1What the Berean Dashboard is

The Berean Dashboard is a free Bible study workbench that runs in a web browser. It puts up to three English translations and the Hebrew or Greek original side by side, lets you mark the text in color, gives you a notebook organised the way inductive study actually works, and reads any of it aloud in your device’s own voice. It is at berean-dashboard.pages.dev. There is nothing to install, nothing to buy, and no account to create.

That is the short version. The longer version is that most Bible websites are reference tools. You go there, you look something up, you leave. Blue Letter Bible is superb at that and I use it. But looking things up is not studying. Studying is what happens when you sit with a passage, notice what it repeats, ask what it meant to the people who first heard it, and then write down what has to change in you. That work needs a workbench, not a lookup counter.

So the positioning is simple, and I say it the same way every time: Blue Letter Bible is where you look things up. Berean is where you do the work. Every decision in this app follows from that sentence.

Nine things are worth naming on that first screen, and each of them gets its own section later:

2Why I built it

I built this for my youngest brother, Tim.

Tim is dyslexic. He wants to study the Bible the way I do, and the two things that stand between him and that are not spiritual and are not intellectual. They are mechanical. Typing a question is hard. Reading a paragraph back is hard. Every Bible study tool I could find assumed both of those were free.

So the microphone is not a novelty feature bolted on late. It is load-bearing. You can dictate your notes instead of typing them. You can ask the Study Partner a question out loud. You can turn on conversation mode and never touch the keyboard at all. And you can have the app read your own notes back to you, which turns out to be the half nobody builds — everyone will read you the Bible, nobody will read you your own notebook.

I keep one rule above the others when I decide what to build next: that fact outranks every feature idea. If a shiny new capability makes the app harder to use by voice, it does not go in.

The second reason is method. Inductive study has three movements — Observation, Interpretation, Application — and the discipline is in doing them in order and not skipping the first one. Most note-taking tools give you a blank box. A blank box quietly invites you to jump straight to what it means to me. This app gives you three boxes in order, with the questions for each one sitting right there when you want them, so the method is built into the furniture rather than into your willpower.

The third reason is ownership. There is no account, no server copy of your work, and no analytics watching you study. That is a design decision with a real trade-off, and I explain the trade-off honestly in section 11 rather than hiding it.

The footer of the app carries the whole thesis in ten words: Observation to Interpretation to Application. Let the text speak before you do.

3Your first five minutes

Open berean-dashboard.pages.dev in any modern browser. On a phone or tablet you can add it to your home screen and it will run like an app. I use Chrome on an iPad; if you want the home-screen install specifically on an iPhone or iPad, that still has to be done from Safari, because Apple only allows it there.

The first time you arrive you get the welcome card. It is the same card the ? button brings back at any time, so you do not have to memorise it now.

Here is what I would actually do in the first five minutes.

4The screen, part by part

The window has four bands: the top bar, an optional settings row, the reading area with its columns and side panel, and the footer. This section walks every control in each one. The numbers in the tables match the orange numbers on the figures.

4.1The top bar

The top bar is split across two figures here only so the numbers stay readable on the page. On screen it is one continuous row.

4.2The settings row

The gear button in the top bar opens a second row. It stays open until you press the gear again, and everything you choose here is remembered.

The translation list is long — it comes from the same source that supplies the text — and some translations carry Strong’s tagging while others do not. The KJV in the middle column of figure 1 is tagged: those small blue numbers beside the words are Strong’s numbers, and they are clickable. An untagged translation simply will not show them. That is a property of the translation, not a fault in the app.

4.3The columns

Each column is one translation, laid out verse by verse so the same verse number sits at the same height across all of them. That alignment is the whole point: it is what lets you see, in one glance, that where the NASB says more noble-minded the YLT says more noble and the Greek says eugenesteroi.

The focused verse is drawn with a gold edge and a lifted background across every column at once. You focus a verse three ways: pick it from the Verse dropdown, click its number, or arrive at it from a shared link.

The Originals column behaves differently from the English ones. Each word is shown in Hebrew or Greek with its transliteration underneath in smaller type, and a small speaker beside the transliteration that pronounces it. The word itself is clickable and sends its entry to the Lexicon tab.

That column also reads aloud, which is new in this version. Its heading carries a ▶ Hebrew or ▶ Greek button that reads the whole chapter in the original language, and every verse in the column carries its own small ▶ that reads just that verse. Section 7.4 is about what that actually sounds like and what it is for.

4.4The side panel and its six tabs

Everything that is not the Bible text lives in the panel on the right. There are six tabs. Which one you have open is not remembered between visits — every fresh load of the app starts on Lexicon.

4.5The footer

The footer carries three things. On the left, the method in one line: Observation to Interpretation to Application. Let the text speak before you do. In the middle, links to Guzik, to the Smith For Christ blog, to the inductive guide, and to the three companion PDFs — Why Berean, the Field Guide, and How It Was Built. On the right, the version chip. Tap the chip for the About panel described in section 10.

5Working with the text

5.1Verse numbers are buttons

This is the single feature people miss for the longest time, so I will say it plainly. Every verse number in every English column is a button. Click one and that verse becomes the focused verse across all columns — the commentary, the listening and the copy-to-notes chip all key off it. It also opens the Deeper tab at that verse, and the tooltip on the number tells you in advance exactly which commentary it will open — Open Guzik at verse 11, or whichever one you already had showing. If a commentary is open, that is the one it stays with and scrolls. If none is open, it opens Guzik. Either way you get commentary on the verse you just clicked, in one click, without going to the panel first.

In earlier versions this did nothing unless you had already opened the commentary tab yourself, and the tooltip promised more than the button delivered. That is fixed. If you learned the old behaviour, unlearn it — the numbers now do what they always looked like they did.

5.2Word study: three ways in

There are three doors into the dictionary, and they all open onto the Lexicon tab.

You can also simply type into the Lexicon’s own box: a Strong’s number like G25 or H7225, or a word, or a lexeme.

5.3Marking the text

Select any word or phrase in the scripture text — drag with a mouse, or press and drag with a finger — and a small palette appears right at the selection.

Marks belong to the study you are in, not to the app as a whole. Two studies of the same chapter can carry completely different markings, which is exactly what you want when you come back to a passage a year later and do not want your old conclusions shouting at you.

5.4Marking on a touch screen

Dragging to select text is fiddly on a phone, and it is worse if your hands are not steady. So on any touch device a pencil button appears in the bottom-left corner. Tap it to turn on tap-to-mark mode, then simply tap a word to mark it. Tap the pencil again to go back to normal. The button is not there on a desktop with a mouse, because it is not needed there.

6Notes: the deep dive

This is the part of the app I care most about, so it gets the most pages. Everything here is in the Notes tab.

6.1Studies, and why there is more than one

A study is a named container: its own notes, its own marks, its own color legend. You might have one called Acts — the noble-minded and another called Romans — the righteousness of God, and a third that is just this autumn’s small group. They can all contain notes on the same chapter without colliding.

6.2Observation, Interpretation, Application

The three tabs are not folders. They are an order of operations. The app will not stop you jumping to Application first, but it will keep quietly putting Observation on the left, and after a while that does its work on you.

Open the coaching prompt line and you get the questions for the movement you are in, in the app’s own words:

Underneath the prompt is a row of chips. Tapping one drops a heading into your notes so you do not have to type it. In Observation they are the observation moves — Who / What / When / Where, Repeated words, Contrast, Comparison, Commands, Cause to Effect, List. In Interpretation they are Context, Word study, Cross-references, Author’s intent, What it meant to them. In Application they are Promise to trust, Sin to confess, Command to obey, Example to follow, Prayer. Every one of the three also ends with + verse. Be clear about what that one does: it drops in a labelled stub, v11 —, and leaves the writing to you. It does not paste the verse text.

The chip that does paste the text is the gold one at the front of the row, reading Copy verse v11 + questions with your focused verse number in it. That one puts the whole verse into your notes together with the inductive questions for the box you are in, which is usually what people are reaching for when they press + verse and wonder why nothing arrived.

6.3The editor and its toolbar

6.4Preview, and what the formatting marks do

The notebook is plain Markdown. You do not have to know what that means — the toolbar buttons write it for you — but it is worth knowing that the symbols you see while typing are not clutter. Two stars around a word makes it bold. A hash at the start of a line makes it a heading. A greater-than sign makes it a quotation. A dash makes a bullet. Press Preview and the editor splits: your typing above, the formatted result below.

I keep Preview off while I am writing and turn it on before I export. The reason to care is that Markdown is what makes the export honest: the file you get out is the same text you typed, readable in any editor on earth, and re-importable here.

6.5Full-screen notes

The expand button in the study row throws the notebook across the entire window with the editor and the preview side by side. This is the mode for the moment when you have stopped looking things up and started writing. Esc returns you to the study view.

6.6The marking legend

A color only means what the legend says it means. Under the notebook, open Marking legend and you get a line for each of the six. Every new study starts with the set I use — gold is God — His character and actions, green is command or instruction, sky is key repeated word, rose is sin or warning, violet is promise or blessing and amber is time, place or contrast. That is a starting point and nothing more. Type over any of them. Each study carries its own set, so a study of Romans can use the six colors for six entirely different things than a study of Acts.

6.7The note manager

Open Note manager and you get every chapter you have notes on, across every study, with a count of which of the three movements you have filled in and how many marks are in it. Click a reference to jump there. The small bin on a row deletes just that chapter’s notes and marks within that study, which is a far gentler thing than the Delete button at the top.

6.8Keyword marking

Below the manager is a box that reads Key words to mark. Type words separated by commas — love, believe, therefore — and press Mark, and every occurrence in the open chapter is highlighted at once. Six terms is the limit; type a seventh and it is quietly ignored. Clear removes them. This is the fastest way to do the classic observation exercise of finding a repeated word, and it is the one I reach for first in a new chapter.

6.9Getting your notes out, and back in

Four ways out, one way in. Understanding the difference matters more than any other housekeeping detail in this app.

7Voice: the deep dive

There are nine separate voice features now, and they do genuinely different jobs. People conflate them, so here they are laid out plainly before the detail. Two of them — hearing a whole chapter in Hebrew or Greek, and the three controls that govern how the original languages are spoken — are new in this version.

7.1Dictating your notes

Press the microphone in the note toolbar. It turns into a stop square, the word listening appears beside it, and what you say goes into the notebook at the cursor. It is continuous: you can pause to think without it giving up on you. What it has heard but not yet committed shows in quotation marks beside the button, so you can see it is following you.

Press the button again to stop, or press Esc. That escape key is deliberately greedy — if you are dictating in full-screen notes, the first Esc stops the microphone and only a second one leaves full screen, because stopping the microphone is almost always what you actually meant.

Two housekeeping behaviours are worth knowing. Only one thing owns the microphone at a time, so starting dictation stops the Study Partner listening, and vice versa. And because browsers end long listening sessions on their own schedule, the app quietly restarts the session behind the scenes while the button is still lit. You should never notice this happening; if you do, it is a bug and I want to hear about it.

7.2Hearing your notes read back

This is the half nobody builds, and for Tim it is the important one. Press Hear notes and the app reads your own notebook aloud, starting from the paragraph your cursor is in rather than always from the top. The formatting marks are stripped out, so you hear your words and not a recitation of hash signs and asterisks.

The same button pauses and resumes. The stop square beside it stops altogether. If the notebook is empty it tells you so instead of sitting silently. And if you were dictating, starting playback stops the microphone first, because reading your notes aloud into a live microphone is a comedy nobody needs.

7.3Listening to the chapter

The ▶ Listen button in the top bar reads the Bible chapter aloud in English, using your device’s own built-in voice, which is why it is free and why it works offline once the chapter is loaded. It starts at the focused verse rather than at verse 1, so you can listen from where you are actually working. It reads slightly under normal speed. As it goes it scrolls each verse into view, so you can follow along with your eyes if that helps. Verse numbers and Strong’s numbers are stripped out of what it says. The button reads ⏹ Stop while it is speaking; press it to stop.

This button was labelled simply Read until this version. It was renamed because the Originals column now has a reading button of its own, and two controls both saying Read would have been a puzzle rather than a label.

7.4Hearing the Hebrew and the Greek

This is the largest addition in this version. The Originals column no longer just pronounces one word at a time — it will read the whole chapter to you in Hebrew or in Greek.

There are two ways in, and they sit exactly where you would look for them. The head of the Originals column carries a button that says ▶ Hebrew in the Old Testament and ▶ Greek in the New; press it and the chapter is read from the focused verse onward. And every verse in that column carries its own small ▶, which reads that verse alone. The chapter button turns into ⏹ Stop while it is running; a verse button turns into ⏹. Press either again to stop.

While it reads a chapter it moves the highlight and scrolls the page one verse at a time, not one word at a time — so it keeps pace with your eye rather than twitching down the column. Reading a single verse deliberately does not scroll the page at all, because you just tapped that verse and moving it out from under you would be rude.

▶ Listen and ▶ Hebrew stop each other. Starting one always stops the other, because two voices reading two languages over the top of one another is not a feature anybody wanted.

7.5Speed, pause, and which voice says it

Three controls govern how the original languages are spoken. They live at the top of the Lexicon tab, directly under the lookup box, because that is the tab you are already in when you are working with a word and wanting it said differently. All three are remembered between visits.

The Pause slider is read fresh before every word, so if a chapter is already running and it sounds wrong, drag the slider and the very next word takes the new spacing. You do not have to stop and start again.

7.6Reading view

Reading view exists for the eyes first and the ears second. It takes the columns away and gives you one translation, top to bottom, in a single readable measure. There are two reasons it exists. One, sometimes you just want to read a chapter like a chapter. Two, and this is the real reason, a dedicated reading tool like Speechify needs a clean block of prose to point at, and a four-column parallel grid with superscript verse numbers is the worst possible thing to hand it. The hint in the corner says so out loud.

7.7Asking out loud

In the Partner tab there is a microphone beside the Ask button. Tap it, say your question, and it sends itself — you do not have to press anything afterwards. What it heard is echoed on screen so you can see whether it understood you.

7.8Conversation mode, hands-free

The checkbox marked Conversation — hands-free is dictation, sending, answering and reading-aloud wired into a loop. Turn it on and the app listens. You speak. It thinks. It speaks the answer. Then it listens again, without you touching anything. A line under the checkbox tells you which of those it is doing at any moment.

Three details make it usable rather than maddening. It only starts listening again after it has finished speaking, so it does not hear itself and answer its own question. If the browser cuts the listening session short, it re-arms silently. And if you say nothing for two minutes it stands down, and says out loud that it is doing so, rather than sitting there with the microphone open. Esc turns it off at any time.

This is the mode I built the whole app around. If you never touch the keyboard and never read a paragraph, you can still study a chapter properly.

7.9What voice needs to work

All of it uses the free speech services built into your browser. Nothing is sent to a paid transcription service and there is nothing to configure.

8The Study Partner

The Partner tab is an AI study companion that knows which passage you have open. Its job description is printed at the top of the tab, and it is short: ask anything about the open passage, and it answers like a good teacher — with a question back at you. Scripture stays the authority.

I want to be exact about why it behaves that way, because it is a deliberate design choice and it will occasionally frustrate you. A tool that hands you the meaning of a passage on request is a tool that does your observation for you, and observation is the part you cannot outsource without losing the whole benefit. So the Partner is tuned to point you back at the text: to ask what you noticed, to suggest a word worth looking up, to name the context you might be missing. It will answer a direct factual question directly. It will not do your homework.

The five starter chips are the questions I found myself asking most often: How do I study the Bible inductively?, What’s the context of this chapter?, What key words should I mark here?, What does the Greek add to my focused verse?, and Quiz me on this passage. That last one is worth trying — being asked questions about a chapter you have just read is a better test of whether you actually studied it than any amount of re-reading.

Under every answer there is a small → Notes button. Press it and the answer is saved into your Interpretation notes for the chapter you are on. This is the bridge between talking about a passage and having actually studied it: the conversation does not evaporate when you close the tab.

9Lexicon, Deeper, Blog and Search

Lexicon — the word-study bay

The Lexicon tab is where every word study lands, whichever of the three doors in section 5.2 you came through. You can also type into it directly: a Strong’s number, a word, or a lexeme.

Directly under the lookup box, and not shown in figure 18 because that figure predates them, sit the three voice controls described in section 7.5: 🔊 Speed, ⏸ Pause, and the Speak the Hebrew / Greek instead checkbox. They are in this tab rather than in the settings row because this is the tab you are already looking at when a word is being pronounced to you and you want it said slower.

Definitions come from Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew and Thayer’s for Greek. These are the standard public-domain lexicons; they are old, they are respected, and they are what free tools can honestly offer. The Add word study to notes button at the bottom of an entry saves you copying it out by hand.

Deeper — four commentaries on the open chapter

This tab was called Guzik and held one commentary. It is now called Deeper and holds four. This is the other large change in this version, and it changes the shape of the tab rather than just its contents, so it is worth walking through.

Open it and you do not land in a commentary. You land on a list, headed Who has something on Acts 17 — with your own chapter in place of Acts 17. Each of the four commentators gets a card, and each card tells you what the app has actually found before you commit to reading it.

Each card carries a flag. ready means the text is there, and the card tells you how many entries: Acts 17 · 42 entries. checking means the app is still asking. couldn’t load means the ask failed — a network problem, not an absence. If a commentator simply has nothing on your chapter, no card appears at all. Those two are kept carefully apart: hiding a card because the network dropped would tell you something false about the commentator.

Guzik and Gill are asked for every chapter, so their cards appear immediately. The other two are checked in the background, and when both answers are in they are added together, in the order they are listed above — never in whichever-server-answered-first order. The list does not shuffle itself while you are reading it.

Tap a card and it opens into the commentary, scrolled to your focused verse with that verse’s heading highlighted. The sticky header at the top then reads ‹ Deeper and the name of what you are in. That header is the only control in the tab, and it is deliberately the only way back: one button, one meaning, in one fixed place. Whichever commentary you choose stays chosen as you move from chapter to chapter.

Blog — my own writing on the passage

This tab looks through the Smith For Christ blog for posts that discuss the chapter you have open, and shows you the ones it finds with a link out to the full post. If you are not me, this tab is a window onto my writing rather than yours; I left it in because a good number of the people using this are in my study groups.

Search — finding a phrase

Two ways in: the Search Scripture box in the top bar, or the box in this tab. Either way the results land here, each one a link that takes you to the verse.

10Settings, sharing, offline and updates

Sharing a verse

The web address at the top of your browser always points at the exact passage you are looking at. The link button in the top bar copies it — or, on a phone, opens the normal share sheet so you can text it. Anyone who taps it lands on the verse you were on, in their own columns and their own theme. Nothing of your notes travels with it.

Working offline

The app installs a small piece of itself into your browser so that it opens without a network. Chapters you have already read are kept too. So on a plane, or in a basement with no signal, the app opens, your notes are all there, and the chapters you have been working in come up. A chapter you have never opened will not, and when that happens the app says so in plain English rather than showing you a browser error — and it quietly tries once more on its own before it gives up.

Version and updates

The chip in the bottom-right corner shows which version you are running. Tap it for the About panel.

11Where your work actually lives

Everything you write — every study, every note, every mark, every legend entry, and your choice of columns, text size and theme — is stored in your browser on the device you are using. There is no account. There is no copy on any server. Nobody, including me, can read your notes.

That is a real benefit and it comes with a real cost, and I would rather you understood both than be pleasantly surprised by one and ambushed by the other.

The app also asks your browser to treat its storage as durable rather than as something to be cleared when space runs short, and if saving ever does start failing it puts a warning on screen rather than losing your work quietly. If you ever see that warning, export immediately and then tell me.

12When something goes wrong

If something is wrong that is not on this list, tell me. The list gets longer because people tell me things.

13The roadmap

You asked for everything in the backlog, so this is everything, sorted by how certain it is rather than by how exciting it sounds. Anything below the first heading is not a promise.

Being built next

Written and waiting on me to test them

These are finished and sitting on branches. Each one merges when I have put it in front of real hands and watched what happens.

Specified, not yet built

Under consideration

Ideas I think are good and have not committed to. Listing them is not the same as agreeing to build them.

Decided against

14Credits, sources and a word about the figures

Where the words come from

Scripture text and original-language text come from bolls.life. Commentary now comes from four hands: David Guzik, from Enduring Word, used for personal study and credited with a link out to the original on every panel; and three that are in the public domain — Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, John Gill’s Exposition of the Bible, and Matthew Henry. Each is named on its own panel; none of them is anonymous in this app, and none of them is mine. Hebrew definitions are Brown-Driver-Briggs; Greek definitions are Thayer’s. Speech in both directions is the free capability built into your own browser, including the Hebrew and Greek voices — the app supplies no audio of its own and records nothing.

About the figures in this manual

Every figure here is a real screenshot of a real browser with real Acts 17 text, real Strong’s tagging, real Greek, and real lexicon output. The study shown throughout — the notes, the ten marks on Acts 17, the legend, the second Romans study — is a worked example I set up so the figures would show a notebook with something in it rather than empty boxes.

But the figures were captured from v11, and this is the v12 manual. The text is v12 throughout — every label, every button name, every behaviour in these pages was checked against the version you are running, line by line, not remembered. The pictures are one version behind, and rather than quietly hope you do not notice, here is exactly where that shows.

Two older caveats still stand. In figure 20, the Blog tab, the post shown is a clearly labelled sample rather than a real Smith For Christ post — the live blog feed could not be reached when these were captured. In figure 17, the Study Partner exchange, the answer shown is a written-out representative answer in the Partner’s actual style rather than a captured live response.

Everything on every figure that is not named in this section is the real thing, and the figures will be recaptured for the next revision.

The companion documents

One last thing.

This app exists because my brother wanted to study the Bible and the tools were in his way. If it is in your way somewhere, tell me, because that is the only thing I am actually trying to fix.

The Bereans were not praised for being clever. They were praised for two things together: they received the word eagerly, and they checked it daily. Eagerness without examination is enthusiasm. Examination without eagerness is homework. Hold both.

Ed

Ed Smith · Smith For Christ · smithforchrist.com