Bible Study Tools

Overview

Comment Coach includes a full Bible study environment: a parallel Bible that reads any number of translations side by side, in any language they were published in. You can browse chapters, look up references, search by keyword, by pattern, or by the Hebrew and Greek behind the text, select verses, and write comments — all from your browser, even offline.

All Bible data is stored locally on your device in IndexedDB. Nothing is uploaded to the server. Two free translations are set up for you on first visit: the Berean Standard Bible (English) and Palabra de Dios para Ti (Spanish). After that they are yours offline like any other.

Installing Bibles

Browsing & reading

Go to Bibles to see your installed translations. The whole canon is listed further down that page as two grids, Old Testament and New Testament — tap any book to open its first chapter. The Browse button on a translation card is a shortcut that drops you at Genesis 1.

Once you are in a chapter, everything you need sits on one line at the top: back, the book and chapter (tap it to jump to any book or chapter), ‹ › for the previous and next chapter, ▶ to hear the chapter read aloud, the magnifier to search, and Bibles, which says how many are on screen. The bar slides away as you read down and comes back as soon as you scroll up.

Reading side by side

A chapter is a parallel Bible. Tap Bibles in the top bar for a sheet listing every Bible you have installed:

• The circle shows or hides that Bible as a column.
• ≡ — drag it to put the Bibles in the order you want them.
• Read this makes that Bible the one you are reading (more below).
• Add a Bible installs another without leaving the chapter.
• Paragraphs sets the text as the publisher paragraphed it rather than one verse per line, and says whose paragraphs they are when your Bibles disagree.

When they all fit, every Bible is a column. When they do not — on a phone that is anything over two — the Bible you are reading stays pinned on the left (📌) and the others sit beside it one or two at a time. Swipe across the verses, or use the dots and arrows under the column names, to bring the next one in. The verses stay lined up whichever Bibles are showing. English, French and Hebrew can sit next to each other, each running in its own direction.

Each column is headed with where it is, in its own language:

• The translation’s name — Traduction du monde nouveau — opens its About page. With a mouse, resting on it shows the copyright notice.
• Its tag — NWT · FR. Tap it to make that column the one you are reading: the study panel, the book picker and your reading position follow it, and it is marked reading.
• The book and chapter — Genèse 2 — in that Bible’s own words. Where the translation is read online, the book name opens that book on its site and the chapter number opens that chapter: jw.org for the New World Translation in any language it publishes, BibleHub for the King James, American Standard, Berean Standard, World English, Young’s Literal, Darby and American King James.
• A play button that reads that column aloud, in its own language.

Bibles in any language

The app’s own menus and buttons are in English and Spanish, but the Bibles you read in it are not limited to those. Import an edition in any language and:

• Every book comes through, however the publisher names them. Books are recognised by their place in the Bible, not by their English or Spanish name.
• Book names are the edition’s own — Genèse, Jean, Actes — in the column heading, the book picker, and the label your comment is filed under.
• Hebrew, Arabic and other right-to-left scripts run right to left, with the verse numbers on the right. Comment boxes and search fields do the same, from the first letter you type.
• Search works in scripts written without spaces — Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese are split into words the way a reader would — and ignores Hebrew vowel points and Arabic vowel marks, so a word typed without them still finds the pointed text.
• Read-aloud uses a voice for that language — about 45 of them — and otherwise your device’s own. If neither has one, the play button says so rather than reading the text in the wrong language.
• Scripts that stack above and below the line — Burmese, Thai, Khmer, the Indic scripts — get the extra line spacing they need, and Arabic is set a little larger.

About this Bible

Tap a translation’s name — in a column heading, or on its card on the Bibles page — for a page about it: its language, publisher, year, the date of the edition you have, where it came from, its licence, and the copyright notice it carries, in the rights holder’s own words. Open on jw.org (or BibleHub) takes you to it online.

Online links at the foot of that page are yours to set. For a Bible the app has no address for, paste where it is read online — a home page, and a book or chapter address in which {book}, {bookNum} and {chapter} are filled in for you — and every column heading for that Bible links there from then on.

When a chapter comes up empty

You will occasionally open a chapter and be told No verses found for Genesis 1 in WEBNT. That is almost always coverage rather than a fault: plenty of catalog entries are New Testament only, and a few are Old Testament only or partial. The book you asked for is simply not in the translation you are reading.

Add another translation as a column and the chapter appears there. The catalog labels coverage on every entry, so you can see which of your Bibles are complete before you install them.

Searching Scripture

From a chapter, tap the magnifier in the top bar. Search opens over the chapter — beside it on a wide screen, as a sheet from the bottom on a phone, with a button to make it full screen. The navbar’s Bible Search link opens the same panel, and so does the Open … in Bible search row when you search with Ctrl+K, which opens on the Bible pill anywhere in the Bible section. It has two tabs and a link: Words (and, once you type a second word, Words together: in the same verse, within 2 or 5 verses, or in the same chapter), Concordance (how often a word appears in each Bible on screen, and which uses it most and least), and Pattern ↗, which opens the separate Pattern page. Choose where to look — this chapter, this book, its group (the Law, the Gospels…) or the whole Bible. Tap a result and the reader goes to that verse with your words marked; ‹ › at the foot of the screen steps through the rest. On a phone, Back brings the results back.

The same box answers genuinely different questions:

• Reference lookup — type "Heb 6:10", "he6.10", or "Hebreos 6:10" and press Enter: the reader goes to the passage with the verses marked. English and Spanish are both recognised automatically. Several references are listed as passages to tap.
• Keyword search — type words to search every installed Bible at once, not only the ones on screen. Forgiving about spelling in longer words; quote a phrase for an exact match; tap a translation’s count to see only its results, or its + to read it alongside. Put a reference in front of the words — romans 3 faith — to search inside just that passage.
• Words together — with two or more words typed, chips let you look for them in the same verse, within a few verses, or in the same chapter. Results come back as passages rather than lone verses, because two ideas argued across four verses are one answer, not two.
• Boolean operators — OR for either word, NOT to exclude one, brackets to group. Capitals are required, which is what keeps a Spanish no from turning a search into its opposite.
• Pattern search — on the Pattern page: find every form of a word at once, or verses with a structural property such as ending in a question mark.
• Strong’s search — search the Hebrew and Greek behind the translation: from a word in a verse’s Hebrew / Greek tab, or by number on the Pattern page. It works in every Bible you have installed, including untagged and Spanish ones, because it never looks at their wording.

A strip at the head of the results shows where your matches actually fall across Scripture, and tapping it narrows the search to that part of the Bible or to one book.

The Pattern page also has an Ask box that turns a plain-language description into a query you can read and edit — without ever letting a model quote Scripture or hand you a citation.

Both search boxes remember what you did. The one on the Bibles page keeps your recent lookups as chips underneath it. The search panel shows your recent searches whenever its box is empty — see Recent searches — and picking one restores the whole search, including the part of the Bible it was narrowed to, rather than just the words.

The concordance

Bibles → Concordance counts instead of listing: how often a word appears in each translation you have installed, and whether they disagree about it. It reports occurrences the way a printed concordance does — a verse using the word twice counts twice — alongside the verse count Bible search uses.

A translation with no search index yet is marked not counted rather than shown as zero, since zero would claim the word is missing from a Bible nothing actually read. The Bible Search guide covers it in full.

Studying a verse

Tap a verse — its words or its number — and its panel opens: beside the chapter on a wide screen, as a sheet over the lower half on a phone (drag the handle up for more room, down to close). The chapter never moves under it, and on a phone you can tap another verse above the sheet and the panel follows. ‹ › in the panel step to the previous or next verse and keep the tab you are on. Done, Esc or your phone’s Back closes it. The address remembers the verse and tab, so a link you share opens the same study.

At the top of the panel, the things you can do with the verse:

• Listen reads the verse aloud in the Bible you are reading.
• ✎ Write a comment opens the comment workbench on that verse, and brings you back to it when you are done (see Commenting on verses).
• The coloured circles highlight it, and 🔖 Bookmark marks it to come back to (see Highlights and bookmarks).
• + Tag adds a tag to the verse.

Underneath, tabs for what there is to know about it:

• Compare — the verse in every Bible you have installed, grouped by language, including ones you have hidden from your columns. Each has a play button, to hear it in its own language, and Copy, and above them all a button that copies every Bible at once. Either way it arrives ready to paste into WhatsApp: the reference and the Bible in bold (*John 17:1 BSB*), the verse on the line under it, and a blank line between Bibles — each one naming the book in its own language, so a Spanish Bible reads *Juan 17:1 PDDPT*. Where two of your Bibles are in the same language, a Differences toggle marks the words that actually differ between them. It is offered only within a language: marking an English verse against a Spanish one would highlight every word and mean nothing. Under the list, This verse in more languages on BibleHub opens the same verse there, in dozens of translations you have not installed.
• Hebrew / Greek and References — the study tools, below. From Matthew to Revelation the Hebrew / Greek tab also ends with Kingdom Interlinear on jw.org, which opens that verse in the Kingdom Interlinear Translation of the Greek Scriptures online. Both are links: nothing is downloaded into the app.
• Yours — what you have written on this verse, when there is something.
• In your library — paragraphs in publications you have imported that cite this verse, when there are some.

Going deeper: the word behind the word

The panel’s Hebrew / Greek and References tabs are the study tools.

Hebrew / Greek

The Hebrew / Greek tab lays the verse out word by word in its original language — 447,000 tagged words covering the whole canon, from STEPBible’s openly licensed data. Each cell shows the original word, its transliteration, a short gloss and its part of speech. Hebrew rows read right to left, as they should.

Tap a word and it opens fully:

• Its full parsing — a Hebrew verb’s complete grammatical description runs to about 140 characters, which is why the cell only summarises it.
• The full lexicon entry — press Full entry for the whole article, not just the gloss: abridged Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew, Abbott-Smith for Greek, with its verse references linked into the reader. Each language’s entries are fetched the first time you open one, and are there offline after that.
• What the BSB calls it — the English words the Berean Standard Bible uses for that original word, most frequent first, with counts. H2617 is rendered loving devotion 44 times and kindness 24 times, and seeing both is the point.
• Where it lands in the verse — the BSB line with the words rendering that word marked, so you can see which English carries it.
• Every other verse that uses it — one tap, and search opens over the chapter with the word, its meaning, how many verses and how many times, and every verse, without leaving where you are.

Where the editions differ

In a New Testament verse, the Hebrew / Greek tab ends with the places where the printed Greek editions part company — Nestle-Aland 28 and 27, the Tyndale House text, SBL, Westcott-Hort, Tregelles, the Textus Receptus and the Byzantine text. Words some of them lack are listed with who prints them: Matthew 17:21 is only in Tregelles, Textus Receptus, Byzantine; the heavenly witnesses of 1 John 5:7 are only in Textus Receptus. Where an edition prints a different word, its reading is given beside the one shown. A verse where all eight agree shows nothing.

It reports what the editions print, not how they mark it. The longer ending of Mark and John 7:53–8:11 are printed by all eight, the critical texts in brackets, so they do not appear here. The data is STEPBible’s TAGNT, which also carries manuscript readings before AD 500 that translators use.

References

The References tab answers “where else does Scripture speak to this?” using OpenBible.info’s cross-reference set — 341,000 connections, each carrying the number of readers who marked it. The strongest are highlighted rather than merely listed first, because ordering is invisible when you are looking at one row.

References that readers voted against are not shown at all. A connection its own contributors rejected is not one this app will assert.

Translator’s footnotes

If the translation you imported carries its own footnotes, they appear as small letters in the verse text, lettered across the chapter. Tap one to read the note where the marker falls. These are the publication’s own notes, shown while you read that publication — they are not applied to other translations.

Where a search points

Cross-references also work on a whole set of results. Run a keyword search and, below the verses, Where do these verses point? follows the references from every result at once and ranks the destinations by how many of them agree.

This surfaces passages that no result mentioned by name — which is the sort of recall a keyword index cannot reach on its own. The same verse found in four installed translations counts once, so the ranking does not change with the size of your library.

Highlights and bookmarks

In a verse’s panel, tap one of the five coloured circles to highlight it; tap the same circle again to clear it. To colour several verses at once, tap the first, choose Select verses in its panel, tap the last, and use the circles in the selection bar. 🔖 Bookmark puts a small ribbon on a verse you mean to come back to.

• A highlight belongs to the verse, not to the Bible you made it in: colour John 3:16 while reading the ASV and it is coloured in the NWT and the Reina-Valera beside it.
• They follow you. Signed in, a verse coloured on your phone is coloured on your computer within half a minute. With no signal they wait and are sent when you are back online.
• Not signed in? They are kept on that device, and move into your account the first time you sign in there.
• Your highlights and bookmarks lists them all — bookmarks first, then highlights, which you can show by colour — each with its verse and a link back to it.

Define and translate a word

Select a word in any column and a small toolbar appears. Define opens both meanings, a voice and the fuller entry — the same panel articles use — for the word in the language of the column you selected it in. Select a phrase and Translate gives it in your other language. Nothing is saved.

Commenting on verses

For one verse, tap it and choose ✎ Write a comment in its panel. For several, use the steps below.

Alternative: Compose-then-cite

You can also start from the full compose form, which no longer has a button on the dashboard — open it at /dashboard?view=compose:

1. Click Add source material, then 📖 Bible
2. The BiblePicker opens — select Version → Book → Chapter → Verses
3. The selected verse text auto-fills the source field, and the reference auto-populates the subject name
4. Write your comment and save

Managing your Bible library

• Add Bible File — the Bibles page has its own drop zone, so you do not have to go through the catalog to import a file you already have. It takes EPUB, MySword (.mybible), e-Sword (.bblx, .bbli), plain JSON, and SQLite Bible databases (.sqlite, .db), and detects which it got from the file itself.
• Export Library — downloads every installed Bible as one JSON backup file.
• Restore Library — re-imports from that file. Anything already installed is skipped rather than duplicated, and you get a summary of what was restored, skipped, and failed.
• Update detection — installed JW.org Bibles are checked against the publisher's current file in the background, and show an Update button when theirs has changed.

Storage, and keeping it

Under your installed Bibles is a line reporting what the library actually costs on this device — not an estimate. It reads something like:

Underneath, each translation is broken out into text, index (what keyword search needs) and patterns (what pattern search needs, if you have enabled it). The split is shown because search data usually dwarfs the text it indexes, and it is worth knowing which part of the figure is the Bible and which part is the searching.