The Adam Clarke commentary app for iPhone
If Matthew Henry is the commentary you read for the heart, Adam Clarke is the one you read for the homework. Clarke spent the better part of forty years on a verse-by-verse commentary stuffed with Hebrew and Greek notes, history, geography, and the science of his day. It is one of the most learned commentaries in the public domain — and it fits on a phone.
Here is what Adam Clarke’s Commentary is, where it still shines, where to be careful, and how to read the whole thing offline on an iPhone.
Who was Adam Clarke?
Adam Clarke (c. 1762–1832) was a British Methodist theologian and one of the most formidable scholars of his generation — a linguist comfortable in Hebrew, Greek, and a string of other languages. His Commentary on the Bible, published between 1810 and 1826, was the work of decades and made his name. Like Matthew Henry and Spurgeon, he wrote in the Wesleyan-Arminian stream of English Protestantism.
What is Adam Clarke’s Commentary?
It is a verse-by-verse, scholarly commentary. Where Henry applies the text, Clarke examines it: the meaning of the original words, the customs behind a passage, textual variants, and his own (sometimes contrarian) judgments. In Scribe it runs to 2.3 million words across more than 14,000 notes, spanning Genesis to Revelation — roughly 25 average paperbacks from this one author.
That makes it a natural companion to Scribe’s own Greek and Hebrew word study: tap a word for the Liddell-Scott-Jones or Brown-Driver-Briggs entry, then read Clarke’s note on how it works in the verse.
Is Adam Clarke’s Commentary still worth reading?
Yes — with eyes open. Its strength is erudition: Clarke takes the original languages seriously and brings a huge breadth of learning to the text, which is rare in a public-domain commentary. The caveat is that it is two centuries old. Some of his science is dated, and a few of his interpretations are genuinely idiosyncratic (his theory about the creature in Eden is the famous example). Read it for its linguistic and historical insight, and weigh the opinions against the text and the modern lexicons rather than taking them as settled.
Reading it beside other voices keeps that balance. All twelve sources in the Classical Commentary Library — including Matthew Henry, John Gill, Albert Barnes, and Spurgeon — sit side by side, so you can see where Clarke is leading and where he is off on his own.
How do you read it on an iPhone, offline?
Most “Adam Clarke” results online are websites that need a connection. A real Adam Clarke commentary app keeps the full text on the device. In Scribe, Clarke is part of the Classical Commentary Library:
- The complete commentary is on your phone — no connection needed to read or search it.
- Keyword search finds an exact phrase across the whole commentary; semantic search finds the right note when you only remember the idea.
- If you use AI research, the assistant can search the library and quote Clarke — and the other eleven sources — with author attribution, grounded in the passages you actually own.
The Classical Commentary Library is a one-time $24.99 add-on — also included with the $4.99/mo subscription — that installs once and then works entirely offline.
Where to start
See what’s in the library, or read more on choosing an offline Bible commentary app. And because it — like Scribe itself — is a one-time purchase, Clarke’s whole commentary is yours to keep, with no subscription.