Bible Search

Which search should I use?

Bible search opens over the chapter you are reading, so you never leave the passage to look something up. Tap the magnifier in the chapter’s top bar. It opens beside the columns on a wide screen, and as a sheet from the bottom on a phone. The navbar’s Bible Search link, the Open … in Bible search row in Ctrl+K, and any search link someone sends you all open the same panel. If you have not opened a chapter yet, it opens over the one you read last, or over Genesis 1.

At the top of the panel are its tools: Words, Concordance, and Pattern ↗. The Pattern link opens a separate page, Bibles → Pattern, for regular expressions and Strong’s numbers. Start here if you are not sure which one you want.

• I know the reference — type it in the Words box and press Enter. he6.10, Heb 6:10 and Hebreos 6:10 all work. The reader goes straight there with the verses marked.
• I remember some of the words — type them in the Words box. Longer words tolerate a typo; short ones are matched as typed.
• I want two ideas near each other — still Words. Type both words, then widen the Words together chips that appear under the box. See Two ideas, a few verses apart.
• I only want to search inside one passage — put the reference in front of the words: romans 3 faith, or romans 3-8 faith for a run of chapters.
• I want either of two words, or want to exclude one — type OR or NOT in capitals. See Either word, or neither.
• I want to know how often a word is used — the Concordance tab, which counts rather than lists. See The concordance.
• I want every form of a word at once — Pattern ↗.
• I want the original Hebrew or Greek word, not one translation’s wording — tap the verse, open its Hebrew / Greek tab, tap the word, then Find every verse with …. To type a Strong’s number yourself, use Pattern ↗ and its Strong’s & parsing toggle.
• I am not sure of the word — just start typing. The results update as you go, so a spelling your translation does not use stops producing results while you are still typing it.
• I can describe what I want but not write it — use the Ask box at the top of the Pattern page and let it write the query for you.
• I only want part of the Bible — tap a chip under the box (this chapter, this book, its group, or the whole Bible), pick one from Other parts…, or just type gospels shepherd. See Searching part of the Bible.

Looking up a reference

Type a citation into the Words box and it is treated as a reference rather than as words to search for. Press Enter and the reader goes to that passage, with the verses marked. The reader already shows every translation you have open, side by side, so that is where you read it.

• 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.

Several references cannot all be opened at once, so the panel lists them under Tap a passage to read it, each with its first verse so you can tell them apart. Tap one to go there. The list stays in the panel for the next one.

A reference with words after it searches inside it

A citation on its own is a lookup. A citation with other words is a search inside that citation. Type romans 3 faith and you do not get the whole of Romans 3 — you get the verses in Romans 3 that contain faith, and the count line says Romans 3 beside the number, so you can see the narrowing that was applied.

• A chapter — romans 3 faith
• A run of chapters — romans 3-8 faith. This is worth knowing: a chapter range is something only this form understands. As a plain lookup, Romans 3-8 resolves to Romans 3 alone.
• A verse range — romans 3:21-31 righteousness

An out-of-range reference is rejected rather than quietly trimmed, so Romans 99 is treated as words to search for rather than as a chapter that does not exist.

Keyword search

Anything that is not a citation is searched as words, across every translation you have installed — not only the ones on screen. Results are ranked by relevance, with your search terms highlighted. Tap one and the reader goes to that verse with your words marked; ‹ › at the foot of the screen steps through the rest of the list.

• Spelling is forgiving on longer words, by exactly one letter. A word of seven letters or more still matches with one letter missing, added or changed — rightous finds righteous, forgivness finds forgiveness. Two mistakes is one too many, and that includes swapping a pair: recieve does not reach receive, because moving the i past the e counts as two changes rather than one. Shorter words are matched as typed, because one wrong letter in a short word usually spells a different real word: faith would otherwise return every saith. Partial words match as prefixes at any length — 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.
• Other scripts work as they are written. Hebrew and Arabic match without their vowel marks, so שלום finds the pointed שָׁלוֹם. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Lao, Khmer and Burmese, which put no spaces between words, are split into words the way a reader would, so a word inside a verse can be found.
• Filter by translation. With results from more than one Bible, a chip per translation shows its count, the Bibles on screen first. Tap one to see only that Bible; tap it again to see them all.
• Read a translation alongside. A translation that is not on screen has a + beside its chip. Tap it and that Bible joins the reader as another column. A count is evidence about which translation is worth reading for this question.
• Fifty at a time. The list shows fifty results, with Show 50 more underneath.
• The list stops at 500, and says so. A broad word lists its first 500 matches, and under the last one the panel says These are the first 500 matches of 1,347. The count at the top is the true total. The strip is drawn from the whole set too, so to reach the rest, narrow to a book or add a second word.

Either word, or neither: OR and NOT

Several words normally narrow a search — all of them have to appear. Three operators change that, and they are typed rather than clicked:

• OR — either word. shepherd OR pastor finds verses using one or the other, which is the search to reach for when translations disagree about a word.
• NOT — exclude a word. faith NOT works finds verses about faith that do not mention works.
• AND — the default, written out. faith AND works is the same search as faith works; it exists so you can be explicit inside brackets.
• Brackets group. (shepherd OR pastor) NOT hireling applies the exclusion to both alternatives rather than only the last.
• Spanish operators work too — O, Y and NO mean the same things.

Type faith or hope in lowercase and it searches for three words, exactly as it always has. The panel notices, and offers you a button: Capitalise OR to search for either word. Taking it changes only the operator, not the rest of what you typed.

When a boolean query cannot be answered

An empty result and an unanswerable question look identical — both give you no verses — so the panel distinguishes them rather than letting you read a mistake as a finding about scripture:

• Nothing to search for. NOT faith on its own would match nearly every verse in the Bible, so you are asked to add a word rather than handed thirty thousand results.
• An operator with nothing after it. faith OR says so: OR needs a word after it.
• An unclosed bracket is named as such rather than silently ignored.

Results while you type

There is no search button. From the second character, a moment after you stop typing, the count, the strip and the list all update. This is for the search you cannot quite phrase. You are not sure whether the word is lovingkindness or loving-kindness, neighbour or neighbor. A word that is not in your translations stops producing results while you are still typing it, which is the moment that fact is useful.

Enter still means something. A single reference is only opened when you press Enter, so the reader never jumps away while you are halfway through typing Heb 6:1 on the way to Heb 6:10.

Two ideas, a few verses apart

Type two or more words and a row of chips appears under the box, labelled Words together:

In the same verse is the default, and it is what every multi-word search has always done. The other three are the interesting ones, because a verse is a citation unit rather than a unit of meaning. Chapter and verse divisions were added in the 16th century for referencing; an argument routinely runs three or four verses. Searching two ideas within a verse is close to searching within a page number — it works, and the boundary has nothing to do with the thought.

The case to try is any two words you expect to find argued together rather than stated together — faith and works, grace and law. Search them plainly and you get only the verses that happen to contain both. Widen to within 5 verses and you get the places where one leads to the other, which is usually the passage you were actually looking for.

The count reads 12 passages within 5 verses. Each result is headed with its reference and how far apart the words were — Romans 3:21–28 · 7 verses apart, or same verse. That last figure is the tightness signal: two ideas three verses apart are far more likely to be one argument than the same two thirty verses apart.

What changes when you widen

• You get passages, not verses. Each result shows the verses where your words were found, joined by … with your terms highlighted. Tap it and the reader opens at its first verse, where the verses in between — the argument connecting the two ideas — are there to read.
• Every term must still appear. Widening the window does not loosen the requirement. A passage containing one of your words twice is not an answer to “where do these two ideas appear together”, and it is not returned as one.
• Matching becomes exact. This is the one that surprises people. Ordinary keyword search is forgiving about spelling, which is right for find me verses about hope and ruinous here: one letter turns faith into saith, and a search for faith near works fills up with thus saith Jehovah. Naming two specific words near each other means those words. Prefix matching stays, so faith still reaches faithful.
• Windows never cross a chapter. The last verse of one chapter and the first of the next are adjacent on the page and are not one thought.

The chips only appear when there are two or more words to relate, and the setting travels in the link alongside the query and the scope, so a shared search arrives with its window intact.

Searching part of the Bible

Under the box is a row that always shows where you are searching, labelled In. It offers four places, worked out from the chapter you are reading. Standing in John 3, they are:

That is this chapter, this book, the group the book belongs to — the Law, the Gospels, Paul’s letters and so on — and the whole Bible. The one in use is highlighted, and when the search is narrowed the count line names the narrowing too: 37 results · Gospels.

That row 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. A highlighted Gospels does.

Three ways to narrow, and only one to learn

• Tap a chip — this chapter, this book, its group or the whole Bible. Other parts… at the end of the row offers the rest: the Gospels, Paul’s letters, the Prophets, the Law, and each testament.
• Just type it. Type gospels shepherd and you are offered a button: Search shepherd in Gospels. No syntax, no model call, no connection needed.
• Tap the strip. Any part of the Bible the results land in can be tapped to narrow to it; see Where these verses are.

A narrowing that none of the four chips names — one from Other parts…, a part of the Bible you tapped in the strip, one a recent search remembered, or one a shared link carried — appears as a chip of its own at the end of the row, with a × that goes back to the whole Bible.

Where these verses are

At the head of 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.

The strip is also how you navigate

It is not only a readout. Tapping a bar does two things at once: it narrows the search to that kind of writing, and it opens the books inside it with their own counts. Tap a book from there and the search narrows again to that book alone.

This is usually the fastest way to work. Search a word across the whole Bible, look at where it clusters, then tap straight into the cluster — no need to decide in advance which part of Scripture you wanted. To come back out, tap Whole Bible, or the × on the narrowing’s chip.

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 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

The chips narrow Words, Words together and the Concordance. A search for a Hebrew or Greek word by its Strong’s number uses a different engine and always covers the whole Bible, so while one is showing, the chips are not there rather than sitting there looking as though they were doing something. The Pattern page has its own Searching: line, with the same presets and any of the 66 books under All books.

Where these results point

Under a list of results is a button, Where do these verses point? It follows the cross-references of every verse you found and pools them, ranked by how many of your results agree on each passage. That surfaces passages about your subject that do not use your search word at all, which is exactly what a word search cannot reach. It is loaded only when you ask, and the cross-references are from OpenBible.info.

Recent searches and starters

With the box empty, the panel shows your Recent searches, newest first, each with the number of results it found, and under them a few starters to try — a reference, a word, a word inside one chapter, a reference in the other language, two words within five verses, and a Greek word by its Strong’s number. Picking a recent search restores the whole search — the words, the part of the Bible you had narrowed to, and the Words together window — not just the text.

The count is recorded after the search actually ran, so it is what was found rather than what was hoped for. A row reading 0 is worth seeing: it tells you that you have asked this before and it came up empty, which saves you asking twice.

A recent pattern is marked Pattern and opens the Pattern page with it. The × at the end of a row forgets that one, and Clear beside the heading forgets all of them. Recents live in this browser only; they are never uploaded.

Driving it from the keyboard

• ↓ from the box — moves to the first row below it: a result, a passage, a recent search or a starter.
• ↓ / ↑ — move through the rows. ↑ on the first row goes back to the box.
• Enter on a row — opens it. Enter in the box opens a reference, or searches what you typed.
• Enter on an empty box — runs your most recent search, the first row of the list.
• Esc — closes the panel.

On a phone

The panel is a sheet over the lower part of the screen, so the chapter stays visible above it. The ⌃ button beside Done makes it full screen when the starters, the chips and the strip need the room, and ⌄ shrinks it again. Tap a result and the reader goes to the verse; press Back and the results are there again, as you left them.

The concordance

The Concordance tab answers a different question from search: not where is this word but how often is it, and do my translations agree about it? Type one word and you get a row per Bible on screen, each with the times it is used and the verses it is in, plus a line naming the translation that uses it most and the one that uses it least. See the verses switches to Words with the same word, and Where it appears, book by book ↗ opens the full Bibles → Concordance page, which counts every translation you have installed.

• Occurrences, the way a printed concordance counts them. A verse using the word twice counts twice. This matters more than it sounds: in the ASV Jehovah is in 5,822 verses and appears 6,889 times, so nearly a fifth of the count lives in verses that say it more than once. Strong's and every printed concordance report the larger number, and so does this.
• The verse count is shown too, because that is the number Bible search reports and the two should never look like a contradiction.
• A translation with no index is not counted, never zero. Zero would say the word is absent from a Bible nobody actually looked in — the one claim a concordance must not make by accident. Open that translation once to build its index.
• The canon strip appears on the Concordance page too, so you can see where the word lives while you are counting it, and its See the verses brings the word back to Bible search.

Seeing what changed between translations

Tap a verse in a chapter and open its Compare tab, and where you have two translations in the same language there is a Differences toggle. It marks the words that actually differ, so you are not left doing the comparison by eye.

• Same language only. Diffing English against Spanish would mark every word, which looks exactly like a finding and means nothing. The panel groups by language first and only offers the toggle where a real comparison exists.
• Punctuation and capitals are ignored. God, and God are the same word wearing different typography; marking those would bury the differences that matter. The text you see is always the original, accents and punctuation intact — the normalising is only used for matching.
• One English Bible and one Spanish is the default install, which gives nothing to compare. If that is you, the panel says so and points at the catalog rather than hiding the feature.

Pattern search

Bibles → Pattern 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. It is a page of its own, with its own help and examples; the Pattern ↗ link in the search panel opens it with whatever you had typed.

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.
• Ignore syllable marks — lets Hittites match the New World Translation, which prints it Hitʹtites. Turn it off to search for the marks themselves.

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

There are two ways in. From a verse: tap a verse in a chapter, open its Hebrew / Greek tab, tap a word, then Find every verse with …. Bible search opens on that word, headed Every verse with G26, with the lemma, its transliteration and a short meaning, then the verses from the Bibles on screen. The last starter in an empty search panel does the same for G26, agapē.

By number: on the Pattern page, switch the toggle from Pattern to Strong’s & parsing and type a number: H430, G26. Loose forms are understood too — h430, G 26, even Strong's H430. Type a number in the Pattern box by mistake and the page offers to search it as one.

This is a different question from every other search here. 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. On the Pattern page, searching H430 covers the disambiguated forms the data splits it into, listed under Also used for.
• No AI is involved at any point. You tap the word or 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.

By parsing: tense, voice, mood, stem

The Strong’s & parsing box on the Pattern page also searches by how a word is parsed. Every word of the Hebrew and Greek carries its morphology, so you can ask for a grammatical form on its own or narrow a number to one:

• aorist passive participle — every aorist passive participle in the New Testament.
• niphal imperfect — the same idea in the Hebrew stems.
• H1254 qal perfect — bara, “created”, only where it is a qal perfect. Genesis 1:1 comes first.
• G2036 aorist imperative — one word in one form.

The words are the grammar’s own — tense, voice, mood, case, number, gender, person, and the Hebrew stems and forms — and the beginning of a word is enough: aor finds aorist, and perfect does not find imperfect. 3rd and third are the same person in both languages. Under the results a line says what was matched and how many distinct forms that covered, so a surprising count can be checked; a word no parsing uses is named rather than silently returning nothing.

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 thousands of verses and times; the count describes the whole result set, and 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 page 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: This is best run as a keyword search — open it in Bible search. The link takes the query to the search panel, where it runs.

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 & parsing 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.