Search

Introduction

The Bible stands out among works of literature in that many resources were devoted to its study long before the digital age. In the old days, we had concordances that would allow us to look up a word as if in a dictionary and get a list of all the verses in which that word was used. I seem to recall that the editors combined basic form variants into the same entry, but you still had to look up multiple words for synonyms. Digital tools make this work much faster and easier, with perhaps some additional danger of alternate forms falling through the cracks. Besides finding how combinations of words are used in the Bible, learning about literal string searches helps us be more aware of the properties of language and pay attention to detail. The Google search engine was a major step forward because of its capability to know what you meant even when you did not use the right word or spell it correctly. For searchable Bibles, attention to detail is still important. For one introductory example, suppose you wanted to study redemption in the Bible. If you search only redemption you will not match redeem and vice versa (note the extra e).

It is up to you to decide what is a synonym and what is not. Lord and God are synonyms for some purposes and not for others. Besides searching for all of a set of synonyms, you might also want to search multiple translations. BibleGateway allows you to do this in a single search from the Advanced Search page. For example, some concepts like “peace offering” are translated variously as “sacrifice of well-being” or “communion sacrifice”. Similarly, some translations try harder than others to use inclusive language such as “child” rather than “son.” If you searched any one of these terms in multiple versions you would at least find the right verses. I do not recall running into problems with variant English spellings such as gray/grey, color/colour. I wonder if Noah Webster avoided distinctly biblical or religious words when reforming American English. The more abstract the concept, the harder it is to think of all the synonyms. Synonymous parallelism will work in your favor.

Terminology

String
One or more characters of text in sequence. Sometimes quotation marks are added to clarify that a string must be literal or may not be optional. For example, if you wanted to search a phrase of multiple words you might put the phrase in quotation marks to indicate that the whole string should be searched, not each word separately.
Boolean
AND OR and NOT operators nested within parentheses
Wildcard *
Matches zero or more of something. E.g., blood* matches both blood (zero characters before the word boundary) and bloodguilt (five more characters before the word boundary).
Regular expressions
Advanced string search and replace, essential for coding but probably not for introductory biblical studies
Fun Fact: Boolean operators are named after the nineteenth-century English mathematician George Boole. His work in binary logic was absolutely fundamental for the digital information age. We say digital (base-ten, like the number of fingers on a hand), but it would be better if we said binary (base two, one or zero, true or false). Boolean logic works great when everything is either true or false and relates to other things only as “and” “or” or “not”. Obviously these binaries can be nested into very large and complex trees. For a theologian, binaries do not always suffice. Quantum computers do not rely on the binary logic foundations of “digital” (binary) computers and may be quite revolutionary.

Resources

Personally, I still use BibleWorks even though they went out of business in 2018. I can’t recommend learning a platform that is not maintained. For the installable software solutions, Accordance is the remaining option. The high-end packages can cost more than a thousand dollars, but introductory trials are free and basic packages seem to be pretty affordable.

The web-based search solutions listed here are free with ads, and I think have paid ad-free versions.

If you are aware of something good not on this list, please let me know. I have not reviewed large language models (AI) for searching Bibles. I would be very wary of hallucinations and errors, but I can imagine a situation in which I would give it a try.

Examples

Description Boolean string BibleGateway advanced interface
Find any word that starts with blood, including blood, bloodshed, and bloodguilt blood* blood
Find only the word blood blood blood [Match whole words only]
Find variants forms redeem and redemption rede*m* redeem redemption [Match ANY word]
Find forms of Levi (Levites, Levitical) in combination with priestly language. levi* AND (altar* OR priest* OR sacri*) Separate Match ANY searches for each combination
Lord God exactly, not Lord your God, etc. "lord god" lord god [Match EXACT phrase]

BibleGateway will also count matches by biblical book (including translator headings) and can limit searches to particular books. As a brief exercise, investigate a few questions.

  1. Where and how does the Bible talk about Levi in a priestly context?
  2. Work on a concept of your choosing. Consider redemption, blood, Adam and Eve, Noah, or the time a patriarch said his wife was his sister.

It has been a while since I have seen or used a search that also looked in surrounding verses. This is a limitation to be aware of. For example, you could search kill son and find Abraham, Pharaoh, and Jesus, but I can’t think of a similar search likely to point you to Jephthah.