Square Brackets and Bible Analyzer
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Left and right square brackets [ASCII 0x5B and 0x5D, respectively] do not
appear in the Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible, nor do they
appear in many other English translations. Bible Analyzer uses square
brackets to enclose Strong's numbers in the biblical text.

James Strong, a linguist and professor at Drew Theological Seminary,
published "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance" in 1890. This volume assigned
each Hebrew or Greek root word a unique number, enabling users unfamiliar
with these languages to look up word definitions by number. This innovation
has spawned a wide range of biblical study tools, designed to make
non-scholars more familiar with the original Hebrew and Greek text.

In Bible Analyzer, translations of the Bible put Strong's numbers in square
brackets immediately after an English word. These numbers are hidden by
default, but can be toggled to appear. They look like "[H123]" (for Hebrew
words) or "[G4567]" (for Greek words). Those numbers are then linked to
dictionaries, lexicons, or concordances.

Some translations of the Bible _do_ contain square brackets in the text,
which creates problems rendering the text on screen, since it conflicts with
the square brackets used to mark Strong's numbers.

At the present time (2026), since brackets for Strong's numbers occur many
thousands of times while brackets for translation remarks occur only dozens
of times, it seems wiser to replace square brackets for translation remarks
with a different bracket symbol.

Bible Analyzer supports UTF-8 Unicode, which has over 30 different pairs of
bracket symbols (http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_matching_brackets.html).
However, most of them are stylized forms of parentheses and braces, and
don't look much like square brackets.

I recommend using a Unicode bracket pair which looks as much as possible
like normal ASCII brackets. This is my recommendation:

    Full width square brackets  | U+FF3B, U+FF3D

These symbols add a little extra horizontal space on the left and right of
the bracket symbol ("full width"), but otherwise the similarity is close
enough to be nearly identical to normal square brackets.

I recomment editing the translation in a Unicode-aware text editor like
Notepad++ or Emeditor, and doing a global replace of ASCII square brackets
with Unicode full width square brackets.

-- Eric Pement, 2026-10-24