Introducing: The Literal Word ESV

Online Bible searches should be easy. I’m glad for a lot of the popular search pages out there like Bible Gateway and Youverson. But I think that a lot of these pages could be less cluttered. If you cut and paste verses as much as I do, having to hunt down cross-reference and verse numbers can get annoying. It made me glad to know I wasn’t the only one who wanted something a little leaner to search Scripture with. Thanks to a couple of San Franciso Bible geeks, we now have the Literal Word ESV.

One of the creators (Nick Honda) shared it on-line this week and I was fortunate enough to see it first. I tested out the page and I love it. It’s connected to the ESV, and it’s a simple, elegant page. Here are a few reasons to do your Bible searches there.

1. It uses the ESV (and the NASB)
I like that it’s set the Bible I use the most. I don’t want to have to hunt it down among a ton of other translations. And, they also have an NASB page, which has the same features as the ESV page.

2. You can remove verses and divisions
You can automatically remove the divisions (which aren’t original to the text). One of the first rules of Bible study is to read a passage without divisions, this makes it easier to get a feel for the flow of the text and its natural divisions. This feature alone made me fall in love with the page.

3. Simple to use
All Bible search pages have great benefits, but sometimes I just want to type in a phrase or a verse, and not worry about getting lost in the bells and whistles. This page offers simple searches, with no clutter.

4. Bar graphs
Each word search comes with a bar graph to tell you how much a word or phrase is used in a section of Scripture. Here’s the results of looking up the word “truth”.

4.No Adverstising
Of course, not all Bible search pages have ads (which isn’t wrong), but when I study, I find it better to have the text and nothing else competing for my attention.

I highly recommend this page and hope you take a look. You can learn more about the features at their about page. Remember to come back later this week for my interview with one of the creators of the page. See you then.