Bible Study Tools

Overview

Comment Coach includes a full Bible study environment. You can browse chapters, look up references, search by keyword, by pattern, or by the Hebrew and Greek behind the text, compare translations side by side, select verses, and write comments — all from your browser, even offline.

All Bible data is stored locally on your device in IndexedDB. Nothing is uploaded to the server. Two free translations are set up for you on first visit: ASV (English) and RV1909 (Spanish). After that they are yours offline like any other.

Installing Bibles

Browsing & reading

Go to Bibles to see your installed translations. The whole canon is listed further down that page as two grids, Old Testament and New Testament — tap any book to open its first chapter. The Browse button on a translation card is a shortcut that drops you at Genesis 1.

Once you are in a chapter, the book and chapter title in the breadcrumb is a button: tap it to open the navigator and jump to any book, or to any chapter of the book you are in. The Prev/Next buttons at the foot of the page move one chapter at a time and roll over into the next or previous book at the ends, so you can read straight through.

When a chapter comes up empty

You will occasionally open a chapter and be told No verses found for Genesis 1 in WEBNT. That is almost always coverage rather than a fault: plenty of catalog entries are New Testament only, and a few are Old Testament only or partial. The book you asked for is simply not in the translation you are reading.

Switch translations with the dropdown and the chapter appears. The catalog labels coverage on every entry, so you can see which of your Bibles are complete before you install them.

Searching Scripture

Bible Search has grown into several different ways to find a verse, and they answer genuinely different questions:

• Reference lookup — type "Heb 6:10", "he6.10", or "Hebreos 6:10" and get the passage from every translation you have installed. English and Spanish are both recognised automatically.
• Keyword search — type words to search every installed Bible at once. Forgiving about spelling in longer words; quote a phrase for an exact match; filter the results by translation. Put a reference in front of the words — romans 3 faith — to search inside just that passage.
• Words together — with two or more words typed, chips let you look for them in the same verse, within a few verses, or in the same chapter. Results come back as continuous passages rather than lone verses, because two ideas argued across four verses are one answer, not two.
• Boolean operators — OR for either word, NOT to exclude one, brackets to group. Capitals are required, which is what keeps a Spanish no from turning a search into its opposite.
• Pattern search — find every form of a word at once, or verses with a structural property such as ending in a question mark.
• Strong’s search — search the Hebrew and Greek behind the translation. It works in every Bible you have installed, including untagged and Spanish ones, because it never looks at their wording.

Any of these can be narrowed to part of the Bible — the Gospels, the Prophets, a single book — and a strip under the results shows where your matches actually fall across Scripture. Search something in the Gospels and find nothing, and it tells you how many verses are elsewhere rather than leaving you to conclude the word is absent.

There is also an Ask box that turns a plain-language description into a query you can read and edit — without ever letting a model quote Scripture or hand you a citation.

Both search boxes remember what you did. The one on the Bibles page keeps your recent lookups as chips underneath it. The one on the search page keeps your last twelve searches in a drop-down panel — complete with the part of the Bible each was narrowed to and how many results it found — so picking one restores the whole search rather than just the words.

The concordance

Bibles → Concordance counts instead of listing: how often a word appears in each translation you have installed, and whether they disagree about it. It reports occurrences the way a printed concordance does — a verse using the word twice counts twice — alongside the verse count the search page uses.

A translation with no search index yet is marked not counted rather than shown as zero, since zero would claim the word is missing from a Bible nothing actually read. The Bible Search guide covers it in full.

Parallel verse comparison

Click any verse number in the chapter view to open the parallel comparison panel. This shows the same verse across every installed translation, grouped by language (English versions together, Spanish versions together).

This is useful for spotting nuances in translation — how different Bibles render key words or phrases. Click the same verse number again to close the panel.

Where two of your translations are in the same language, a Differences toggle marks the words that actually differ between them, so you are not comparing by eye. It is offered only within a language: marking an English verse against a Spanish one would highlight every word and mean nothing. Punctuation and capitals are ignored when matching, and the text shown is always the original.

The verse page

Every result in a keyword search links through to a page of its own, at a URL like /bibles/john/3/16. It is the same idea as the comparison panel with more room: one card per installed translation, grouped by language, with the reference and a translation count at the top.

• Copy on any card puts that verse on your clipboard already formatted — John 3:16 (ASV) on the first line, the text in quotes underneath. This is the quickest way to get a verse into a comment you are drafting elsewhere.
• Previous / next verse step through the chapter one verse at a time, keeping every translation in view.
• View full chapter returns you to the chapter in your preferred translation.
• Arriving from a search, your search terms stay highlighted in every translation, and a Back to search link returns you to the results you left.

Commenting on verses

Alternative: Compose-then-cite

You can also start from the Compose Form on your dashboard:

1. Click Add Scripture in the compose form
2. The BiblePicker opens — select Version → Book → Chapter → Verses
3. The selected verse text auto-fills the source field, and the reference auto-populates the subject name
4. Write your comment and save

Managing your Bible library

• Add Bible File — the Bibles page has its own drop zone, so you do not have to go through the catalog to import a file you already have. It takes EPUB, MySword (.mybible), e-Sword (.bblx, .bbli), plain JSON, and SQLite Bible databases (.sqlite, .db), and detects which it got from the file itself.
• Export Library — downloads every installed Bible as one JSON backup file.
• Restore Library — re-imports from that file. Anything already installed is skipped rather than duplicated, and you get a summary of what was restored, skipped, and failed.
• Update detection — installed JW.org Bibles are checked against the publisher's current file in the background, and show an Update button when theirs has changed.

Storage, and keeping it

Under your installed Bibles is a line reporting what the library actually costs on this device — not an estimate. It reads something like:

Underneath, each translation is broken out into text, index (what keyword search needs) and patterns (what pattern search needs, if you have enabled it). The split is shown because search data usually dwarfs the text it indexes, and it is worth knowing which part of the figure is the Bible and which part is the searching.