Terms of use
Last updated: 16 August 2026.
This page is written in plain English rather than legal boilerplate, and it is short because Lemma asks very little of you: there is no account, no subscription you can be locked into, and nothing here is paywalled. Using the site means you accept what follows.
1. What Lemma is
Lemma is a free Hebrew and Greek interlinear Bible study tool, built and run by Godless Engineer. It needs no account and asks for no personal information to look up Scripture. Every page is available to everyone: supporting the project removes advertising, and never unlocks a verse, a lexicon entry, a commentary, or a search. See About for what the tool does and Support for what a pledge changes.
2. Using the site
Read it, study from it, quote it, link to it, screenshot a page for a class or a sermon, install it as an app. None of that needs permission.
What is not fine is anything that degrades the service for other readers: automated bulk requests at a rate a human could not produce, attempts to break or probe the server, or republishing the site's pages wholesale as if they were yours. Note that scraping Lemma is also the worst way to obtain the underlying texts — they are openly licensed and published in bulk by the projects that made them, each named on Sources & licenses, and downloading from those sources is faster, cleaner, and gets you the data without our editorial layer on top of it.
3. The texts, and what you may do with them
Every corpus Lemma ships is public domain or openly licensed — nothing here is redistributed on someone else's terms without saying so. But the licenses are not all the same, and they travel with the material rather than with this site:
- Public domain sources carry no conditions. Most of what you see — the classic lexicons, the older commentaries, the public-domain translations — is in this group.
- CC BY 4.0 sources may be reused, including commercially, if you credit the source and note that you changed it if you did. The Hebrew text and morphology (Open Scriptures morphhb) is one of these, which is why it is credited in the footer of every page.
- CC BY-SA 4.0 sources add one further condition: a work you build from them must be shared under the same license. If you are reusing something, this is the group to check for first, because it constrains what you can put it into.
Each panel on the site names its own source and license where it renders, and the complete roster is on Sources & licenses. That roster is generated from the same data the panels read, so it cannot drift out of step with what is actually being served — which is the point of putting it there rather than restating a list here. If you are reusing a source, take the license from that page, not from this summary, which is a description of the kinds and not a substitute for the terms.
4. Lemma's own work
Some of what you read on this site is not from any source, because no source ships it. The curated glosses (including the separate plural and non-verb gloss sets), the constructed reading of a Hebrew word rebuilt from its prefixes and suffixes, the plain-English morphology, the computed corpus statistics — frequency bands, first occurrences, distinct forms, per-book concentration — and the software itself are original work.
No license is granted over that by default. Quoting a gloss or a statistic in a paper, a lesson, or a post, with a link back, is welcome and needs no permission. Bulk reuse — copying the gloss sets, mirroring the computed data, or building a product on them — is a conversation: get in touch and say what you have in mind. The answer is often yes.
5. Advertising and the supporter tier
The free version of the site carries advertising served by Google AdSense, and requests non-personalized ads. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google's certified consent message appears before any ad is served; Google detects the region and records the answer, and we never see it. Supporters see no ads at all. The full detail is in Privacy.
Supporter payments are handled entirely by Patreon. We never receive or store your payment details, and pledges are changed or cancelled in your Patreon account, not here. Sign-in sets one cookie that marks you as a supporter; logging out clears it. If a pledge lapses the site simply returns to the free tier — nothing you had access to is taken away, because there was never anything the free tier could not reach.
6. Accuracy, and what this tool is not
Lemma is a study aid, not an authority. The glosses are short display renderings chosen to be useful at a glance, not full lexical definitions; the morphological tagging comes from scholarly projects that are themselves revised over time; and translation, textual and interpretive questions that scholars genuinely dispute are not settled by anything on this site.
Where the data cannot support a claim, the tool says so on the page rather than quietly rounding up — there is no word-level alignment between English and the original languages, so English words are never highlighted as "the match"; the translation-rendering breakdown is disclosed as recovered and approximate; commentary is labelled where it is passage-level rather than verse-level. Those disclosures are meant to be read. If you are relying on something in print or from a pulpit, check it against the source the panel names.
The site is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind. It may be offline, incomplete, or wrong; use your judgement.
7. Changes
These terms may change as the site does. The effective date at the top is updated when they do, and material changes will be visible there rather than announced by email — there is no mailing list, because there are no accounts to mail.
8. Contact
Questions about any of this, including reuse requests, go to Contact — or straight to john@godlessengineering.com. Related pages: Privacy, Sources & licenses, Support.