Two-edged Sword

A Bible study app for macOS and Windows, for reading Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries and books beside your own notes. It comes with a library of Bibles, commentaries, dictionaries and books, so it works with nothing else installed (what's included), and also reads modules in e-Sword X's formats: your own, and on a Mac e-Sword X's library if you have it. It never changes them: your journal, highlights and plans are kept separately.

See it on the Two-edged Sword website, and learn it step by step with its tutorials.

Contents: Download · What's included · What it does · Quick start · Thanks · Licence · Documentation

Download

Mac

For a Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later) and macOS 13 or later.

1. Download Two-edged-Sword.dmg from the latest release.
2. Open it and drag Two-edged Sword onto Applications.
3. Open Two-edged Sword from Applications. macOS says it can't check the app for malicious software, because it isn't notarised by Apple. Click Done.
4. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway beside Two-edged Sword, then Open Anyway again and enter your password.

It opens normally after that. The first time you use some features, macOS asks for permission: see First run.

Windows

For Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.

1. Download Two-edged-Sword_x64-setup.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it. It installs for you alone, with no administrator password.
3. If Windows says it protected your PC, click More info, then Run anyway: the app isn't code-signed.
4. Open Two-edged Sword from the Start menu.

A few things differ on Windows: see On Windows.

The app checks for updates once a day and offers to install them. Check for Updates… checks now: at the foot of Settings, and in the app menu on a Mac or the notification-area menu on Windows.

What's included

The app comes with these modules. The Library guide lists each with its source and licence.

Kind	Modules
English Bibles	KJV, Berean Standard Bible, ASV, World English Bible, Young's Literal, Darby, Webster, Revised Version, Weymouth NT, Tyndale, Geneva 1599, Douay-Rheims, Brenton's Septuagint, Murdock's and Etheridge's Peshitta, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan
With Strong's numbers	KJV+, BSB+, Webster+
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Syriac and Aramaic	WLC, Ginsburg and MAM (the Aleppo Codex) (Hebrew), Byzantine NT and Brenton's Septuagint (Greek), Clementine Vulgate (Latin), Peshitta (Syriac), the Targum and Pseudo-Jonathan (Aramaic); most also word by word with English
Dictionaries and lexicons	Strong's Hebrew and Greek, Brown-Driver-Briggs, Abbott-Smith, King James Concordance, Easton's, Smith's, Nave's, the ISBE, Torrey's, Hitchcock's, Webster's 1828, Bible places
Commentaries	Matthew Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Adam Clarke, Barnes, Wesley, Scofield, Keil & Delitzsch, Spurgeon's Treasury of David
Cross-references	Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, OpenBible.info
Books	Josephus, Edersheim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Pilgrim's Progress, Brother Lawrence, E. M. Bounds on prayer, Sheldon's In His Steps, Strong's Systematic Theology, Larkin's Dispensational Truth, The Book of Revelation, The Book of Daniel, The Second Coming of Christ, The Spirit World and Rightly Dividing the Word (with their charts)
Devotionals	Spurgeon's Morning and Evening, Daily Light
Maps	Bible Maps: fifteen maps drawn for the app

What it does

• Read a chapter beside every commentary on the verse, cross-references, dictionaries and your notes. Click any word for its Greek or Hebrew.
• Highlight in eight colours, each standing for a theme you name.
• Books and devotionals from your library: highlight, bookmark, note, listen to or ask about any paragraph, as you would a verse.
• Listen to anything read aloud, each word highlighted as it's spoken.
• Differences from the KJV: a mark wherever a translation differs in meaning from the KJV, with the reason.
• Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Syriac word by word, each word over its English and Strong's number.
• Ask questions about what you're reading, answered from your own library.
• Compare translations side by side, Search the whole library, and Word Study a Greek or Hebrew word.
• Journal entries linked to their verses, saved as Markdown files, so a notes app that works with Markdown, such as Brainstead, can open them too.
• Quiet time plans, with worship songs chosen for the day and a daily reminder. Songs can be chosen for any chapter too.
• Build more modules from free sources, such as the Targums, the Talmud and Beza's Greek New Testament.
• KJV History: the manuscripts and editions behind the KJV, and which of them you have.

Quick start

Needs macOS 13 or later, the Xcode Command Line Tools, Rust and Node. The built-in modules are downloaded and built on the first make dev or make app (make core). Ask also needs Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity or GitHub Copilot.

npm install
make dev                                  # the app with hot reload
cp signing.local.example signing.local    # then name your signing certificate in it
make install-app                          # build it and put it in /Applications

On Windows (10 or 11) it needs Rust, Node, Python and Visual Studio Build Tools with the C++ workload: npx tauri build --debug --no-bundle builds the app and npx tauri build the installer (see Development).

If you have e-Sword X and no signing certificate, macOS asks again for access to its data after every build (Signing and Full Disk Access).

Licensed Bibles are read where e-Sword keeps them and never copied into this repo.

Thanks

To Rick Meyers, whose free e-Sword has put God's word into the hands of millions since 2000. This app reads e-Sword X's formats and library, and owes that to his work (e-sword.net).

Licence

Two-edged Sword is free software under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later: you may use, share and change it, and anything you pass on must stay free under the same licence. The Bible texts and books it reads keep their own terms. The built-in modules are public domain or openly licensed (Library); the terms of the rest are in Licence and credits.

Three built-in modules are for non-commercial use only. Vulg-C+ (src-tauri/modules/clementine+.bbli), whose word-by-word tagging comes from a model trained on the PROIEL treebank, is shared under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Targum+ and Ps-Jon+ (targum_aramaic+.bbli and pseudojonathan_aramaic+.bbli), whose English partly comes from a digitisation of Jastrow's dictionary, are shared under CC BY-NC 4.0. If you sell the app or a build of it, leave those three out (tools/core/build.py builds them as clementine+, targum_aramaic+ and pseudojonathan_aramaic+).

Documentation

The same guides are in the app, under Help (⌘?).

• Getting started: step-by-step walk-throughs of everything the app does
• Tutorials, on the website: five, each following one real task, from reading John's Gospel to leading a study on Romans 8
• Features: getting around and Settings, then Reading, Study, Translations and manuscripts, Journal and Quiet time
• Ask: the AI assistant and what it sends
• Library: your modules, adding and building more, and free ones worth having
• Development: building, signing, where data lives, and the code