Analyzing verses from a Bible search

Here’s a somewhat obscure but interesting and often useful feature of SwordSearcher.

The Passage Analysis feature (added in version 7.1) gives you lots of details about sections of the Bible, such as a book or group of books. (See this detailed video for details.) Information includes a full list of words ranked by frequency of “uniqueness” to the passage, word count, versification metrics (number of chapters, most verses in a chapter, most words in a verse, etc), and more. The Passage Analysis tool is normally opened from the Search menu.

However, what’s not obvious is that the Passage Analysis tool can also be invoked based on a verse list. This option means that you can analyze verses from a search result. (In fact, you can do this with any verse list, including ones loaded from the Scan Text for Verse References tool or from Book and Commentary Panels.)

For example, do a search for the word scripture, and you will get a verse list result like this:

Search results for a Bible search
Search results for a Bible search

To “analyze” just the verses from this search, right-click in the verse list panel and select “Analyze All Verses” from the “Passage Analysis” menu item:

Right-click menu for verse list, Passage Analysis, Analyze all Verses.
Right-click menu for verse list, Passage Analysis, Analyze all Verses.

This will open the Passage Analysis tool and analyze all of the verses from the search results. This is what it looks like:

Passage Analysis of all verses in the Bible with the word "Scripture"
Passage Analysis of all verses in the Bible with the word “Scripture”

This can be quite interesting. For example, take a look at the “Most Unique” ranked word list. Scripture is the first word in the list, because that’s the word we searched for, so every verse in the Bible appears here. But right below that we can see that the words foreknew, foreseeing, noted, and private only appear in verses that also have the word Scripture. Now this may or may not carry some significance, but the only way to find out is to start studying.

Again, be sure to watch the video demonstrating the use of the Passage Analysis tool to see if this could be useful with any of your own Bible search results!

Different Bible text display modes

In its default configuration, the SwordSearcher Bible panel shows text in a columnar format along with a “study margin” for fast access to verse-based material within the chapter.

Start video
Watch the video (1:52)

Sometimes you will want to quiet things down a bit. For example, during devotional reading it can be advantageous to switch off the margin area to devote more visual space to the Bible text, or change to paragraph format for a different reading flow.

There are two helpful toolbar icons in the Bible panel that can be used to change the display format with one click. There is a button for margin toggle and one for paragraph mode toggle, as you can see in this screen shot:

Continue reading “Different Bible text display modes”