Bible Search

Which search should I use?

All of it lives at Bibles → Search, under two tabs: Keywords and Pattern (regex). Start here if you are not sure which one you want.

• I know the reference — type it in the Keywords box. he6.10, Heb 6:10 and Hebreos 6:10 all work. It is recognised as a citation automatically.
• I remember some of the words — type them in the Keywords box. Spelling does not have to be perfect.
• I want every form of a word, or two ideas near each other — Pattern tab.
• I want the original Hebrew or Greek word, not one translation's wording — Pattern tab, then the Strong’s toggle.
• I can describe what I want but not write it — use the Ask box at the top of the Pattern tab and let it write the query for you.
• I only want part of the Bible — tap a preset above the search box, or just type gospels shepherd. See Searching part of the Bible.

Looking up a reference

Type a citation into the Keywords box and it is detected as a reference rather than as words to search for. You get the passage itself, shown from every translation you have installed, one card each.

• Full names — Ezekiel 34:25, 26
• Abbreviations — Phil. 4:6, 8-10
• Compact keys — eze34.25,26
• Prefix shortcuts — he6.10 resolves to Hebrews
• Several at once — Heb 6:10; Heb 11:6
• A whole chapter — ge1

Spanish book names are recognised too, so Hebreos 6:10 and Salmo 23 work without switching anything. Where a translation stores paragraph breaks, the passage is laid out in flowing paragraphs with superscript verse numbers rather than one verse per line.

Keyword search

Anything that is not a citation is searched as words, across every installed translation at once. Results are ranked by relevance, with your search terms highlighted, and each one links through to the verse in context.

• Spelling is forgiving. Close-enough spellings still match, and partial words match as prefixes — right will find righteousness.
• All your words must appear. Several words narrow the search rather than widening it.
• Quote it for an exact phrase. "everlasting life" returns only verses containing that literal run of words.
• Filter by translation. Chips above the results show a count per translation; tap one to see only that Bible, tap All to come back.

Searching part of the Bible

Above the search box is a line that always tells you where you are searching. By default it reads Searching: Whole Bible. Narrow it and it says so — Searching: Gospels, or Gospels, except John if you have excluded something.

That line never collapses into an icon or a count of filters, and that is deliberate. A narrowing you have forgotten about is how an empty result quietly becomes a false belief about Scripture: you search a word, find nothing, and conclude it is not there. “3 filters” does not prevent that. “Gospels, except John” does.

Three ways to narrow, and only one to learn

• Tap a preset — Gospels, Pauline Letters, All Prophets, Law, Hebrew Scriptures, Greek Scriptures. Any of the 66 books is under All books.
• Just type it. Type gospels shepherd and you are offered a chip: Search shepherd in Gospels. No syntax, no model call, no connection needed.
• Share the link. A scoped search carries its scope in the URL, so sending someone the link sends them the same search.

Where these verses are

Under the results is a strip showing how your matches fall across the Bible, grouped into the nine kinds of writing it contains. It is worth reading even when you have not narrowed anything, because it answers a question the result list cannot: where does this idea actually live?

Toggle it between Count and Per 1,000 verses. That second reading is the interesting one. Raw counts measure how long a book is as much as they measure your search — the Minor Prophets are barely 3% of the text, so a word can be far more characteristic of them than of the Law and still show a shorter bar. Searching shepherd makes the point:

Read that last phrase carefully, because it is doing real work. The comparison is against the books that actually use the word, not against the whole Bible. Most of Scripture contains no given word at all, and measuring against all that silence would make almost any book look remarkable — the sentence would fire constantly and mean nothing. Comparing like with like means you only see it when something is genuinely concentrated, and when there is nothing to compare against, you get no sentence rather than a flattering one.

When a narrowed search finds nothing

This is the screen worth knowing about. Instead of a bare “no results”, a scoped search that comes up empty tells you where the word actually is:

Search everywhere clears the narrowing completely — both what you included and anything you excluded — and returns you to the whole Bible. It does not half-widen.

This appears only when a narrowed search found nothing. It is the empty-result screen, not a panel that sits there on every search telling you what is elsewhere.

What it applies to

Narrowing works for keyword, exact-phrase and pattern searches, and it survives switching between them. It does not apply to Strong’s search, which uses a different engine — so the bar hides itself in Strong’s mode rather than sitting there looking as though it were doing something.

Pattern search

The Pattern (regex) tab searches by shape instead of by word. It is the tool for questions an ordinary search box cannot express: every form of a word at once, two ideas within a few words of each other, or a structural property such as verses that are questions.

Options

• Ignore case — on by default. Turn it off when capitalisation is the point.
• Ignore accents — off by default. Turn it on to make oracion match oración, which saves a lot of typing in Spanish.

Two rules the pattern box enforces

A verse is the unit of a match, so ^ and $ mean the start and end of a verse, not of the whole Bible. Patterns that could match across a verse boundary are rejected with an explanation rather than quietly returning a match belonging to neither verse — that includes the s flag, \n, [^] and [\s\S].

A search stops at 5,000 matches and says so. If you see that notice, the pattern is broader than you meant.

Strong’s search — the original languages

In the Pattern tab, switch the toggle from Pattern to Strong’s and type a number: H430, G26. Loose forms are understood too — h430, G 26, even Strong's H430.

This is a different question from every other search on the page. A keyword or pattern search asks which verses use this English wording, and the answer changes with every translation. Strong’s asks which verses use this Hebrew or Greek word — and that answer is the same in all of them, because it is a fact about the original text rather than about anyone's rendering of it.

• It works in every translation you have, including ones no other tool can search this way — the New World Translation, Reina-Valera, any Spanish or untagged Bible. It never looks at the translation's words, so it does not need them tagged.
• No setup, no storage cost. Unlike pattern search, Strong’s needs no opt-in and builds no per-translation index.
• A gloss header explains the word — the code, the lemma in Hebrew or Greek, its transliteration, and a short English meaning.
• A bare number finds all its senses. Searching H430 covers the disambiguated forms the data splits it into, listed under Also used for.
• No AI is involved at any point. You type the number yourself; there is no assistant path into Strong’s search. The verse list comes from published original-language data and a lookup on your device, so there is nothing here that could be hallucinated even in principle.

Details worth knowing

• Spanish glosses cover Greek only. The Greek source carries a Spanish column and the Hebrew source does not, so New Testament codes show a Spanish meaning and Old Testament codes do not. That is a gap in the data, not in your Bible.
• Psalm superscriptions are real results. They appear as Psalm 3 (superscription), never as “Psalm 3:0”. Most translations fold the superscription into verse 1, so the reference may be listed with a note that your Bible stores no separate text for it.
• Common words are enormous, and the count tells you so. H430 reports something like 2,603 matches in 2,248 verses and then renders the first 300. The counts describe the whole result set — only the list is capped, never the number.
• Attribution stays with the results. The original-language data is STEP Bible, used under CC BY 4.0.

Ask in plain language

At the top of the Pattern tab is an Ask box. Describe what you are looking for in ordinary words — every form of the word justify, verses that end in a question — and it writes the query for you, into the visible box, where you can read and edit it before or after it runs.

It also tells you, in one sentence, what the query it wrote will match, and lists the words it decided to search for when it widened a concept. That sentence is the point: a query can be subtly wrong in a way its results do not reveal, and reading the explanation is how you catch it without reading the pattern.

When it hands the query back instead of running it

Not every question is a pattern question. Ask decides which kind of search actually fits, and for many questions the honest answer is a plain keyword search — ranked and forgiving, which a pattern is not. When it decides that, it writes the query, explains it, and stops, telling you to run it from the Keywords tab.

That is deliberate, and worth knowing rather than reading as a failure. The quickest way for a feature like this to end up worse than the plain search box it was meant to help with is to reach for a pattern on every question. Being told “this is best run as a keyword search” means it picked the better engine, not that it gave up.

Ask always writes into the Pattern box, and switches you back there if you were on the Strong’s toggle — the toggle names the engine that actually ran, so it is never left pointing at one that did not.

Ask needs a connection. Offline, the box is disabled and you can still write a pattern yourself. If the assistant is unsure, it says so above the query rather than presenting a guess as an answer.