Category: Examples

SwordSearcher 10: Searching the Bible Without Knowing the Words

Watch the video here.

Keyword search has been the foundation of Bible software for decades. It’s powerful, precise, and indispensable for serious study. But it has a fundamental limitation: you have to already know the words you’re looking for.

This is a real barrier for people who are new to the Bible. The Bible has a specialized vocabulary that a new reader will not be familiar with. If you want to find verses about being anxious, it is difficult to form a keyword search that finds “Philippians 4:6 Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” or “1 Peter 5:7 Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you.”

Even experienced readers run into this. You remember the idea of a passage but not the phrasing. You know the concept you want to study but aren’t sure which terms the Bible uses to express it. You end up trying keyword after keyword, hoping to land on the right one, then resort to Commentaries or Dictionaries.

SwordSearcher 10 introduces natural language Bible search to address this directly. Instead of keywords, you describe what you’re looking for in plain language — a concept, a feeling, a half-remembered idea — and SwordSearcher finds the verses that match the meaning of what you typed.

Search for “morning thoughts” and find Psalm 5:3: “My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O LORD; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto thee, and will look up.” That’s not a result keyword search can give you, because the words “morning” and “thoughts” don’t appear together in the verse. But it’s a perfect match. You’ll also find “Psalm 143:8 Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.”

This doesn’t replace keyword search. Precision still matters, and when you know what you’re looking for, or are in a deep study, nothing beats an exact search. Natural language search is a complement — a way in for the reader who doesn’t yet have the vocabulary, and a way forward for the reader who knows what they mean but not how to say it.

I’ve been building Bible software for over thirty years, and thinking about this problem for at least twenty of them. I’m glad to have finally shipped a solution. I hope you find it edifying.

Watch the video here.

New video: Putting Bible verses into historical context

It can be interesting and useful to learn when a particular event in the Bible occurred or was written. SwordSearcher includes two resources that are very helpful with this. Head on over to this new video: Putting Bible Verses into Historical Context

The video demonstrates how the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge and the Annals of the World (by James Usher) can provide calendar dates and historical context.

Guide to running SwordSearcher on Linux operating systems

SwordSearcher 9.1 running on Ubuntu 22.04

I’ve written a Guide to Running SwordSearcher on Linux Operating Systems.

While SwordSearcher is designed for Microsoft Windows, many SwordSearcher users, or potential SwordSearcher users, have asked if there is a version for Linux operating systems.

There is no Linux version of Windows, and you can view the system requirements here. What I recommend is using a virtual machine like VirtualBox to run Windows applications on Linux, but that is not always an option for people and does require one to purchase a Windows license.

However, it is technically possible to run SwordSearcher on a Linux system without a virtual machine, using a tool called Wine, which stands for “Wine is not an emulator.” Wine is a way to run some Windows applications on operating systems like Ubuntu.

Getting SwordSearcher to work with Wine is a matter of patience and persistence. While I cannot provide a guarantee of support for using SwordSearcher this way, I have written a guide to setting it up.

Please see this forum post for the full guide, and be sure to read all the way to the end for some caveats.

Guide to Running SwordSearcher on Linux Operating Systems

Quick tip: Clone panel from the Topic Guide

If you’re using the Topic Guide to find more information on a given topic, sometimes it can seem inconvenient to look at the material, because by default, it will move your Book or Commentary panel content away from what you may be reading.

There’s an easy way around that: Clone Panels (see the Help section). The way this works is instead of moving your Book panel to the content you clicked on, a new window is created instead, leaving your Book Panel alone.

Clone Panels have been part of SwordSearcher for years, but version 9 adds the ability to create a clone panel from the Topic Guide by right-clicking the entry title and selecting Open in a Clone Panel from the menu. This makes it super easy and fast to review a lot of material on a topic without changing the course of your current Bible study.

SwordSearcher Topic Guide

Cloned panel containing topical content

Also, you don’t even need to right-click. Hold down the CTRL button while you click the link, and SwordSearcher will open the content in a clone panel.

Navigation tip: Switching between book tabs and the history menu

SwordSearcher’s Books and Dictionaries panel is designed to help you review similar materials in different books. For example, if you’re viewing the Nave’s Topical Bible entry on Anathema Maran-atha, the Watson’s Dictionary tab is highlighted, and clicking on it will take you to the Anathema Maranatha entry in that dictionary. This works even though the two books use different titles. Note the subtle difference of the hyphenation in Maran-atha.

This is possible because SwordSearcher has a special “best match” algorithm it uses when you switch between book tabs. Minor spelling or orthographic differences don’t typically present a problem for reviewing similar material because of this feature.

However, if you switch between books that do not have similar entries, it is possible to “lose your place” if you don’t realize what is going on. For example, if you’re reading a book comprised of chapters instead of a dictionary, it’s not likely there will be a “close match” in another book. If you switch tabs, SwordSearcher will usually just take you to the first entry.

Sometimes this might seem confusing, and you may wonder how to get back to what you were looking at before.

That’s easy. Just use the back button in the books panel. It remembers what you were viewing. It also has a long memory. Click the back button to go to your previous entry, or, right-click the back button to see a history of what you have viewed in the books panel, and you’ll get right back on track in no time.

The “Back” history menu in the Books panel.

The Bible and Commentary panels also have back/forward navigation buttons with history menus.

Updated video: Making your own books and commentaries

SwordSearcher has long offered the ability to create your own content in the library. This functionality has steadily been improved with new features and tools. Version 8.2, released last week, improves the editor by live-linking verse references as you type. Up until 8.2, verse references were only linked when the entry was saved. This worked well, but now you can make changes and additions and verify that the references are correct before saving the entry. This and other changes over the years prompted me to update (well, completely re-do) the tutorial video on user modules which you can now watch here.

Get an instant book outline from any Bible verse

SwordSearcher includes a book module called Outlines of the Books of the Bible. A great way to use this book is from the Bible margin, where you can link into the verse’s place in an outline of the whole book.

From any verse in the Bible panel, just click the OutlinesBB margin link to see it in an outline of the book, like this:

OutlinesBB link in the Bible Margin
OutlinesBB link in the Bible Margin

This will open the outline for the book, with the verse position highlighted, like this:

2017-08-31_9-34-31
Outlines of the Books of the Bible: Esther Chapter 2

That’s it!

What if you don’t see the OutlinesBB book link in the margin?

Right-click the Margin toggle button from the Bible panel, and make sure it is selected in your list of books to include in the margin area:

Right-click the Bible margin toggle button...
Right-click the Bible margin toggle button…

...and make sure OutlinesBB is selected in the list.
…and make sure OutlinesBB is selected in the list.