Matthew Henry Bible Commentary › About this edition
About this web edition
A record of what this edition contains, where the text came from, how it was prepared, and how its accuracy was checked — so that anyone using it can judge it for themselves.
What is in it
Every book of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation is present, and every chapter within every book. Nothing has been left out, summarised or shortened.
Copyright and public-domain status
Matthew Henry died on 22 June 1714. His exposition, published between 1708 and 1710, and the classic condensed form of it reproduced here, have long been in the public domain worldwide. They may be read, copied, quoted, printed and redistributed freely.
What was deliberately left out. The digital source file used for this edition opens with several pages of modern editorial front matter: a twentieth-century foreword, a short biography of Henry by that edition’s editor, and a numbered statement of that editor’s abridging principles. Editorial material of that kind is a modern composition and may still be in copyright, whatever the status of the commentary it introduces.
None of it has been reproduced here. Those pages were excluded from the published data in full. The Introduction on this site was written fresh by UECF.NET, drawing on standard published biographical sources rather than on that foreword.
Everything else in the source — Henry’s introductions to the individual books, his chapter outlines, and the commentary itself — is his own public-domain work and is reproduced in full.
Original text versus UECF.NET material
The distinction is kept visible throughout:
| Matthew Henry’s own words | Written or built by UECF.NET |
|---|---|
| All commentary text, on every chapter | This page and the Introduction page |
| The introduction to each book | Navigation, search, bookmarks and page design |
| The chapter outlines and their verse ranges | Book groupings (Law, History, Wisdom…) |
| The section headings and verse divisions | Cross-reference links between passages |
Nothing on this site paraphrases Henry, extends him, or supplies commentary of its own. No part of the commentary text was generated, rewritten or “improved” by software. Where the source is silent, this edition is silent.
How the text was prepared
The source was a digital edition of the concise commentary in PDF form, 1,736 pages. Its pages carry a genuine embedded text layer — the file was typeset from a word processor, not scanned — which was confirmed page by page before any text was taken from it. Because there was no scanned page anywhere in the file, no optical character recognition was needed, and none was used; OCR is the usual source of silent corruption in projects like this, and avoiding it entirely removes that risk.
The text was extracted directly, then parsed into structure by recognising the source’s own
conventions: book title pages, CHAPTER n headings, outline entries ending in a verse range, and
section headings of the form Book Chapter:Verse. Line wrapping from the page layout was undone
to restore whole paragraphs; hyphens broken across lines were rejoined; and the resulting structure was
written out as one data file per chapter.
How it was checked
- Completeness. The chapter list produced by the parser was compared against the known chapter count of every book of the Bible. All 1,189 chapters are present, none is duplicated, and no book is missing a chapter.
- No empty chapters. Every chapter was checked to contain at least one commentary section. Every one does.
- Nothing dropped between sections. The text was reassembled from the source in a single pass, so that any text not claimed by a section would have shown up as an unassigned remainder. The reassembled word count was checked against the source.
- Heading integrity. Every line in the source resembling a section heading was examined, including malformed ones, so that a damaged heading could not silently swallow the section beneath it.
- Text quality. The extracted text was surveyed for the artefacts typical of bad extraction — split words, doubled text, page headers and footers embedded in the prose. The source proved clean, and no automatic “corrections” were applied to Henry’s wording.
- Spot checks. Representative passages across the whole commentary were compared against the source page by page.
Corrections made to the source
Two section headings were misprinted in the source file. Both are typographical faults in the heading only; in each case the commentary text beneath was complete and untouched. They are listed here rather than corrected silently.
| Place | In the source | What was done |
|---|---|---|
| Psalm 15:1 | The heading reads Psalms 151 — the colon is missing. |
Read as Psalms 15:1. Without this, the whole of Psalm 15 would have been lost
from the edition. |
| 1 Samuel 14:47 | The heading reads 1 Samuel 14: with no verse number. |
The verse number 47 was supplied from that chapter’s own outline entry, which covers verses 47–52. |
No other change was made to any heading, reference or word of the commentary.
Known characteristics of the source
- Thirty-seven chapters carry no outline in the source — most of Proverbs 11–30, parts of Ezekiel, and a few others. They are presented as the source presents them, with commentary but no outline. Nothing has been invented to fill the gap.
- The single-chapter books — Obadiah, Philemon, 2 John, 3 John and Jude — place their outline with the book introduction rather than under a chapter heading, and appear that way here.
- Henry sometimes refers to a passage loosely, or by an older chapter-and-verse convention. Cross-reference links are only created where the reference resolves to a chapter that actually exists in this edition; ambiguous references are left as plain text rather than linked to a guess.
How this edition is built
The site is a plain static web application: HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with the commentary stored as one small JSON file per chapter and a pre-built search index split into shards by letter. Nothing runs on the server — no PHP, no database, no Node.js — so it will run from any ordinary web host, and it loads only the chapter you are actually reading. Searching happens entirely inside your own browser.
Bookmarks and your light/dark and text-size preferences are stored in your browser’s own local storage. They never leave your device, and this site sets no cookies and carries no tracking.
Credits
Commentary: Matthew Henry (1662–1714), Concise Commentary on the Bible —
public domain.
Web edition: United Evangelical Christian Fellowship, UECF.NET.
This edition follows the design and navigation of the other UECF.NET Bible applications, including the NKJV Chronological Study Bible and the KJV Study Bible.
If you find a place where this edition differs from the printed commentary, please tell us through UECF.NET so it can be corrected.