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KJV Study: A Digital Study Bible Built with AI

kjvstudy.org is a comprehensive digital study companion for the King James Version Bible. Modern tools for an ancient text, built almost entirely through human-AI collaboration.

What It Is

A free, fast, beautifully designed Bible study platform with the full text of the King James Version, cross-references, study notes, and search. Everything you need to engage deeply with scripture without the friction of clunky interfaces or paywalls.

Features

  • Full Text Search: Search across the entire King James Bible with instant results.
  • Cross References: Extensive cross-referencing connecting related passages across books and testaments.
  • Study Notes: AI-generated commentary providing historical, linguistic, and theological context.
  • Verse Highlighting: Personal annotation and highlighting for your own study practice.
  • Reading Plans: Structured approaches to reading and study.
  • Clean Design: The technology serves the text, never the other way around.Same principle as everything else I make: For Humans.

The Story

I built KJV Study as a deeply personal project, a way to bring the same "for humans" design philosophy I'd applied to HTTP libraries to something that matters to me spiritually. The King James Version deserves better than the cluttered, ad-laden Bible apps that dominate the market.For background on the tradition itself, see Christianity in the Knowledge section.

The entire application was built collaboratively with AI. Not generated and forgotten: designed, iterated, and refined through genuine human-AI partnership. The AI handled the scale (generating study notes for every chapter, building cross-reference databases), while I handled the vision and the care.More on how this kind of partnership works in practice: Collaboration Patterns.

I wrote about the full process in Building a Digital Study Bible with AI.

Philosophy

Bible study tools should feel like a quiet library, not a casino. No ads. No gamification. No dark patterns trying to maximize your "engagement." Just you and the text, with good tools at hand when you need them.Attention is the scarce thing here. The design's job is to protect it.

This is what technology serving human consciousness looks like in practice: removing barriers between a person and the thing they're trying to understand.

Examples

Every verse is reachable at a plain, readable URL, like John 3:16. The same data is available through a REST API, with interactive documentation:

$ curl https://kjvstudy.org/api/verse/John/3/16
{
  "book": "John",
  "chapter": 3,
  "verse": 16,
  "reference": "John 3:16",
  "text": "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.",
  "red_letter": "full"
}

Strong's numbers work the same way. Here's the Greek word for love:

$ curl https://kjvstudy.org/api/strongs/G26
{
  "strongs": "G26",
  "language": "Greek",
  "word": "ἀγάπη",
  "transliteration": "agápē",
  "definition": "love, i.e. affection or benevolence; specially (plural) a love-feast",
  ...
}

The interlinear view walks word by word through the Greek of the New Testament and the Hebrew of the Old, with morphological tagging and links into Strong's.

Or run the whole thing yourself:

$ git clone https://github.com/kennethreitz/kjvstudy.org.git
$ cd kjvstudy.org
$ docker compose up
# → http://localhost:8000

Today

KJV Study is live at kjvstudy.org and actively maintained by me. It's built with Responder and Tufte CSS, and the source is on GitHub. It runs on my own little server, alongside most of my other sites.

Since this page was first written, it has grown well past a reading app: interlinear Hebrew and Greek, Strong's Concordance, red-letter text, family trees of biblical figures, topical studies, PDF export, and that API.

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