Sojourner: Bible Study Companion

Sojourner 0.3.0

A free, private, offline Bible study companion for Windows.

Sojourner puts Scripture beside the historic commentaries, confessions and reference works of the church, with the Hebrew and Greek underneath and the tools to prepare a sermon on top. It needs no account and no internet connection. Your notes, highlights, prayers and sermons stay in one file on your own computer.

Download

File	What it is
Sojourner_0.3.0_x64-setup.exe (608 MB)	The app. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Installs for your user account only, with no administrator rights. Installs offline, because the WebView2 runtime is included.
.sjpack files	The book library, optional, as four separate shelves. See the pack release notes in the seperate release.

First run: the installer is not yet code-signed, so Windows SmartScreen shows a warning. Choose More info, then Run anyway.

Upgrading from an earlier version: run the new installer over the old one. Your notes, highlights, sermons, prayers, bookmarks and installed library are kept. As always, a backup first is wise: Settings → Data & backups.

SHA-256 of the installer: a3cf595edb6ada3473e10e2a03a8404b0527031b3195890b477c8873f4b659ba

What's inside

Bibles

• Fifteen English translations.
  • Historic: King James (1769), American Standard (1901), Young's Literal, Darby, Webster's, Geneva (1599), Douay-Rheims, Tyndale and Wycliffe.
  • Modern and free to share: the World English Bible, Berean Standard Bible, Literal Standard Version, Open English Bible (New Testament and part of the Old), and unfoldingWord's Literal and Simplified Texts.
• The original languages. The Hebrew Old Testament (Leningrad Codex), read right to left. Five editions of the Greek New Testament: Textus Receptus, Byzantine, SBL Greek New Testament, Westcott–Hort and Tregelles. Also the Septuagint and the Clementine Vulgate. All follow English chapter and verse numbering, so they line up with the English beside them.
• Your own translations. Add one you own from a Zefania XML file (NASB, NKJV and the like are under copyright and can't be included).

Commentaries and confessions

• Commentaries: Matthew Henry, Calvin's Commentaries, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Barnes' Notes on the New Testament, and Spurgeon's Treasury of David on every Psalm.
• The Westminster Standards: the Confession and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms with their Scripture proofs and a topic index, and commentaries on them by Hodge, Shaw and Vincent.
• Creeds and confessions: the Apostles', Nicene, Athanasian and Chalcedonian creeds; the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism and the Canons of Dort.

Original-language study

• Lexicons:
  • Strong's and Thayer's.
  • The full Brown–Driver–Briggs (Hebrew), Abbott-Smith and Liddell–Scott–Jones (Greek).
  • STEPBible's brief lexicons for both languages.
• Word study. Any Hebrew or Greek word, studied: how often it occurs and where, how the KJV renders it, the forms it takes with their parsing, related words, and every occurrence.
• Search by grammar. Find every word with a given parsing, such as every aorist imperative in Ephesians, by choosing from lists rather than typing code letters.
• Where the Greek editions differ. Set the Greek editions side by side for a verse and see where they read differently: in 1 John 5:7, the Comma Johanneum stands only in the Textus Receptus.
• Interlinear. The Hebrew or Greek word by word under the English, with parsing.
• Double-click any word for its entry. Search the Greek and Hebrew typed without accents or vowel points.

Reference

• Factbook. A page for each of 4,275 people, places and things in the Bible. It tells apart the Bible's several Zechariahs by the verses that name them, and gives each one's family, every verse, and the encyclopedia and dictionary entries. Double-click a name in the text for the person that verse means.
• Timeline. 464 events from Creation to Paul in Rome, on a line you can zoom. The eras are marked, the kings of Judah and Israel run side by side, and a strip beside the text shows where the chapter you're reading falls. Dates are approximate, from a traditional chronology.
• Atlas. 1,342 places of the biblical world, each with every verse that names it, and fourteen journeys from Abraham to Paul's voyage to Rome.
• Encyclopedia and dictionary. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (9,349 articles), and Easton's and Smith's dictionaries merged into one (nearly 6,000 entries).
• Cross references: over 340,000.
• Also included: two harmonies of the Gospels, five reading plans, and the 1650 Scottish Metrical Psalter with playable tunes.

What you can do with it

Read and study.

• Split the window into up to eight panes, dock them, stack them as tabs, and save named workspaces.
• Linked panes follow each other. Click a verse, and the commentary, cross references, confession proofs, encyclopedia, atlas, the people and places it names, the timeline, and the books that cite it all turn to that verse.
• Compare translations side by side, or one verse in every translation.
• Highlight in five colours, underline, bookmark, and write notes on a verse, a highlight or a chapter.

Search everything. One box covers Scripture, commentaries, the lexicons, the Factbook, the confessions, the encyclopedia, your books, notes, prayers, sermons and illustrations.

• Operators: "exact phrases", OR, -exclusions, (grouping), words near each other, exact forms and capitals (+LORD finds the divine name without "Lord"), prefixes, and regular expressions.
• Filters in the box, saved with the search: in:psalms, t:kjv, G26, red:, has:note.
• Older spellings match ("shew" finds "show"). Results can be counted by book and translation, or lined up as a concordance.

Prepare and preach.

• Manuscript. A sermon editor whose points are its outline, with live Scripture blocks. Send any verse, commentary entry, confession section, lexicon entry, word study or book passage into the open sermon with its source.
• Preparation. A prep track, timed rehearsals, and an illustrations file that warns when you've already told a story in the series.
• In the pulpit. A full-screen preaching mode with a clock.
• Outputs. Slides with PowerPoint export, fill-in handouts, printing, and Markdown export.

Pray and remember.

• A Today page to start the day.
• Reading plans, with catch-up tools and a builder for your own.
• A prayer journal and prayer list.
• Scripture and catechism memory with spaced repetition.
• An offline neural voice that reads any chapter, commentary or book aloud.

Build a library.

• The book packs. Install any of the four shelves (see the pack release notes). Resources sorts every book by shelf and subject: sermons, theology, commentary, Christian life, the Fathers by series.
• Cited in your library. Beside each verse, a small count shows how many books on your shelves cite it. Click it for the list; click a citation to open the book at that page.
• Your own books and recordings. Add EPUB, PDF and MOBI books, and audio and video files. They're searchable, scanned for the verses they cite, and can be linked to passages, down to a moment in a recording.

Keep your data safe. Snapshots, automatic backups, export and import, an integrity check, a copy to a OneDrive or Dropbox folder, and a Trash that keeps deleted notes for thirty days.

Make it comfortable. Seven themes including sepia, true black and high contrast, a dyslexia-friendly font, adjustable text, and reduced motion. A built-in tutorial covers every feature: Settings → Tutorial.

Private by design

Sojourner makes no network requests of its own. The one exception is Check for updates in Settings → About, which runs only when you press it. Nothing is uploaded, tracked or synced, and the book packs are installed from files you download yourself, so they can just as well arrive on a USB stick.

Sources and licences

Every text is in the public domain or used under an open licence. Settings → About lists each source and its terms, and every Creative Commons credit the licences require:

• Original-language texts, lexicons and people and places: STEPBible and Tyndale House.
• Morphology and lexicon data: OpenScriptures.
• Modern translations: the Berean Bible, unfoldingWord and the LSV.
• Timeline data: the Theographic Bible Metadata.
• Atlas data: OpenBible.info.
• Books: CCEL and Project Gutenberg.

None of the texts or reference data in Sojourner is AI-generated. Where a source included AI-written summaries, they were left out.

Known limitations

• Windows only. No Mac, mobile or sync between computers.
• No copyrighted modern resources. The ESV, NIV and NASB, and the BDAG and HALOT lexicons, can't be included. A translation you own can be added from a Zefania XML file.
• The installer isn't code-signed yet (see "First run" above).
• No automatic updates. Check for updates in Settings → About, then download the new installer.

Questions and corrections

sojourner@gentleking.org

Sojourner Library Pack

Sojourner book library packs, 0.3.0

The book library is optional, and comes as four separate shelves. Install whichever you want: each can be added, updated and removed without touching the others. Every book is searchable down to the sentence, linkable to any passage, and sorted in Resources by subject.

Cited in your library: beside every verse, Sojourner counts how many books on your installed shelves cite it. Click the count to see them; click a citation to open the book at that page, with the reference marked. The four shelves hold about 330,000 Scripture citations between them.

Requires Sojourner 0.3.0 or later. An older version refuses these packs with a message to update the app first, and changes nothing.

The shelves

Pack	Books	Download	On disk
Sojourner-Library-0.3.0.sjpack (Puritan and Reformed)	270	490 MB	744 MB
Church-Fathers-0.3.0.sjpack	38	169 MB	250 MB
Nineteenth-century-0.3.0.sjpack	14	44 MB	67 MB
Ancient-literature-0.3.0.sjpack	6	14 MB	23 MB

Puritan and Reformed (270 works, 220,000 citations)

The Puritans, the Reformers and their heirs:

• Puritans: Owen, Manton, Watson, Flavel, Sibbes, Baxter, Bunyan, Charnock, Burroughs, Gurnall, Rutherford, Durham and Boston.
• Reformers: Calvin, Luther, Knox, Latimer, Bradford, Cranmer and Bullinger.
• Their heirs: Edwards, Spurgeon (63 volumes of sermons and the Treasury of David), the Hodges, Dabney, Shedd, Chalmers, Ryle, the Bonars and M'Cheyne.

Sorted into twelve subjects: Sermons, Theology, Commentary & exposition, Christian life, Confessions & catechisms, Prayer & worship, Church & ministry, Apologetics & controversy, History & biography, Collected works, Allegory & poetry, and Bible & reference.

Church Fathers (38 volumes, 85,000 citations)

• The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volumes 1–9, edited by Roberts, Donaldson and Coxe: from the Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus to Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian and Lactantius.
• The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, 14 volumes, edited by Philip Schaff: Augustine and Chrysostom.
• The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, 14 volumes, edited by Schaff and Wace: Eusebius, Socrates and Sozomen, Athanasius, the Gregories, Basil, Jerome, Ambrose, Hilary, John of Damascus, Leo and Gregory the Great, and the Seven Ecumenical Councils.
• J. B. Lightfoot's The Apostolic Fathers.

The tenth Ante-Nicene volume is not included: CCEL's edition of it is only the bibliography and index, and its Origen commentaries are already in volume 9.

Nineteenth century (14 volumes, 22,000 citations)

• Philip Schaff: History of the Christian Church (8 volumes) and The Creeds of Christendom (3 volumes).
• Alfred Edersheim: The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, The Temple: Its Ministry and Services, and Sketches of Jewish Social Life.

Ancient literature (6 works)

The writers around the Bible:

• Jewish writings: the complete works of Josephus (Whiston's translation) and of Philo (Yonge's), and 1 Enoch (R. H. Charles, 1917).
• Roman historians who mention Christ and the church: Tacitus (Annals I–VI), Pliny the Younger's letters, and Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars.

Josephus and Philo seldom cite Scripture by chapter and verse, so this shelf adds only about 2,200 citations. Its value is the text itself, searchable beside the Bible.

Installing

1. Download the packs you want.
2. In Sojourner, open Settings → Book library and click Install from file…, once for each pack. Each takes a minute or two, and you can keep reading meanwhile.
3. Every file in the pack is checked against its checksum before anything is installed, so a damaged or incomplete download leaves your library as it was.

Nothing is downloaded from inside the app. A pack can just as well be copied from a USB stick.

Updating from an earlier library pack

If you installed the library pack from an earlier release (0.1 or 0.2):

• It keeps working in Sojourner 0.3.0 as the Puritan and Reformed shelf. Its books contribute no citation counts until it's updated.
• Install Sojourner-Library-0.3.0.sjpack to update it. It replaces the old pack in place, keeping every note, tag, highlight and bookmark you made on its books, and adds their citations. The other shelves are not touched.
• The new shelves install beside it in any order.

Removing a shelf

Settings → Book library → Remove takes one shelf away and leaves the others. Anything you wrote about its books is kept, and comes back if you install the shelf again.

Sources

Every book is in the public domain:

• Church Fathers, Nineteenth century, Josephus and Philo: epubs from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (ccel.org).
• 1 Enoch, Tacitus, Pliny and Suetonius: from Project Gutenberg.
• The whole list: each shelf's list in the Sojourner repository (library/shelves/) gives every book's source address and terms.

Checksums (SHA-256)

b73b05e008b3320fef90b6f7744f40d7ab25f4798736a9e0d3d32f167908facd  Sojourner-Library-0.3.0.sjpack
f45318c7d4dd47b880577b3f0b0bfb0bad963829e0832f32761711926991847a  Church-Fathers-0.3.0.sjpack
2a40e03406db1ec4b499a250186e5d700cad719c1e5f19c8f229885e8dfc822b  Nineteenth-century-0.3.0.sjpack
91a48980490bbb754c6039ba00f3e0843dc20a6ed034b9929689e8f4cb676e4d  Ancient-literature-0.3.0.sjpack