About
A workbench beside the reference shelf
Most Bible websites are reference tools, and the best of them — Blue Letter Bible chief among them — are very good at that work. But looking something up and studying are two different kinds of work. 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 — and that is what this is. Blue Letter Bible is where you look things up. Berean is where you do the work.
Which means there is a long list of good things this app deliberately does not build. Dictionaries and encyclopedias, atlases and maps, timelines and charts, picture libraries, devotional reading plans, narrated and dramatized audio Bibles — Blue Letter Bible and sites like it already carry all of that, carry it well, and give it away free. Building a second-rate copy would cost years and leave you with a worse version of a page you can already open. What almost nobody builds is a notebook shaped like the method itself: Observation, Interpretation and Application anchored to the verse you were actually reading, marked in your own legend, dictated by voice and read back to you aloud. That is what this is for, and the depth goes there. Use both — and let the method decide the order. Come to the text first; go looking for outside help afterward.
There is one door to it inside the app. Every Lexicon entry now carries a link out to Blue Letter Bible on the same Strong’s number you are reading, so their lexicon and concordance are one tap away and nothing is copied here. It is a link and only ever a link — the same rule the Guzik commentary lives under, for the same reason: their permissions page invites linking and forbids scraping, so linking is all we do.
I built it 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. A family does not all read the same way, and for some of us the things standing between us and deep Bible study were never spiritual or intellectual — they were mechanical. Typing a question is hard. Reading a paragraph back is hard. So in this app the microphone is load-bearing, not decorative: you can dictate your notes, ask questions out loud, search Scripture by speaking, and have the app read your own notebook back to you. If a feature would make the app harder to use by voice, it doesn’t go in.
Three things it refuses to do: it will not think for you — the Study Partner answers like a good teacher, usually with a question back, and Scripture stays the authority. It will not hold your notes hostage — your work lives on your device and exports to Markdown, Word, or paper whenever you ask. And it will not charge you. Not now, not later.
What it does
The whole workbench, briefly
Up to three English translations beside the Hebrew (WLC) or Greek (TR) original, with pronunciation under every original word. Over a hundred translations, in dozens of languages.
Tap any Hebrew or Greek word, tap a blue Strong’s number, or double-click an English word — Brown-Driver-Briggs and Thayer’s definitions open beside the text.
Six colors and an underline, with a legend that means whatever you decide it means — the inductive habit of marking repeated words, promises, and commands, kept digital.
Observation, Interpretation, Application — three boxes in order, with the right questions beside each, autosaving as you type. Studies keep your work organized by book or topic.
Dictate notes, hear chapters read aloud, hear the Hebrew and Greek spoken with speed and pause controls, ask the Study Partner out loud, and have your own notes read back.
An AI partner grounded in the passage you have open, plus four classic commentaries — Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, John Gill, Matthew Henry and more — each named on its own panel. (David Guzik is reached by a per-chapter link in the app’s footer — his commentary is read on enduringword.com, by Enduring Word’s request.)
Ask in your own words — “where does it say God will not leave me” — or check exact words for letter-for-letter search. There’s a microphone in the search box too.
A hundred and four walks, a verse at a time, in nine sections — the gospel first, then freedom and recovery, everyday life, marriage and family, growing, comfort and care, doctrine, walks through a passage, and the verses behind six books. Your place in each is kept on your device; which path you open never leaves it.
No account, no analytics watching you study. Your notes live in your browser and export whenever you want them. Since v39 you may sync them to your other devices — sealed with a key the server never sees, and only if you switch it on. Pairing a second device is a code on one screen and a camera on the other; no passcode is typed, and none is ever shown to you.
The library
Every document, readable here or yours to keep
Each guide has a web edition you can read right now and a PDF you can download, print, or hand to your study group.
Every control, every tab, every voice feature — the whole app, part by part, including where your work actually lives and what to do when something goes wrong.
Current to v60 — all 51 figures reshot against the v60 build the day it was cut, among them Teachers on Revelation 17; it opens on a What changed section copied from the change log by a script and held to it by a suite; new in this edition 6.14 (sharing a marked study), 7.1a (drive mode), the Partner’s What did I miss? in 8, the journeys in 9a, the memory room in 9b, and at v59 Examine · Lampstand in 9a — Teachers and Elsewhere (9a.2a) and the named bar (9a.4), in plain device names; at v60 the phone’s verse sheet in 5.6.3 carries Teachers and Elsewhere, and /examine on a phone opens it. The sync part, rewritten at v52, stands: the key is generated rather than chosen, shown once as 24 words, and carried to a second device by a pairing code the camera reads.Why this app exists and what makes it different — the one to share with your study group when they ask what you’re using.
Current to v47 — rewritten as a real web edition on 13 September 2026. It had been five page images of the PDF; it is text now, so it reflows on a phone, a screen reader can read it, and the PDF is printed FROM the page like every other document in this library.Study like a Berean: the inductive method — Observe, Interpret, Apply — step by step.
Current to v60 — eight parts, nine figures reshot at v60, one of them in pocket mode, one of Examine; page seven now says the phone’s verse sheet is Examine, that the chapter opens under the verse of the day with seven reading plans above the paths, and the five v57 doors in one sentence: share, What did I miss?, Remember this, drive mode, journeys; page eight now says Examine is Examine · Lampstand, with Teachers, Elsewhere and the named bar, and that on a phone it opens the verse sheet with the same two as tabs.Where a verse comes from and where your notes go — the device, the one file, the edge and the four outside services, every arrow labelled.
Current to v60 — re-measured against the v60 build: the one file is 23,203 lines and 1.5 MB across 111 testable blocks, the worker 1,110 lines with the morning verse’s two routes, the share’s and the household’s, 128 guarded files in the bundle, and the NOTES binding holding one push subscription per device beside the sealed vaults — each keyed to a secret the app generates rather than a passphrase anyone chose.The architecture: one file, no accounts, your notes on your device — and why it was built that way on purpose.
Current to v60 — file sizes re-measured against the v60 build, with a v59 section on Examine · Lampstand (and, at v60, the same on the phone) (links and only links, a list kept by hand, a player built on a tap, and art kept off the first-visit path), beside the v58 section on the household (the share’s shape made to last: one sealed document every member’s device rewrites), the handout and the presets, beside the v57 section on the five things built the same way (the share as the vault turned outward, the Partner held to a form, the memory room, drive mode, the journeys) beside the two v53 sections: one diagram and one map with two hosts, and the morning verse — Web Push written out in WebCrypto, one record per device and nothing that names anyone, a paged send driven by a daily workflow. The sync chapter from v52 stands.The confession the Study Partner teaches from.
A web edition and a PDF, printed from the same page; the source text, DOCTRINE.md, is what binds the Study Partner.The Observation → Interpretation → Application discipline itself — the method the whole notebook is furniture for.
See the Dashboard at work before you open it — the short film, with captions.
Berean Dashboard Training
Learn the languages under your Bible
You don’t need seminary to touch the Hebrew and Greek — you need a map, an app that sounds every word out with you, and a good teacher on video. Here are all three.
The alphabet, how roots make word families, the names of God, and Genesis 1:1 word by word — with the exact Dashboard buttons for each step, and a gentle four-week path.
The alphabet, why endings do the work, a dozen words worth knowing on sight, and John 1:1 word by word — with the Dashboard buttons, and the same four-week path.
Start here if someone has just handed you the app. Nineteen short scenes on what changed and what each change is for: drawn icons in place of symbols you had to guess at, a shape on every marking colour, Examine, paths through Scripture for the hard places, the way to reach a real person on the path for those who have lost hope, and Scripture read aloud. Narrated by Jarnathan, animated, captions optional.
Genesis 1:1 read in Hebrew and its first word opened letter by letter; John 1:1 in Greek and who the Logos is; the last words of Revelation in Greek — and how the whole Bible, first word to last name, points to Jesus. Narrated, animated, captions optional.
The architecture, scene by scene: where the Scripture comes from, what stays on your own device, the notebook and the sealed vault, the honest counter, the Study Partner, every panel of Examine and its provenance colours, the camera, and the road every change travels. Narrated by Jarnathan, animated, captions optional.
Bible codes, gematria, and the sevens — what they are, the famous findings run live against the Hebrew text, and the search tools to look for new ones, with the control experiments no code book ships. Fluke, or breadcrumbs? Examine and see.
The Patterns Lab shows you the famous findings. This is the workbench underneath it: 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 it cannot be left out. Explore freely. Claim carefully.
The teachers on video
The most-loved free courses on the internet, linked with gratitude. Watch a lesson, then trace it through real verses in the Dashboard.
Standing on someone’s shoulders
Support bolls.life
Every verse in this app arrives free, from one man in Ukraine.
The Scripture text the Dashboard shows you — every translation, every chapter, the Hebrew and the Greek — comes from bolls.life, a Bible platform built and run by Bohuslav Pavlisinec. He offers it to the world for nothing, keeps it fast on his own server, and answers letters from strangers like me with kindness. This app could not exist without his work.
The Berean Dashboard will never charge you or take a donation. If you want to give somewhere, give to him — it costs real money to keep a Bible API running for everyone, free, in the middle of everything Ukraine is walking through.
Both links go to Bohuslav’s own pages. Nothing passes through this app or through Smith For Christ.
Credits
The hands this app stands on
Scripture and original-language text from bolls.life. Commentary from David Guzik at Enduring Word, used for personal study and credited with a link to the original on every panel; and from three public-domain classics — Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, John Gill’s Exposition, and Matthew Henry. Hebrew definitions are Brown-Driver-Briggs; Greek definitions are Thayer’s. Speech in both directions is the free capability built into your own browser — the app supplies no audio of its own and records nothing.
Contact
Write to me
If the Dashboard blesses you, I’d love to hear it. If it breaks on you, I need to hear it — tell me what you pressed and what happened.