About
A calendar date is already a reference: the month is a chapter and the day is a verse. Every book of Scripture whose chapter runs that far opens there, and those verses are the day’s reading. Nothing selects them but the number on the calendar, which means no one is choosing what you see. The date is.
ScriptDate is made by Steve Schaaf, to help new readers build some discipline around reading the Bible daily. The hard part was never understanding it. The hard part is starting — and then starting again the next day. A date takes the deciding away: you never have to choose where to begin, because the calendar has already chosen.
It works by making Scripture personal before it makes it thorough. A verse that arrives on your own birthday is harder to skim than the next entry on a schedule, and a reader who keeps turning up is a reader who eventually gets through the Bible rather than starting it again.
Blessed is he that readeth — Revelation 1:3. Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed — 2 Timothy 2:15. The reading is the thing. A habit is how it lasts.
Every verse opens into the ones around it, and from there into the whole chapter, and the next. The date is a door rather than a fence — and it has to be, because reading by date alone reaches about 12,400 verses, near enough two in every five in the Bible. That ceiling is real, so rather than hide it the progress screen draws the line and counts past it.
A date does not have to be today’s. Name one — a birthday, an anniversary, the day you were baptised, the day you lost someone — and ScriptDate keeps the name with it. Its verses become that day’s reading, and anything you keep from it carries the occasion with it, so a saved verse remembers not just where it came from in Scripture but why you were there.
It is the same idea as the calendar, turned toward the dates you would have remembered anyway. A wedding anniversary stops being only chapter and verse coordinates and becomes the thirty-odd verses your marriage shares with the Bible.
Some days you do not want the date, you want the thing you are carrying. The prayer page is a cloud of words — healing, grief, fear, doubt, loneliness, temptation, salvation — and behind each one a list of verses somebody chose on purpose. Not everything Scripture says on the subject: the handful worth praying, which is a different list and a much shorter one. There are 24 words and 280 passages, and every one of them was read before it was put there.
Add your own to any of them. Those stay on your device and sit under their own heading, because the list everyone is handed and the list you are building are not the same thing.
A sermon, a study or a book walks through a dozen passages. Put that list into a reading plan and it becomes something anyone can take up with a six-character code — and what they finish counts toward their own reading, the same as any other verse.
A church, a small group or a ministry can have a code of its own. Follow it once and every reading they publish turns up, with no new code to find and nothing for anyone to send round.
The King James Version and the Bible in Basic English, both in the public domain, both included. Swipe a verse right to keep it, left to clear it once you’ve read it.
Then mark it up. A verse can be filed under one of six colours — promise, comfort, wisdom, praise, conviction, prayer — given your own tags, and written on: a note in your own words, kept against the reference rather than against the day, so it is waiting the next time that date comes round. A category says what kind of verse it is and a tag says what it is about; the note is the only one of the three that can say what it meant to you.
Nothing, unless you ask. Your verses, tags and reading history live in your own browser, and ScriptDate works fully without an account. That cuts both ways, so it is worth saying plainly: without an account there is no copy anywhere else. A lost phone takes your verses with it, and a browser can clear its own storage after a stretch of not visiting — on an iPhone, about a week.
Signing in is what keeps them: it carries your reading to a second device and brings it back to a new one. What is kept is only that — the verses, the tags, the days read. An account can be deleted from inside the app, which takes its history with it. Nothing is sold.
One thing does leave, and a paragraph headed what we keep should say so. Google Analytics sets a cookie and records that a page was opened — which page, roughly where from, on what kind of device. It is how anyone here can tell that August 29 is read and March 4 is not, which is what decides where the next work goes. It never sees a verse you kept, a note you wrote, or a word you prayed.
It is a small independent project, free to use and free of advertising. If it has become part of your day, the donation link at the foot of any page is what keeps it running.