Study like a Berean

The Berean Dashboard is a free study workbench — no account, no ads, nothing to install unless you want to. It exists for one method, the one Acts 17:11 commends: Observation — what does the text say? Interpretation — what does it mean? Application — what must change in me? In that order, every time, letting the text speak before you do.

This guide is the five-minute tour. The Complete Manual is the whole country; these seven pages are the trailhead map. Open berean-dashboard.pages.dev in any browser and walk along.

The screen at a glance

Your first study, in five minutes

One. Open a chapter and read it once, whole. Two. Select any phrase — a palette appears. Six colors, and the legend is yours: key repeated words, commands, promises, warnings. Mark what the text actually does.

Three. Open Notes and write what you see — observation before interpretation. The notebook keeps the three movements on separate tabs so the order stays honest, takes simple formatting, and saves itself as you type. Studies are named — Eschatology, Acts — the early church — and one study can span every chapter you touch. Since v35 the notebook has an ↶ Undo that takes back actions as well as typing, a search box across every note you have written, a typeface of your own choosing, pictures pasted straight into a note, and a 🧠 Mind map export for Xmind. And since v39 a note can belong to one verse: select the verse and press 📌 on the palette, and a small 📝 beside the verse number keeps it. And since v40 a mark can belong to the whole verse — triple-click it, or press ¶ on the palette — in every column at once, the Greek included; and 📋 Tonight, at the foot of Notes, counts the evening in one sentence: chapters, marks by colour, words written, lookups, commentators — measured on your device, never narrated, never sent anywhere. And since v41, paste a sentence of a verse into the reference box — copied from a page, or off a printed page through the phone’s Live Text — and the app lands on it, in your own translation. And since v42, on an iPad, a phone, or a Mac with an iPhone standing beside it, tap 📷 and hold the camera over the page: with nothing pressed the verse is read on the device, outlined on the page, and shown with its Greek beneath — the Textus Receptus or Tischendorf, whichever your printed Bible was made from; freeze the page and every verse on it is a tap away.

Let it talk — and listen

Tap ▶ Listen and the chapter is read aloud, the text highlighting along as it goes. The Hebrew and Greek read aloud too, word by word, at a speed you set. Your notes can be read back to you. And the microphone works everywhere it makes sense: dictate a note, or speak a question and watch it search itself. Reading view strips the screen to one clean column when you want nothing but the words.

Go deeper, honestly

When your own observation is done, Deeper brings in the witnesses: six seats, each holding a classic verse-by-verse commentary — Gill, Matthew Henry, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Tyndale’s open notes, Adam Clarke, Keil & Delitzsch — each swappable, each card telling you honestly what it found before you commit. At the foot of the list, David Guzik is one tap away — read on his own site, enduringword.com, at Enduring Word’s request — and since v40 the link knows the way back: the same tab and Back on a phone, the system’s Done when installed, one named tab on a Mac. Under the heading, one shut line of cross references for the verse you are on (v39) — open it and every reference shows its own verse, so you never leave the passage to find out whether it was worth following.

Lexicon takes you from any word — English, Hebrew or Greek — to its dictionary entry in two taps, and every entry carries a link out to Blue Letter Bible on that same Strong’s number — their shelf, one tap away, nothing copied here. On a Mac you need not even click: rest the pointer on a Strong’s number or a Greek word and a small card peeks the meaning (v40). Search finds a phrase or answers a question; Count it measures how many times the Bible really says a thing, wording by wording, counted on the spot — never remembered from somewhere else — and in KJV, WEB and YLT the count is exact, read from the very text the app ships. And the numbers go deeper than words: type a Strong’s number — G1577 — and every verse carrying it answers, every spelling (church, churches, assembly, one search). Type church and a gold bar offers you the number. Select a phrase and the palette offers 🔍 by the numbers — fear not in the original stands in 74 verses where English wording finds 63. The Partner answers like a good teacher — Coach, the default, hands the work back with a question; choose Teacher for a longer exposition through a named lens. The Patterns Lab counts letters, gematria and the sevens from Hebrew and Greek that ship with the app (v36), and the ELS Explorer lets you search the letter stream yourself with a shuffled control beside every result. And with two Greek editions in the columns, Δ Variant lens (settings gear) marks every word the manuscript families disagree on, in dotted gold — shown, never judged.

Keep your work

Your studies live on your own device — no account, nobody reading over your shoulder, and no server copy unless you ask for one. Close the app; open it tomorrow; everything is where you left it. Since v39, ☁ Sync to my other devices at the foot of the Notes tab carries your notes to your iPad and back, sealed with a passphrase before they leave you — the server holds what it cannot read, and there is no reset, so choose the passphrase with care. One tap prints a study as a clean PDF handout, Word opens it for editing anywhere, and the .md export is the archival backup the app can read back in — that is how a study moves between devices.

And if you like the app, install it: on Mac or Windows, Chrome and Edge offer it from the address bar — its own window, its own icon, several windows at once. On iPad or iPhone: Safari’s Share menu → Add to Home Screen, which also gives your notes the strongest protection the device offers. Then open a chapter, pick up a pen’s worth of colors, and search the Scriptures daily — whether those things are so.

One verse, everything around it

Since v45 the app has a second way to read, on an address of its own: go to /examine and the screen rearranges itself around a single verse — the verse large in the middle, the Greek or Hebrew beneath it word by word, and the helps in columns either side. The reading view you already know is untouched; this is a door beside it, not a change to it. It wants a landscape screen — a MacBook, or an iPad turned sideways — and below that width it says so and hands you back.

Tap a dotted word and the whole screen answers. The word lights in the verse, its word lights in the strip beneath, a dotted line joins the two, and the left column fills with the original word, how it is said, its Strong’s number, its dictionary entry and every place that number stands in the chapter. Change translation and your place is kept, because what is selected is a number, not a word.

Down the right: cross references already on your device, each quoted so you can judge it before you follow it — and following one moves the whole view; the same verse in your other translations; a commentator, which tells you whether the note is on this verse or on the paragraph it falls inside; and Guzik as a link to his own site. At the foot of that column is your own work — a note on the verse and a colour for the whole verse — written into the very same study the reading view writes. It is not a second notebook.

At the very bottom, a gold strip. Left alone it costs the verse nothing. Tap it and the rail opens in three groups — Observe, Interpret, Apply, which is the order this whole platform teaches: use the rail and you are practising the method, not just reading answers. Twelve questions sit under those three, never more than six at once. Choosing a group is free and is remembered; opening a question is a fresh call and is deliberately forgotten when you move on.

Four of them are new. Antecedents answers “who is these?” — and it must quote the verse where the noun stands, so you can check it rather than trust it. Flow asks what the verse before sets up and the one after concludes. Culture asks what a first-century reader knew that we do not. Prophecy asks whether the verse predicts or fulfils anything, and where it does it says plainly which position it is answering from. Each of them is allowed to say there is nothing here, and should. Every answer still names which engine wrote it, and that none of it came from bolls.life.

And some King James words have quietly changed sides. Let meant to hinder. Prevent meant to go before. “I shall not want” means I shall lack nothing. The Examine marks those words in the verse with a wavy underline — not the dotted rule that means “this word has a Strong’s number”, because they are different claims — and a card in the left column says what each one used to mean. It is a small file on your device: free, instant, works offline, invents nothing. And it marks a word only where that older sense really stands, which is why it is quieter than you might expect.

In your pocket

On a phone the app arrives in a different shape. Since v37 you read one version at a time, in bigger, quieter type, with the Strong’s numbers folded to small dots; the chip at the top switches versions instantly, and tapping a verse number opens that verse in every version at once, Greek or Hebrew first, with the commentary, your notes and the Partner one button further. Tap any word for a card — the word, how it is said, its number, one line of meaning — and the full Lexicon one tap on. The gear holds Settings, the tools, and every manual, opening inside the app. Since v40 the marking palette there is sized for a thumb, with ¶ for the whole verse.

And since v38 you can have that on a Mac or an iPad too: tick Pocket mode in the settings row and the app draws itself as a centred, phone-sized frame — the whole phone layout, for tired eyes on a big screen — remembered on that device until ⇖ Back to the full layout in the gear sheet.