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 family — so that we would search the Scriptures diligently, daily, together — and then for every brother and sister in Christ who wants the same thing.

A family does not all read the same way. Some of us can sit with a page for hours. For some of us the two things that stand between us and deep study are not spiritual and are not intellectual. They are mechanical. Typing a question is hard. Reading a paragraph back is hard. Neither has anything to do with how much a person loves the Word. And 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: if it cannot be used by voice, it is not usable by all of us, and that 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.

On a phone the app arrives in a different shape — one version of the text on screen, a strip of tabs along the bottom, and every other version one tap away. That is pocket mode, new in v37, and section 5.6 walks through it. Everything in this manual still applies on a phone; the controls are simply reached by tapping the verse number, the version chip or the gear instead of looking to the right.

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 a wide screen it is one continuous row. On a narrower one — an iPad, or a small laptop window — it breaks at a chosen point into a navigation row and a tools row, rather than wrapping wherever the width happens to run out (v39). Nothing moves to a second place; the same controls simply have two lines to stand on.

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.

Two things about this row changed in v47, and both are about small screens. The three translation pickers take their width from the longest translation name in the list, and on anything narrower than about 530 pixels that pushed the third one off the right-hand edge with no way to scroll to it — on a phone the row simply lost its own controls. They now shrink to the screen, one to a line. And on a phone the row used to open underneath the bar that opens it, so the pickers were on the screen and painted over; it now opens clear of the bar, and a tap anywhere on the page closes it, which is how every other phone panel behaves.

New in v35 among these settings is a Typeface picker for the scripture text. The choices are faces chosen for long reading — and for dyslexia-friendliness — rather than decoration; pick one and the whole reading surface follows, on every visit, on this device.

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.

The small speaker beside each transliteration used to be there for every word at once — six hundred and seventy-eight of them on Acts 17. Since v39 it appears only for the word under your pointer, or, on a touch screen, for the words of the verse you have focused. The column reads the same; it is simply quieter until you ask.

That column also reads aloud. 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.

On an iPad held upright four columns do not fit, and until v39 the fourth was simply off the right edge of the screen, with nothing to say so. Now the grid shows the columns that fit — three, at that width — and a chip at the foot of the text says exactly what happened: 3 of 4 columns fit here — YLT folded, with a button to choose your columns and one to show them all and scroll sideways instead. The chip exists only while a column is folded. Turn the iPad on its side and all four come back.

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.

On a phone there is no room for a panel on the right, so the same six tabs become a strip along the bottom of the screen and each one opens full-screen. Section 5.6.

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, a per-chapter link to David Guzik at enduringword.com (his commentary is read on his own site, by Enduring Word’s request), a link to the Patterns Lab — the ciphers-and-sevens laboratory — and links to the Smith For Christ blog, the inductive guide, and the About & Docs library, where every companion document lives. 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 John Gill 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 John Gill. Either way you get commentary on the verse you just clicked, in one click, without going to the panel first. On a wide monitor — about 1100 pixels and up — that commentary opens in a column beside the Bible rather than over it, so the verse you tapped stays on the screen (v39). The ⤡ button at the top of the commentary swaps between the two, and whichever you choose last is what you get next time; on a narrower screen it still opens full width, as it always did.

A small 📝 after a verse number means you have written a note on that verse. Tap it and the note opens. Section 6.11.

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.

On a touch screen the ✎ pencil that switches between marking and scrolling sits at the bottom-right corner of the text area rather than floating over the words (v39), and the last verse can always scroll clear of it.

On a phone the number does one thing more: it opens the verse in every version you have chosen, Greek or Hebrew first, in a sheet that slides up from the bottom — with the commentary one button further. Section 5.6.3.

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.

On a phone the blue numbers fold to small dots, and tapping a dot or a Greek word opens a card first — the word, how it is said, its number and one line of meaning — with the full Lexicon entry one tap further. Section 5.6.4.

On a Mac, a fourth way that is not a door at all (v40). Rest the pointer on a Strong’s number or on a Greek word and, after a quarter of a second, a small card appears beside it: the word, how it is said, and one line of meaning. Move on and it is gone; click, and the Lexicon opens as it always did. The same card works on a marked phrase — it names the colour, what that colour means in your legend, and how many marks of it are in the chapter — and on the 📝 beside a verse number, where it shows the note. It is a peek, not a control: it adds nothing you could press, it stores nothing, and it never appears on an iPad or a phone, where there is no pointer to rest.

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.

Word study, one tap (new in v21–v22). Tap a single word and the palette grows a second row: all in this chapter, ticked by default — choose a color and every occurrence of that word in the chapter takes it at once. Where the translation carries Strong’s tagging, the row also offers the other language: mark serpent and הנחש takes the same color in the Originals column, found by the Strong’s number itself.

The bridge runs both ways. The Hebrew and Greek words are markable too: a plain tap on an original word still opens its dictionary entry — that job does not change — so marking has its own gesture: right-click on a computer, or a tap while tap-to-mark (the pencil) is on. The palette opens on the original word, and when it carries a Strong’s number it offers to color the English counterpart with it.

A mark on the whole verse (new in v40). A phrase mark lives in one translation’s wording: more noble in the King James is noble-minded in another, and the mark follows the words. Sometimes what you want to say is about the verse and not the words — this whole verse is the promise. Triple-click a verse and the palette opens with ¶ already on; or select anything in it and press ¶ yourself, which is the way on a phone. Then any colour marks the whole verse: a light tint of the colour behind it and a pencil-line down its margin, in every column at once, whichever translations they show, the Greek included. U̲ with ¶ on underlines the verse’s text instead. Because the mark is anchored to the verse and not to a phrase, your exports say the whole verse where they would quote a phrase, and the word analytics (section 6.6b) count nothing from it. Clear with ¶ on removes the whole-verse marks and leaves the phrases alone.

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.

Since v40 the palette on a phone is sized for a thumb: every dot and every button meets the 44 pixels a finger needs, and the palette wraps to two rows inside the screen instead of running off its right edge. Section 5.6.10 shows it.

5.5The foundational texts: the Variant lens and the Originals picker

The translations differ because the Greek beneath them differs. The King James stands on the Textus Receptus; the modern translations stand on the critical text, whose free representative here is Tischendorf’s 8th. From v33 the app lets you see exactly where those foundations part ways. Put both Greek editions in the translation columns — TR and TISCH is the classic pair — and flip Δ Variant lens in the settings gear. Every word one text carries that the other lacks wears a dotted gold underline, deliberately distinct from your study marks; rest on an underlined word and it names the side that lacks it. A verse present in one edition and absent from the other gets a plain banner saying so, and a summary line above the text counts the chapter’s differences. Open 1 John 5 with the lens on and verse 7 stands marked in the TR with silence opposite it — the most famous variant in the Bible, shown rather than told. Spelling conventions — accents, breathings, case — never light up; only real presence, absence and substitution do. The diff runs on the chapters already on your screen: no server calls, no new data, and it works offline. The lens describes; it never judges — it marks where the manuscript families differ and leaves the weighing to you, with the Lexicon and the commentaries one tap away.

And from v34 the Originals column is choosable on its Greek side: Originals · NT in the settings gear offers the Textus Receptus (the default, as always), Tischendorf’s 8th — the critical-text family, natively Strong’s-tagged — or the plain Tischendorf text. The Hebrew side stays the Westminster Leningrad Codex, untouched, without so much as a control to disturb it. The Septuagint and Delitzsch’s Hebrew New Testament are on the shelf too, and the picker deliberately refuses both: they are translations, not originals — the Septuagint is Greek rendering Hebrew — so they belong in the translation columns, where the Septuagint can be read today beside the Hebrew it renders.

5.6The Dashboard on a phone

Until v37 the phone got the desktop folded in half. Four columns stacked one on top of another, so a single verse was the King James, then the NASB, then Young’s, then the Greek — nearly a whole screen per verse, and a chapter of Acts twenty-two thousand pixels tall. Small type, a blue number on every word, a spelling-out and a speaker under every Greek word. All of it was there. None of it could be read.

So on any screen narrower than about 640 pixels the app now changes shape. I call it pocket mode, and this section is the manual for it. Two things to know before the detail. First, nothing in it is a second app: the same chapter is on the page, the same marks, the same notes, the same Lexicon — only folded, and one tap unfolds whichever part you want. Second, on a Mac, an iPad or a phone turned sideways, none of this happens by itself; you get the layout the rest of this manual describes. But you can ask for it. Since v38 the last row of the desktop settings row (section 4.2) is a tick-box, Pocket mode, and on a wide screen it draws the app as an emulated phone — a centred, phone-sized frame with exactly the layout this section describes, every sheet the width of the frame rather than the window. I use it on the iPad for my eyes. It is remembered on that device; ⇖ Back to the full layout at the top of the gear sheet, or unticking Keep pocket mode on this device in Settings, puts the desktop back.

5.6.1 One version on screen

You read one version. The chip at the top says which — KJV, or Greek · TR — and tapping it switches instantly, because nothing new is fetched: every version you chose in Settings is already on the page, only hidden. The same chapter of Acts is now under five thousand pixels.

The text is bigger and quieter. Seventeen-pixel type with room between the lines; the Greek and Hebrew are larger still. The blue Strong’s numbers fold to a small dot after each tagged word — the dot still opens the word, section 5.6.4 — and if you want the numbers back, Settings has a switch. The spelling-out under each Greek word is a switch too, off by default. The pencil for tap-to-mark (section 5.4) moves to the right-hand corner where a thumb can reach it, and hides while a sheet is open.

The slim header is the whole top bar, folded: the reference (tap it for the picker, section 5.6.8), the version chip, the gear that opens More, the share link, and Listen. Along the bottom is the strip — Read, Lexicon, Deeper, Notes, Search, Partner, Blog and the rest — which scrolls sideways and fades at its edge so you can see there is more. Each tab opens full-screen; Read brings the chapter back.

5.6.2 Switching the version

Tap the chip and choose. The choice is remembered, and if the version you were reading is ever taken out of your columns the app falls back to column one rather than showing you nothing. A thin gold line under the header shows how far down the chapter you are.

5.6.3 Tap a verse number: the verse sheet

This is what a parallel Bible can mean on a screen four inches wide. Tap any verse number and that one verse opens in every version at once, the original language first, your marks intact. The arrows — or a swipe — walk to the next verse and the one before. Swipe the sheet down to close it. The four buttons are the things you most often do with a verse: Hear the Greek (or Hebrew), Commentary — which does exactly what the verse number does on a desktop, opening Deeper at that verse — Note, and Partner. At the end of a chapter a card offers the next one.

5.6.4 Tap a word: the word sheet

On a desktop a Strong’s number sends you straight to the Lexicon tab. On a phone the Lexicon is a whole screen away, so a tap opens a card first: the word, the Greek or Hebrew behind it, its pronunciation, its number and one line of what it means, fetched from the same dictionary the Lexicon uses. Then three choices. Go to the lexicon opens the full entry, and leaves a gold pill — ‹ Back to Acts 17:11 — that returns you to the exact place on the page you tapped from. Highlight it marks the word with the palette, as section 5.3 describes. Copy puts more noble · G2104 on the clipboard for a note or a message. Tapping a Greek or Hebrew word in the Originals does the same, with the original on the card.

5.6.5 Settings on a phone

Text size, theme — Dark, Light, or Auto to follow the device — which version to read and which two to keep a tap away, the Originals on or off, the Strong’s numbers back in the text, the interlinear line under the Greek and Hebrew, and the switch that keeps pocket mode on a wider screen. Nothing here is new; until v37 none of it was reachable on a phone without opening the entire desktop toolbar.

5.6.6 The gear: everything else

Settings and a one-tap light-or-dark switch sit at the top, because reading outdoors is a phone thing. Under Tools: Deeper, Search, the Blog and the Patterns Lab. Under Read: the Inductive Guide, this manual, the Field Guide, the About & Docs library, the change log and the Smith For Christ blog — and the documents open inside the app, section 5.6.9. (Guzik is not here: he lives at the foot of Deeper, one tap on the strip, and section 9.6 explains how that link brings you back.)

5.6.7 Tap a tab twice: the sub-strips

Some tabs have a second row. Tap Deeper once and the commentary list opens; tap it again and the strip becomes the commentators themselves, one chip each, with Back at the left. Tap Read a second time and the strip becomes your translations, so you can swap the two shown without opening Settings — two at most, because two is what a phone can compare.

5.6.8 Tap the reference: the picker

Tap the reference in the header and a real picker opens rather than the desktop dropdowns. Type John 3:16 and press Go; type a word instead and it hands you to Search with the word filled in; paste a sentence of a verse (v41) and it lands on the verse it came from, whichever translation it was copied from — section 4.1 says how; or tap 📷 beside Go and hold the camera over the page (v43) — section 5.7. Or tap a book, then a chapter from the grid, then a verse — Whole chapter is first. The last five places you went wait at the top as chips, and All desktop controls at the foot is the old toolbar, for the one time you need something only it has.

5.6.9 Reading the manuals inside the app

Every document under Read opens in a sheet inside the app, in the app’s own type, rather than kicking you out to a browser tab. Close it and you are back on your verse. On a phone the contents column of this manual and the Field Guide folds behind a ☰ Contents pill; tap a section and it closes.

5.6.10 Marking on a phone

Marking on a phone is the pencil (section 5.4) and this palette. Until v40 the palette on a phone was the desktop’s, drawn small — dots twenty pixels across and buttons of fifteen — and it was the one surface pocket mode had not resized. Now every dot and every button is a finger’s width, and the palette wraps inside the screen. ¶ is the button to know: with it on, a colour marks the whole verse, in every version at once, which on a four-inch screen is often what you meant.

Two things you would have noticed without knowing why

The King James text as it comes from the source sometimes ends a verse with a stray marginal note — whom: or, whom, said he, I preach at the end of Acts 17:3 — and until v37 the app showed it as scripture and read it aloud as scripture. It is gone, on every screen size. And a space had been creeping in before commas and full stops after every tagged word, which is the source’s doing; it is closed.

The voice controls in the Lexicon tab (section 7.5) fold into a 🔊 Voice line on a phone so the entry comes first; the instructions say tap where they say click on a desktop, and the double-click door of section 5.2 is not offered on a phone, because a double tap zooms the page instead.

5.7The camera: hold it over the page

New in v42, remade in v43 so that there is nothing to press, and in v44 brought to the Mac. Put the Bible on the desk and the iPad or the phone in your hand. On an iPad, 📷 sits beside Open in the top bar; on a phone it is in the picker, beside Go. On a Mac it appears whenever the Mac can see a camera — its own, or an iPhone standing beside it through Apple’s Continuity Camera (macOS Ventura and iOS 16 or later, the same Apple ID, Bluetooth on, nothing to install): then the iPhone is the lens and the Mac’s screen is the pane of glass. Tap the button and the browser asks whether the app may use the camera — the only moment it ever asks. Where more than one camera exists, a small picker in the bar under the picture chooses between them, prefers the one whose name says iPhone, and remembers your choice. A full-screen viewfinder opens with a gold guide across the middle. Hold the guide over a verse and keep your hand still. That is all.

When the hand has been still for a moment the strip of the picture under the guide is read — on the device, by the phone’s own text recogniser where the browser has one and otherwise by a reader the app carries with it, about six megabytes that load the first time and never again — and the verse lights on the page: a soft gold line under each of its printed lines. Beneath the picture, the reference, the verse as your own translation has it, and the Greek or Hebrew word by word with how each is said — the same words the Originals column shows, section 4.3. Move down the page and the next verse follows. Move quickly and the outline fades until you stop; the verse you had stays. A sure reading changes the verse at once; a doubtful one must be seen twice; a miss never takes away what is there. The line under the picture always says how many of the verse’s words were found.

The shutter freezes the page and maps it. Tap the round button and the picture stops; the whole page is read, and every verse the reader finds becomes a box you can tap — the line under the picture says 3 verses on this page — tap another. Tap one and the strip beneath shows it. 🖼 opens a photo you already took and explores it the same way, with no Bible in reach. Tap any Greek or Hebrew word in the strip and the Lexicon opens on it. Open in the Dashboard goes to the chapter with that verse in focus; Another verse raises the camera again; ✕ closes it, and closing it turns the camera off.

Which Greek (v44). Under the Greek sit three chips — Textus Receptus, Tischendorf, NTGT — and they choose which Greek text is shown: the same choice the settings gear makes for the Originals column (section 4.3), one tap instead of a trip to the gear. Match it to the Bible on the desk. A King James or Young’s was translated from the Textus Receptus; an ESV, NIV or NASB from the critical text, of which Tischendorf’s 8th is the nearest the app carries; the World English Bible from the Majority text, to which the Textus Receptus stands close. Strong’s numbers ride natively on Tischendorf’s 8th, so on that text a tapped word opens the Lexicon by its number; the Textus Receptus and NTGT carry no tags, and there a tapped word looks itself up by its spelling. How each word is said is shown on all three. The Hebrew side has one text and no chips.

Three things worth knowing. The picture never leaves the device; nothing about it is sent anywhere, and there is no server that could receive it. Live reading is paced to be kind to the phone — the guide’s strip only, never two readings at once — so a verse takes a moment to appear, and a page with many verses is better frozen and tapped than hovered over. And a photograph is not a scan: glare, a curved gutter and a small face all cost the reader words; moving closer so one verse fills the guide helps more than anything else. What the camera does not yet do is glide the outline with the page as you sweep across it — that is the next step, and the plan for it is in the repository.

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

Since v39 the toolbar shows its everyday half — Undo, B, I, Preview, Picture — and folds the rest behind one ⋯: heading, quote, list, dictation and read-back. Every one of them is still there, one tap in; what changed is that the writing box gets the height they used to take, and the two rows of coaching chips above it show two rows and then say more prompts rather than pushing the box off the screen. On an iPad every control in this pane is now sized for a finger.

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.

6.6bWord analytics — counting what you marked

Under the notebook, always visible, sits 📊 Word analytics (the palette carries the same button, so a fresh mark is one tap from its numbers). It lays out a table: each single-word mark of the open chapter is a row, wearing its own highlight color, and the columns are measured counts — this chapter, this book, the Old Testament, the New, and the whole Bible.

The numbers are counted, never remembered from somewhere else — and since v24, the canon columns are exact. The chapter column comes from the loaded text while you watch. For English words, the Old Testament, New Testament and whole-Bible columns are read from a word table shipped beside the app — every word of the translation counted whole-word, testament by testament, built from the very edition the app displays — so god in the KJV says 4,556, with the small-caps renderings of the Name (LORD, GOD) fully counted, and the whole Bible is the sum of the two testaments, never a third guess. The book column is its own live scan of just that book. The exact tables ship for the public-domain editions (KJV, WEB, YLT); any other edition falls back to live paged scans, and a cell whose scan hit its page limit says ≥ — a floor, honestly labeled, rather than a floor passed off as a total.

Hebrew and Greek words marked from their dictionary entries are counted by their Strong’s number, not by spelling — the original languages inflect, so the same word is written dozens of pointed ways, and the number is what gathers every spelling under one count. Mark אֶלֹהִים in Genesis and the OT column reads 2,606 — the reference concordance count, exactly — while the chapter column counts the tagged words on the page, the same words the highlight colors. A bare form marked without a number first looks for its number in the tagged text itself — one distinct number in the chapter’s tags and the row counts by it, so marks made in earlier versions heal without being touched; only when the text is ambiguous does an honest dash remain. And every number riding on your marks — including the English-side bridge marks — gets its own number row, labeled by the number and counted by it, exact on any translation: the tag count does not care which English stands in column one, so even a copyrighted edition with no word table shows exact figures on its number rows. Nor does it care which original you display: some editions carry no Strong’s tagging (bolls’ Textus Receptus among them), and there the analytics borrows tags from the tagged edition of the same testament — Tischendorf for Greek, the WLC for Hebrew — keeping the text you chose on screen and naming the lender in a line under the table. A chapter with no tagged text anywhere says so with a dash, never a false zero. Phrases are deliberately absent: counting a phrase is the Search tab’s job (section 9).

And since v29 the colors borrow too. The borrowing above was about counting; the highlight now follows it. Mark church in Revelation while the untagged Textus Receptus stands in the Originals column and εκκλησιας colors with it — the untagged column borrows its numbers from the tagged edition at render time, matched spelling by spelling, so count and color finally agree everywhere the counting already did. Where a spelling the tagged text uses for two different numbers turns up, it is left uncolored rather than guessed — the same refusal the dash makes in the table, made in the margin instead.

6.7The note manager

Open Note manager — its label now reads search and browse every note you have written, and that is the whole promise. 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.

New in v35, a search box sits at the top of the manager. Type a word and the list narrows to the notes that contain it, whichever study and whichever chapter they live in — the fastest way to answer “where did I write about the beast from the sea?” when the answer is three studies ago. Clear the box and the full list comes back.

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

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

6.10Notes across open windows

New in v19, and born from a real morning’s study: Daniel 7 in one window, Revelation 13 in a second, Ezekiel 38 in a third, and one Eschatology study taking notes from all three. Every window of the Dashboard shares your studies. Write an observation under Daniel and it is waiting for you in the Revelation window — the study flows live between windows while Shared notes (section 4.2) is ticked.

Each window keeps its own chapter and its own current study. Three windows on three passages never chase each other; only the words travel. Two unrelated studies in two windows never interfere at all.

Underneath the option sits a protection that is never off. Before v19, the last window to close silently overwrote everything the other windows had written since it opened — and for notes that live only on your device, that was the one way to lose work without ever seeing an error. Now every save merges study by study, and the newest edit of each study wins. A window that has been sitting stale all afternoon can only add what it actually wrote; it can never rewind the rest. Delete a study in one window and it stays deleted everywhere — a window still showing it will tell you so in plain English and step aside.

One honest boundary: if you are typing in the same study in two windows in the same instant, the later keystroke wins for that line. The windows sync within a second of each pause, so in practice this never bites — but the app does not pretend to be a multi-user editor. It is one student, several windows, one notebook.

6.11A note on a verse

New in v39. Not every thought belongs in the chapter’s Observation, Interpretation or Application. Sometimes one verse deserves a line of its own, and until now that line went into the chapter note with the verse number typed by hand. A verse note belongs to the verse. There are three ways to write one: select the verse and press 📌 on the marking palette; tap the small 📝 that appears after a verse number once a note exists; or open 📌 Verse notes at the foot of the Notes tab, where every verse note in the chapter is listed and ＋ Note on… starts a new one on the focused verse.

Underneath, a verse note is one more field of the chapter’s note — not a new kind of thing. That is why it goes into every export under its own Verse 11 heading, why the note manager’s search finds it, why the Study Partner can read it, and why it travels with sync like everything else, without any of those needing to learn a new shape. On the phone, the verse sheet (section 5.6.3) shows the verse note under the versions.

6.12Notes on more than one device

For thirty-eight versions this manual said there would be no sync, because there was no version of sync that did not mean me holding your notes. v39 is the version there is, and I want to be exact about what changed and what did not, because I changed my mind in writing and the terms are written where the code is.

What did not change. Your notes still live in this browser on this device. There is still no account, no e-mail address, no password to lose and nothing to cancel. The app works exactly as before if you never open the fold.

What changed. At the foot of the Notes tab there is now a shut fold, ☁ Sync to my other devices. Open it, choose a passphrase of twelve characters or more, and use the same one on every device. When you press Sync now, your studies, notes, marks and legends are sealed on your device with a key made from that passphrase, and only then sent. The server stores something it cannot read. The passphrase itself never leaves the device. Pictures and each device’s own settings — columns, text size, theme — do not travel, and the fold says so.

There is no reset. No e-mail, no recovery question, nobody who can help. If you forget the passphrase, the backup is scrap, and the app tells you so before it takes one. Choose something you will not forget, and write it where you keep such things.

When two devices disagree. If you changed the same note on your iPad and your laptop between syncs, the app keeps both. The other device’s words are joined under a line that says also written on your other device, counted, and named in the message you get after the sync, so you can settle it yourself. I would rather hand you an untidy note than quietly throw away the paragraph that mattered. Deleting a study on one device deletes it on the others; a study you delete and later recreate under the same name survives, because a deletion only outranks the edits that came before it.

Forget clears the passphrase and this device’s memory of what it last synced. It deletes nothing, on this device or the server.

6.13Tonight: the study log

New in v40. At the foot of the Notes tab, above the sync fold, there is a shut fold called 📋 Tonight, and when you open it there is one sentence: Acts 17 — 41 minutes. You marked 5 phrases — 3 Command / instruction and 2 Key repeated word, marked the whole of 1 verse, wrote 26 words of Observation and 16 words of Application, wrote 1 note on a verse, looked up G1537 and G4160, read John Gill, opened the cross references 2 times, asked the Partner 2 times and ran 1 search. Every number in it is counted on this device as you work — a chapter opened, a mark made, words written since the chapter was first opened this evening, a word looked up, a commentator read, the cross references opened, a question asked, a search run. Nothing is written for you. The app counts your work; it does not do it, and it does not grade it.

A session is an evening: it begins when you open a chapter and ends after half an hour away, and the next chapter you open starts a new one. The last thirty are kept, and the seven most recent are listed under tonight’s line. The log lives in the same place as your notes and travels nowhere — it is not part of what sync carries (section 6.12), because it is a fact about this device’s evening, not about the study. The Markdown export (section 6.9) carries it under its own heading, so a study’s file says not only what you concluded but when you sat with it.

Why it exists: the inductive method asks you to notice what you did before you decide what it means, and that applies to the study as much as to the text. A sentence that says you marked five phrases and wrote nothing is worth more than a chart, and it is not a scoreboard; if it ever starts to feel like one, leave the fold shut. It is shut by default for that reason.

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 some of us 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. They are folded under a 🔊 Voice line so the entry you came for is first — on the phone since v37, and since v39 on every screen; tap the line to open them, and they stay open on this device if you leave them so.

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.

New since v36, there are two seats at the top of the tab. Coach is the default, every time the app opens: short answers that hand the work back to you. Teacher is opt-in — choose it on purpose and the Partner expounds the passage at length instead of asking you questions. Teacher also offers a lens, whose method it borrows: the Companion, the Expositor, the Shepherd, the Watchman or the Architect. A lens changes emphasis and order, never the doctrine; and Teacher is never restored for you on the next visit, because a long exposition should be something you asked for today.

I want to be exact about why the Coach behaves as it does, 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.

Counts are measurements, not memories. Ask the Partner a counting question — “how many times does the Bible say Fear not?” — and the app does not let the model guess. It runs the same measured count the Search tab’s Count it button runs (section 9), hands the Partner the real numbers, and the answer is built from those numbers only. If the count cannot be taken — offline, or the source is busy — the Partner says so and points you at Count it rather than inventing a figure. Verse counts change with translation wording, so the answer names the translation it measured.

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 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.

Under that button sits a second one, and it does not add anything to your notes: Blue Letter Bible ↑. One tap opens blueletterbible.org in a new window, on the very Strong’s number you are reading — their lexicon entry, their concordance, their word lists. It is the same arrangement David Guzik’s commentary lives under, arrived at from the opposite direction: Enduring Word wrote and asked that their commentary be read on their own site, and Blue Letter Bible’s permissions page says plainly that no permission is needed to link to them, while asking that nobody scrape them. Both answers point at the same thing, so that is all the app does. It fetches nothing from them, stores nothing of theirs, and quotes nothing. Section 1 said Blue Letter Bible is where you look things up and Berean is where you do the work; this button is that sentence made into a door.

On a few entries the button changes its wording, and that is deliberate. Their lexicon pages answer to a Strong’s number, and the numbering itself runs out — Hebrew at H8674, Greek at G5624 — while a few entries here carry a lexicon code that is not a plain number at all. Past either edge there is no page that matches the number, so instead of the ordinary button you get Search Blue Letter Bible ↑, which opens a search of their site for the word itself and lets their own search find it a home. The two are worded differently on purpose. You should be able to tell which door you are about to walk through before you tap it.

Deeper — a collection of commentators

This tab was called Guzik in the app’s earliest versions and held one commentary. It is now called Deeper and holds a shelf: six seats, each seating a classic verse-by-verse voice, each swappable for another. When you have done your own observation — and only then — this is where the witnesses come in.

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 seated commentator gets a card, and each card tells you what the app has actually found before you commit to reading: ready with an entry count means the text is there; 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, the list says so plainly — Keil & Delitzsch wrote on the Old Testament only, and on a New Testament chapter the list tells you exactly that rather than hiding the fact. Hiding a card because the network dropped would tell you something false about the commentator; those two states are kept carefully apart.

Under the heading and before the first card, since v39, sits one line: ▸ Cross references · Acts 17:11 · 31 references. It is shut, so it never stands between you and the commentators, and it answers is there anything here without being opened. Open it and each reference shows its own verse text, from the Bible already on your device, so you can judge a reference without leaving the passage to find out whether it was worth following. Six show at first and show all brings the rest; the line follows the verse you have focused; and whether you left it open or shut is remembered on this device. The references are 344,756 pairs from openbible.info, under CC BY 4.0, fetched the first time you open Deeper on a verse and kept after that. This is the half of cross references that Blue Letter Bible does not do — the verse itself, in place.

The six default seats: Jamieson, Fausset & Brown — concise and keyed tightly to verse numbers, the fast answer about a single verse. John Gill — one entry per verse and the fullest coverage on the shelf. Matthew Henry — warm and pastoral, a few long expositions rather than one entry per verse. Tyndale Open Study Notes — short, modern study notes, the easiest read of the set (CC BY-SA 4.0; the others are public domain). Adam Clarke — wide-ranging, strong on words and history. Keil & Delitzsch — the scholarly deep end, Old Testament only.

Every card carries a small pull-down naming its current occupant. Change it and that seat now holds a different commentary, on every chapter, until you change it back — and the choice is remembered like everything else. Pick a commentary already seated elsewhere and the two seats trade places rather than duplicating. Six seats, your choice of who sits in them.

Tap a card and it opens into the commentary, scrolled to your focused verse. The sticky header then reads ‹ Deeper and the name of what you are in — one button, one meaning, one fixed place, and the only way back. Tap any verse number in the Scripture text while this tab is open and the commentary jumps to that verse. Whichever commentary you choose stays chosen as you move from chapter to chapter.

And one more voice, kept in the only form its publisher permits. At the foot of the card list sits a dashed row: David Guzik on Revelation 13 ↑ — your chapter, whatever it is. It is a link and nothing more. One tap opens enduringword.com in a new window, on the very chapter you are studying, and follows you as you move. His commentary is read on his own site, at Enduring Word’s request — the app fetches nothing, stores nothing, and quotes nothing. The same per-chapter link has always lived in the footer; the Deeper row simply puts it where a student reaching for commentary is already looking.

Beneath it sits a second dashed row of the same shape: Blue Letter Bible on Revelation 13 ↑ — again, your chapter, whatever it is. It opens their page for the chapter you have open, where their concordance, lexicons and interlinear are arranged around it. Same rule as the row above, arrived at from the opposite side: Enduring Word wrote and asked that Guzik be read on his own site, while Blue Letter Bible’s permissions page says no permission is needed to link to them and asks only that nobody scrape them. Both answers land on a plain link, so a plain link is all either row is. If the row is not there at all, it means the app could not work out an address it was certain of for the chapter you are on — and where it is not certain, it steps aside rather than guess.

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 — ask, find, and count

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. The box takes a question as happily as a phrase — where does it say God will not leave me — because by default the search works by meaning. Tick exact words and it becomes a strict word search instead: only verses carrying exactly the words you typed, capitals and all. The microphone works here too — tap it, speak, and the search runs itself.

Count it answers a different question from search: not where does the Bible say a thing, but how many times, in exactly which words. Pick a family from the pull-down — How many times does the Bible say… Fear not — or choose exactly what I typed in the search box and count your own phrase. The app then actually counts: it scans the chosen translation, wording by wording, and reports each form with its verse count and total — “Fear not”: said 63 times in 62 verses — with sample references you can tap. The numbers are measured on the spot, never remembered from somewhere else, so when a preacher says a phrase appears some tidy number of times, you can check it yourself in ten seconds. The family’s grand total leads the results in gold — said 107× in 103 verses, 5 wordings — with the wording-by-wording groups beneath it. In the KJV, WEB and YLT the count runs against the edition’s own shipped text — the very words the app displays — so it is exact and uncapped, quotation marks and punctuation cannot break it, and it works offline once fetched: “I am” in the KJV is 757 times in 705 verses, counted whole. Counts differ between translations because wording differs; the results always name the edition measured. Other editions count through the text server, deliberately gently — wordings run one at a time, and if the source asks for a pause the app waits and says so — and with one honesty rule: if the server refuses a phrase’s words outright (the very common ones), the app says could not be measured rather than pretending it counted a zero. A true zero — the words came back and the phrase was not among them — still says plainly that the wording belongs to another translation’s voice.

9.5The Patterns Lab and the ELS Explorer

The footer’s Patterns Lab link opens a separate page: the ciphers-and-sevens laboratory, where the famous findings — gematria, the sevens, equidistant letter sequences — are counted live against the real letters, so the arithmetic is yours to check rather than mine to assert. New since v36, beside it, is the ELS Explorer, the workbench underneath the Lab: the whole Hebrew Bible or the whole King James as one unbroken stream of letters, any word, any skip, forwards and backwards — and beside every result the same letters shuffled, computed in the same run, so a finding always stands next to its control. Both are linked from the About panel and, on a phone, from the gear.

The text now ships with the app. Until v36 the Lab asked bolls.life for every chapter of a book at once — a hundred and fifty requests for Psalms — and the server quite reasonably refused some of them, so a book took several presses to finish. Now the consonantal Westminster Leningrad Codex and Tischendorf’s 8th edition are part of the download: 23,213 Hebrew verses and 7,957 Greek ones, counted on your device, with no signal needed. Where the Lab still fetches, it asks five chapters at a time, waits and asks again when refused, shows you Fetching Psalms — 37/150 chapters, and refuses to scan part of a book, because half a book gives an answer that looks exactly like an answer.

Some counts changed in v36, and you should know why. Two things were wrong in the Hebrew the Lab used to read. Where the manuscript records a word written one way and read another, the old text carried both, tagged with the letters כ and ק — and those tags are Hebrew letters, so they were being counted as scripture. And a few words had lost their first letter. Both are fixed, so letter counts, gematria totals and equidistant-letter findings in the affected chapters are now different, and more nearly right. The Greek changed too, and that one is not a correction: it is still Tischendorf’s 8th, now from a public-domain digitisation we can name, and the two digitisations disagree by a letter or a few in about half the chapters compared. Which is faithful to what Tischendorf printed is a question for his apparatus, not for this page — so Greek counts have moved, and unlike the Hebrew I cannot tell you the new ones are more correct, only where they came from. The Textus Receptus option is untouched.

Joel and Malachi are numbered differently in Hebrew than in English, and the Lab follows the manuscript: Joel has four chapters there and three in most English Bibles, Malachi three and four. This also closed a real gap — the Lab had been reading only three of Joel’s four chapters, so nearly a third of the book was never counted. Joel 4:5 in the Lab is Joel 3:5 in your English Bible; the page tells you the two disagree and does not pretend to know which verse equals which.

9.6Working alongside Guzik, Blue Letter Bible and the rest

The Dashboard is where you do the work. Other sites are where you look things up. This section is the workflow between the two — how a study moves inside the app, and how it steps out to a commentator or a reference site and comes back without losing its place.

The workflow inside the Dashboard

A study here has a shape, and the tabs are laid out in its order. Read the chapter once, whole. Mark what the text does — the repeated word, the command, the promise — with the palette (section 5.3), and let the legend carry your meaning. Write what you saw in Observation before you write what it means in Interpretation (section 6). Go to the Lexicon for a word (section 5.2), to Search to count how often the Bible really says a thing (section 9), and only then to Deeper, where the six commentators are waiting with what they saw (section 9). Ask the Partner when you are stuck, and expect a question back (section 8). Export when the study is done — Markdown for keeps, PDF for the group, Word for a friend (section 6.9). Nothing in that loop leaves the app, and nothing in it leaves your device unless you have opened the sync fold (section 6.12).

Stepping out: Guzik and Blue Letter Bible

Two doors lead outside, and they are the only two. David Guzik is read on enduringword.com, by Enduring Word’s written request: one link per chapter, at the foot of Deeper and in the desktop footer. Blue Letter Bible is linked from every Lexicon entry (on the same Strong’s number) and from the foot of Deeper (on the open chapter). Both are links and only ever links — nothing from either site is fetched, framed, cached or quoted here, and nothing of ours is drawn over their pages. That is what their permissions allow, and it is also why the way back had to be built on our side.

Since v40 a link out knows how to bring you back, and it chooses by how you are running the app. On a phone or tablet in a browser, the link opens in the same tab; your study is already saved on the device, and the browser’s Back arrow returns you to the verse you left, with the page scrolled where it was. Installed to the home screen, the phone opens the link in its own in-app browser — on iPhone and iPad a sheet with Done at the top and a small ◀ Berean breadcrumb in the status bar; on Android a tab with a close button. Those are drawn by the system, which is the one party permitted to draw them. On a Mac or PC the link opens a second tab — one named tab that every Guzik or Blue Letter Bible link reuses, so a long study does not leave twenty tabs behind — and the Dashboard’s own tab is titled Berean — Acts 17 so you can find it. Each trip out says which of these it did, in one line at the bottom of the screen.

Bible Gateway, YouVersion, Logos and the rest

The Dashboard does not link to other Bible sites, but it works beside any of them, and the pattern is the same on every device: the Dashboard holds the study; the other site is a window you look through. On a Mac, put them side by side — the Dashboard in one window, Bible Gateway or Logos in the other — and use the share link (section 10) to carry a reference across: it points at the exact verse you are on. On an iPad, Split View does the same with two apps, and pocket mode on one side (section 5.6) leaves room for the other. On a phone, keep the Dashboard installed to the home screen and open the other site in the browser; the app icon is always one tap away, and it opens exactly where you left it. When you find something out there worth keeping, it comes back in through the notebook: type it, dictate it (section 7.1), or paste a picture of it (section 6.3) — with the reference, so the note can be checked against the text later. What you do not do is copy a commentator’s paragraph into your Observation. Observation is what you saw; a quotation belongs in Interpretation, credited.

What leaves, and what stays

9aExamine

A second way to read, and it is a door rather than a change. Everything up to here describes the reading view, and the reading view is exactly as it was. Examine is a different arrangement of the same study, on an address of its own: go to /examine, press E, or tap Examine → in the reading bar, and the screen rearranges itself around a single verse. The view was called the Verse Cockpit until 16 September 2026, and the addresses it had then — /cockpit and #cockpit — still work, so an icon you installed or a link you saved is not broken by the new name. Nothing you have read so far stops being true; nothing moves to make room for it. Close it and you are back where you were, on the same verse, with the same notes.

It wants a landscape screen. A MacBook, or an iPad held sideways. Below about a thousand pixels of width Examine does not squeeze itself into a column — it says it is a landscape view and offers you the way back to Read. That is deliberate: a phone deserves a design of its own rather than a shrunken version of this one, and guessing at it here would ship a layout nobody chose.

9a.1The ring: tap a word, and the screen answers

Every word the translation tags with a Strong’s number carries a faint dotted underline. Tap one and four things happen at once: the word lights in the verse, its word lights in the strip beneath, a dotted line joins the two so you can see which is which, and the left column fills with the original word, how it is said, its number, its dictionary entry, and every place that number stands in the chapter you have open. Tap a word in the strip instead and the same thing happens from the other end.

Change the translation and your place is kept. The pills under the verse switch between the three translations you have chosen. What is selected is a number, not a word — so the English changes underneath it and the selection does not. A translation that carries no Strong’s numbers at all has no dotted words, and the app says so in the line under the verse rather than looking broken; the strip is still the way in.

9a.2The right-hand column

Cross references come from the table already on your device — no waiting — and each is quoted, so you can judge whether it is worth following before you follow it. Tap one and the whole of Examine moves to that passage. The same verse in your other translations sits below it, with the word you selected marked wherever a translation happens to use the same English. A commentator comes next, and it tells you which note it is showing: this verse’s own, or the paragraph this verse falls inside — because commentators write on groups of verses, and a note about verse 10 shown silently under verse 11 is a small untruth. Guzik is a link to his own site, as his permission requires; the commentators the app may host are rendered here, and he is read there.

9a.3Your note, in the same place it always was

At the foot of the right-hand column is your own work: a note on the verse in focus, and six colours that mark the whole verse. Both write into the very same study the reading view writes — the same field, the same file, the same one place on your device. Examine is not a second notebook, and nothing written here needs importing anywhere. Close Examine, open the Notes tab, and the note is in the row for that verse with the 📝 beside its number in the grid.

The chapter’s O·I·A note is deliberately not editable here. That note belongs to the study pane, and a second place to write the same thing is how two half-written notes happen. One line says whether there is one, with a link to where it is written.

9a.4The AI rail

At the very foot of the screen is a single gold strip. Left alone it costs the verse almost nothing, which is the point: the Study Partner is one gesture away from the text rather than sharing its field of view. Tap it, or swipe it up, and the rail opens on three groups — Observe, Interpret, Apply. That is the inductive order this whole platform teaches, and the rail is arranged in it on purpose: a reader who uses the rail is learning the method by using it, which is worth more than any single answer in it.

Choosing a group costs nothing and is remembered; opening a question does neither. A group only decides which questions are on screen, so the rail keeps the last one you chose as you move from verse to verse. A question is a fresh call to the Study Partner every time, so it is deliberately forgotten when you leave the verse — a remembered question would spend money on a boot nobody asked for.

Observe holds Structure, Text note and Antecedents. Interpret holds Setting, Culture, Prophecy, Contrast, Thread and Flow. Apply holds Coach asks, Application and the Teacher outline. Twelve in all, and never more than six on screen at once — fewer than the seven flat chips that were there before.

Each question carries its scale on its chip, and that word is not decoration: it decides how much text the question is given. A verse-scale question is handed the verse and its neighbours; a canon-scale one is handed more. Before this, every question received the whole chapter and was then asked in its prompt not to drift onto it — which is a poor instruction, because a model handed a chapter will answer about the chapter. Handing it less text works better than telling it to ignore what you handed it.

Four of the twelve are new, and each may say there is nothing to say. Antecedents answers the commonest comprehension failure in reading Scripture — “these were more noble”, but who is these? — and it must quote the verse where the noun actually stands, so you can check it in two seconds rather than take it on trust. Flow asks what the verse before sets up and the verse after concludes. Culture asks what a first-century reader knew that we do not, which is a different question from where and when. Prophecy asks whether the verse predicts or fulfils anything — and where it does, it states plainly that it is answering from this tool’s stated position, and where a reader holding another view would read it differently. The frame is pinned for every answer in this app whatever the question is; naming it is the honest version, and the one that survives a reader who disagrees.

Every one of them is permitted — in the same words, deliberately reused rather than rephrased — to say plainly that there is none. Prophecy on Acts 17:11 should come back “this verse is not predictive” in one line and stop, rather than reaching for a theme or a type to fill the space.

Each tab is a fresh question, and each one costs. Nothing is asked until you ask it, and moving to the next verse asks nothing — the rail simply waits. An answer is kept until you leave the verse, so comparing two tabs costs you the second one only. Six of the seven are answered by the Coach; the Teacher outline is answered by the Teacher, which is a longer answer and a larger bill, and its tab is marked with a small T so you know before you tap it. Asking a Teacher question here does not move the Partner’s own seat in the rest of the app.

Whether the rail was up or down is remembered. Which tab you had open is not — because re-opening a tab is a fresh question, and a remembered tab would spend money on a question you did not ask.

9a.5The camera, and the Old Testament

Where your browser has a camera, a small green Camera button appears in the top bar. It opens the same camera the rest of the app uses (section 5.7) — the same reader, the same picker, nothing new underneath. What is new is the arrival: a verse the camera finds does not merely appear in the middle of the screen, it lifts in, and the ring glows once behind it. That is on purpose. A verse that changes while you are looking at a printed page rather than at the screen has to be seen to change, or the screen looks as though it had been wrong a moment ago. If you have asked your device for reduced motion, the movement goes and the glow stays.

The Hebrew reads right to left, as it should, with each word’s transliteration and number left to right beneath it. And here the app has to say something careful. Hebrew counts a psalm’s title as verse 1 and English does not, so across most of the Psalter the two texts number the chapter differently. When they do, Examine says so above the strip, naming both counts — and the dotted line that joins an English word to its Hebrew one is not drawn, because across that gap it would be joining two different verses. Both texts are still shown; what stops is the claim that they line up. A few chapters — Malachi 4 is one — do not exist in Hebrew at all, and the strip says that rather than sitting empty.

9a.6Words that have moved

The King James is 1769 English, and some of its words have quietly changed sides. Not the ones you expect: holpen and peradventure announce themselves, and you look them up. The dangerous ones are the words still in daily use that meant something else. Let meant to hinder — the exact opposite of today’s sense. Prevent meant to go before. Conversation meant your conduct, not your talk. Quick meant living, so “quick and powerful” is not about speed. And “I shall not want” means I shall lack nothing. Nothing signals the misreading, which is why a reader can hold one of these backwards for a lifetime.

Examine marks them in the verse with a wavy underline, and a card in the left column — under the word panel, above the lexicon — says what each one used to mean. The wavy rule is deliberately not the dotted gold rule that means “this word carries a Strong’s number, tap it”. Those are two different claims from two different sources and they must not look alike. A word can carry both at once.

It only speaks where it is sure, and that costs coverage on purpose. One hundred and eighty-five words ship, each with a verse citation checked against the King James text this app itself displays. Most of them mark only at the verses where the older sense actually stands: let appears about fifteen hundred times in the King James and means hinder in roughly three of them, so marking every let would not merely fail to help — it would teach you something false. Fourteen words whose old sense is their only sense in the King James are marked wherever they appear. It is quieter than it could be, and every mark is true.

Nothing about it is AI. It is a lookup in a small file on your device: instant, free, working with the network off, and incapable of inventing a meaning. That is why it sits in the left column under the green “your device” chip rather than behind the gold AI badge — the badge means a model wrote this, and it has to keep meaning only that. Archaisms are listed in the card but never marked in the verse: you already know you do not know holpen, and marking it would train your eye to skip the marker that matters. On a modern translation the card is simply absent, which is the correct answer rather than a failure.

9a.7If it does not look right

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.

Running the Dashboard as an app

The Dashboard is an installable web app. Installing it downloads nothing new — it gives the same app its own window and its own icon, outside the browser.

On a Mac or Windows machine, Chrome and Edge offer an install control in the address bar (Edge also lists it under Apps → Install this site as an app). Installed, the Dashboard lives in your Dock or Start menu and opens in a clean window — no tabs, no address bar, nothing on screen but the Word. You can open several windows of it at once, which is exactly what section 6.10’s shared notes were built for.

On iPad and iPhone the same thing has a different name: open the page in Safari, tap the Share button, and choose Add to Home Screen. The icon opens full-screen, indistinguishable from a native app — and it gives your saved studies the strongest protection the device offers against the browser’s automatic storage cleanup. One honest wrinkle on Apple mobile devices: the Home Screen app and Safari keep separate copies of your notes — they are two different storage containers. Pick one home — the Home Screen app is the right one — and stay there; a .md export moves a study across if you ever need to. On Mac and Windows there is no such split: the installed app and a browser tab of the same browser share one store, and as of v19 they even sync live.

Same free app either way. Installing changes where it lives, not what it is.

Version and updates

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

Version and date	Which build you have and when it was made.
Status line	It checks, and then tells you: either that you are on the latest version, in green, or that a new one is waiting.
Update now	Takes the waiting version immediately, rather than whenever the browser gets round to it.
What’s new	What changed in this version, in plain language.
The three PDFs	Why Berean for someone deciding whether to use it, the Field Guide for the method itself, and How It Was Built for the architecture. This manual joins them as the fourth.
The fine print	Where the text and commentary come from, and the plain warning that your notes live on this device only.