Terms of Use

Effective date: October 1, 2026

What changed: we added the sections on Sources and Credits and on Automated Access and AI, and made clear which parts of the site are ours and which are credited to others.

These terms govern your use of www.thedeeperwhy.com (the "site"), run by Deeper Why Ministries Inc., a Wisconsin nonprofit corporation ("we", "us"). By using the site, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the site.

The Site

The Deeper Why publishes 60 Doctrines by Jonathan Fries and the Swokowski Bible Commentary by Dr. Joel Swokowski, alongside the text of the Bible. The site is free to read, and no account is needed.

Accounts

You can create an account to keep your reading progress, your settings, the verses and doctrines you save to My Library, your collections, and your notes in step across your devices. To create one, you must be at least 13 years old. You agree to:

• give accurate information and keep it up to date;
• keep your password to yourself, and tell us if you think someone else is using your account;
• take responsibility for what happens under your account.

You can stop using your account at any time, and you can ask us to delete it (see the Privacy Policy). We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms.

What You Save and Write

The verses and doctrines you save, the collections you make, and the notes you write are yours. We store them only so the site can show them back to you, on every device you sign in on, and we never publish them or read them except as needed to run the site or as the law requires. They are private to your account: nobody else on the site can see them.

Please keep to your own study in them. Don't use a note or a collection name to store anything unlawful, anything that infringes someone else's rights, or private information about other people. We may remove content that breaks these terms, and we'll tell you if we do.

You can remove any of it at any time, in My Study or under Clear Data in Settings, and deleting your account deletes all of it (see the Privacy Policy). Keep your own copy of anything you would not want to lose.

Private Resources

Some resources are available by invitation only. We decide who is invited, and we may withdraw access at any time. Please don't share your access, or the private material itself, with anyone who wasn't invited.

Who Owns the Content

• Scripture. The American Standard Version and the King James Version are in the public domain in the United States. In the United Kingdom, rights in the King James Version are vested in the Crown.
• The doctrines and commentary. They are owned by their authors, Jonathan Fries and Dr. Joel Swokowski, who have given The Deeper Why permission to publish them here. The reading plan, the site's design, and the rest of the site's content are owned by us. All of it is protected by copyright.
• Credited sources. Some material on the site belongs to others and is used under its own terms, listed under Sources and Credits below. Nothing in these terms takes away the rights those terms give you.

Sources and Credits

We are grateful to the people who made this material available.

• Scripture text. The American Standard Version (1901) and the King James Version (1769), both public domain in the United States. The King James text, with the divine name and the Strong's number tags on its words, is the CrossWire KJV from eBible.org, also public domain. The verse text was loaded from the open scrollmapper/bible_databases collection.
• Strong's dictionaries. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance dictionaries, public domain, in the XML edition by Ulrik Petersen and OpenScriptures.
• Lexicon definitions. Parts of speech, glosses, and outlines of meaning (drawing on Abbott-Smith for Greek and Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew), and the verse numbering map, are from STEPBible.org, Tyndale House, Cambridge, and are licensed under CC BY 4.0. We have reformatted them and linked their references to the Bible text on this site. STEPBible does not endorse this site.
• Blue Letter Bible. Some entries link to the same entry on Blue Letter Bible. We link to it and don't copy from it. We are not affiliated with Blue Letter Bible.
• Pictures and maps. The Ark of the Covenant by James Tissot and The Tabernacle from the 1890 Holman Bible, both public domain, from Wikimedia Commons. The coastlines on the maps are from Natural Earth, public domain.
• Type and icons. EB Garamond, Public Sans, and Frank Ruhl Libre, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Icons from Google's Material Symbols, under the Apache License 2.0. The cookie banner is vanilla-cookieconsent, under the MIT License.

If we have missed a credit or got one wrong, please email hello@thedeeperwhy.com and we will fix it.

How You May Use the Content

You're welcome to:

• read, print, and save pages for your own personal study, or for teaching in a church or small group;
• quote short excerpts, as long as you name the author and link back to the page you quoted.

Please don't, without our written permission:

• republish substantial portions of the doctrines or commentary, on another website or anywhere else;
• sell the content or use it in a commercial product;
• present the content as your own, or change it in a way that misrepresents what the author wrote.

To ask for permission, email hello@thedeeperwhy.com.

Using the Site Responsibly

Please don't try to break into accounts or private resources, interfere with how the site runs, or overload it with automated requests.

Automated Access and AI

Search engines and AI tools are welcome. The authors have chosen to let AI models learn from the doctrines and the commentary, and we offer llms.txt and llms-full.txt to make that easy. When an AI tool quotes or summarizes the writing, we ask that it name the author and link to the page.

The Concordance is the exception. Its definitions, tags, and outlines of meaning belong to the sources credited above, not to us, and we can't license them for anyone else to copy. Please don't use scrapers, bots, or other automated means to copy the Concordance in bulk, or to collect it for training, fine-tuning, or building a dataset. We have said so in our robots.txt, in the head of its pages, and at /.well-known/tdmrep.json. If you want to use any of it, ask the sources credited above.

Whatever the purpose, please don't get around our robots.txt, rate limits, or access controls, and don't overload the site.

Messages You Send Us

If you write to us through the contact form, please be courteous and don't send spam, advertising, or anything unlawful. If you send a correction or a suggestion, we may use it to improve the site, without owing you anything for it. We read every message, but we can't promise to reply to each one.

Teaching, Not Professional Advice

The content on this site is Bible teaching and commentary. It reflects its authors' understanding of Scripture, and it isn't a substitute for professional counseling or for medical, legal, or financial advice.

Disclaimer

The site is provided "as is" and "as available". We work to keep it accurate and running, but we don't promise that it will always be available, error-free, or secure, or that your progress, saves, collections, or notes will never be lost. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied.

Limitation of Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of the site. Because the site is free, our total liability for any claim relating to it is limited to US $50. Some places don't allow these limits, so they may not apply to you.

Links to Other Sites

The site may link to other websites. We don't control them, and we aren't responsible for their content or practices.

Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we do, we'll change the effective date above and say what changed on this page. If you keep using the site after a change takes effect, that means you accept the updated terms.

Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wisconsin, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute will be heard in the courts of Outagamie County, Wisconsin, except where your local law gives you the right to bring a claim where you live.

Contact

hello@thedeeperwhy.com, or the contact form on the home page.