NET Bible for Sword Download/Installation

The Sword project (not to be confused with e-Sword) has Bibles and Bible readers for most platforms including Linux. For full details, look at the Crosswire Bible Society site. If you already have a Sword Bible reader on your computer, you can follow a link below to get full instructions for your particular platform (operating system) and version (program) of the Sword software.

The cross platform Java based Sword Bible reader works really well with the NET module.  For windows users, this is our recommendation. Install it and find the instructions here. You will find the program here: http://www.crosswire.org/bibledesktop/

General notes

Because each of the Sword applications displays Bibles and commentaries in a slightly different way, we have put together several different modules. These are:

  • NETfree
  • NET - which is the for-pay version of NETfree.

    • Each of these have all the footnotes embedded. On BibleTime this is the perfect solution. On Windows, the Hebrew in the notes can not be displayed, and on the Mac the notes are displayed inline rather than as popups or as a separate footnotes Window. This version works well on Windows after version 1.5.9, but is not ideal on earlier versions.
    It is very difficult to use on the Mac as the inline-notes get in the way. Because of this, we are also offering NETtext which is the Bible text alone with the footnotes shown simply as numbers (as on the NET website), and this will work in conjunction with NETnotesfree or the for-pay NETnotes which place the notes in a separate commentary module.

    Try all three of the free modules, that is NETfree, NETtext and NETnotesfree. Try these, and then you will know what to expect when you upgrade to the for-pay modules. Both NET and NETnotes need unlocking with a release key which you can purchase from our online store. This key will be e-mailed to you and can be used to unlock NET and/or NETnotes. The free versions with the notes include only the first three notes in each chapter. This is adequate for test purposes, but if you want to make full use of all the work that has gone into producing the NET Bible, you will want to upgrade in order to have access to all the notes.

    To display the Greek and Hebrew correctly, you will need to make use of a good Unicode font.  If you don't already have a good one, we recommend that you obtain freefont.  This is supplied with a number of Linux distributions, but for Windows or other operating systems, you can download it here.  The package contains both serif and sans serif versions, and is ttf.

    The following links are specific to your software and platform.