitions shortened at a word boundary; wording is otherwise unchanged. We do not redistribute the dataset — STEPBible asks that it be distributed from a single source, so every card carries its exact Strong's number and links to github.com/STEPBible. Credit: STEP Bible. | CC BY 4.0 |
| OpenBible.info Topical Bible (modern topics only) | Community-voted topic → verse groupings, topic-scores dataset. Used for 7 topics Nave's (1897) does not contain at all: depression, identity, loneliness, overwhelmed, purpose, stress, unemployment. We take topic names, references and vote scores only — no Bible text (the source renders ESV, © Crossway, which is never used here). Modified: filtered from 6,711 topics to 7 hand-screened ones, each capped at its top 4 references by vote, with whole-chapter references dropped. Every card links to its own source topic page. | CC BY 4.0 |
Edition. Both are Bible Foundation e-texts (Mark Fuller, 1993 — released "Public Domain—Copy Freely"; the Nave's file documents that non-original material was removed, leaving "completely Public Domain data original to Dr. Nave"), preserved by the Internet Archive's captures of the Bible Foundation's own site (easton.zip, 1998 · naves.zip, 1997). Reference works are down-weighted and capped in general retrieval — an encyclopedia of thousands of small entries must never crowd out Scripture — and surface chiefly as the pinned dictionary/topic card when you look a name or theme up directly.
Authorship — who writes what
Scripture is never ours. Every Bible passage Ruth shows is verbatim from the translations named above. The historic texts — the creeds, the Westminster catechisms, Matthew Henry's commentary, and the classics library — are likewise verbatim from the public-domain editions cited, with one labeled exception (our modern-Chinese renderings of 輕世金書, always marked 本站试译·非原文).
What we write ourselves. The study questions and prayers, the topical selections, the comfort passages shown in heavy moments, the chapter Q&A wording, and the interface itself are composed by SpecEnvoy with AI assistance, then checked against the passages they cite. They follow the classical inductive method (observe → interpret → apply) that churches and campus ministries have used for a century, and their interpretive claims stay within the broad orthodox consensus — the ecumenical creeds hosted on this site are our doctrinal touchstone, and the public-domain commentators in Ruth's own library (Matthew Henry above all) are our reference for readings. Where our questions state a fact about a passage, the passage is one tap away so you can test it.
One thing we hold back — and only one. When a search describes thoughts of ending your life, Ruth withholds three passages that state, as a general claim, that death is better than living: Ecclesiastes 4:2–3, 6:3–5 and 7:1. They are not removed. Look them up by reference, read Ecclesiastes straight through, or search any other way and they are there — and on every other search they appear normally. Nothing else is withheld, anywhere, for anyone. Lament is not withheld and never will be. Psalm 88 ends in darkness with no resolution; Job curses the day he was born; Elijah asks God to take his life; Jonah says it is better for him to die. All of them stay, because a person in the dark needs to find that Scripture has been there before them. Voicing despair keeps someone company; a general claim that death is preferable can read as agreement. That distinction is a judgement, it is ours, and like everything else on this page it carries no authority.
What authority this carries: none. Our questions and prayers are helps, not teaching offices. They are offered in the spirit of Acts 17:11 — the Bereans "examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true," and Paul commends them for it. Examine ours the same way, and let the text, your church, and your pastor outrank anything we wrote.
Models & software
| Sentence embeddings (English) | all-MiniLM-L6-v2 | Apache-2.0 |
| Sentence embeddings (简体中文) | multilingual-e5-small | MIT |
| Sentence embeddings (the other nine languages) | paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2 | Apache-2.0 |
| Result reranking (English) | ms-marco-MiniLM-L6-v2 cross-encoder | Apache-2.0 |
| Runtime | Transformers.js + onnxruntime-web (WASM) | Apache-2.0 / MIT |
| Read-aloud voices | Your device's own system voices (Web Speech API) | Provided by your OS — no audio is sent anywhere |
Data sources
Cross-references. The "Related passages" data is from the openbible.info cross-references project (Treasury of Scripture Knowledge–derived, community-scored), used under CC BY with thanks.
Texts were retrieved from the Free Use Bible API (MIT) and the getBible API, both serving freely licensed translations sourced from eBible.org. Ruth's portrait and all interface artwork are original SpecEnvoy work. Outbound "read in" links open Bible Gateway, which licenses the modern translations it displays.