Getting Started

  1. Enter a search phrase or word.  The search engine is case sensitive, for example LORD and lord are treated differently.
  2. Select text
  3. Select book
  4. Press "Submit"
  5. Look at the results, which are sorted in order of most closely matching your search phrase.  The results appear in sets of 3 concurrent verses, as some phrases can span up to 3 verses in a few locations in the Bible.  A link to Biblehub for the first verse is included.

Examples

When the New Testament quotes the Old Testament

In the New Testament, the Old Testament is quoted quite frequently, in the epistles often with the phrase "it is written" or "scripture saith" signifying a quote (but not always, especially in the Gospels and Revelations).

  1. When Jesus says in Matthew 13 and other places in the New Testament "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear", what is he quoting?   The answer is Ezekiel 3:27.  In this case the Septuagint was searched, because most of the time quotes in the New Testament are taking from the scriptures present in the first century AD, which most closely match our version of the Septuagint.

  2. In Romans 2:24, Paul says "For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you, as it is written".   Remove the "as it is written" part of the text, and search. You won't find this quote in the KJV Old Testament, because the KJV Old Testament is based on the Masoretic text. You will, however, quickly find it in the Septuagint, at Isaiah 52:5.

  3. In various places in the New Testament prophecies, the term "Son of man coming in the clouds" is used.  If you search the for phrase in the Old Testament, you will find it is a reference to Daniel 7:13.  You will also find many references to the word "cloud", as well, which can help word studies.

Phrase and Word Studies

You've probably done word studies with a concordance. Now you can do phrase studies quickly.

  1. In Proverbs the term "the fear of the LORD" is used quite a bit. Here's all the places in Proverbs this phrase appears.  Now try it for Psalms.
  2. Here's all the places in the Bible that the phrase "land of milk and honey" appears.
  3. You can also do word studies and narrow them down to a single book. For example here's all the places that the word "hate" appears in Proverbs.

How to Use

Narrowing Results

Only about the first 30-60 closest matching results are returned. If you see that your search word or phrase has more than about 30 entries, there may be additional results you cannot see.  Try narrowing your search results by selecting a different text or book, or adding more words to the search phrase.

No sanity checking is done, so it's possible to select "Mark" and "Old Testament KJV" and you will get no results.  Double check that the search criteria make sense.

Sharing Results

The URL reflects your query, so you can copy the URL and use it in a document, share it with a friend, post it on a Bible forum, etc.

Note is is possible to get invalid looking screen snapshots if you fail to hit "submit" after changing the search criteria.

Texts

You can select between the entire KJV Bible, The KJV Old Testament, KJV New Testament, and Brenton's Septuagint.

These texts were selected using the following criteria:

  1. Freely available with no license restrictions
  2. Already indexed by verse (e.g. a CSV file, a verse-per-computer-line file, etc)
  3. Available Old Testament version that matches New Testament quotes of the Old Testament. This is why you see Brenton's Septuagint in the list of texts, as it uses the same Elizabethean English as the KJV and the KJV New Testament mostly quotes the Septuagint.  Note this disqualifies texts such as NASB where literal word for word is done using a Masoretic Old Testament and a Septuagint quoting New Testament. A computer algorithm that is understandable cannot make such matches.

If you know of a modern translation that meets these criteria and you want it indexed, feel free to contact the author.

Books

The default is all books of the 66 Book KJV Bible. You can narrow your search results by e.g. selecting "Proverbs".

No sanity checking is done, so it's possible to select "Mark" and "Old Testament KJV" and you will get no results.  Double check that the search criteria make sense.

Currently you cannot select the 14 books of the Apocrypha that are in Brenton's Septuagint. It is an unresolved feature request to add these.

How it works

The scripturesaith search engine indexes the verses using the Open Search program, which is Amazon's open source fork of Elastic Search.

These programs are what is known as "inverted index" databases.  Each non-common word is indexed, with the key being the word, and the data being the list of locations that word appears in. Note that a non-common word might be something like "charity",  verses the extremely common words "is" and "and". Each word, before it is indexed, is reduced to its root word, so for example "looked" would be indexed as "look".

Overlapping sets of 3 verse groups are indexed into the database. This allows for some search phrases where the words can sometimes appear across multiple verses or even chapters of a book. The verse and chapter designations were added a long time after the books became canon, and the divisions sometimes appear to be arbitrary.

Each word in your search phrase reduced to its root word and is then is looked up in the database. Each word has a set of locations in the Bible it appears in (just like a concordance). The results are ranked by score, and the score is calculated in roughly the following manner:

  1. The intersection set is calculated, with the most intersections getting the highest score.
  2. The results are deduplicated for overlapping verses.
  3. Unfortunetely the number of times a word appeas in the text influences the score, and this feature is not disable-able in Open Search. This is not desirable for our use, so the score is modified digging into the detailed results provided by Open Search and reducing the score by the indicated multi-match score influence metric.
  4. The Levenshtein distance is calculated for the results, which takes into account the order of the words in your search phrase. The original score is modified so that text that more closely matches the search phrase word order is higher ranked than text that is in a different order. This helps improve the ranking in many cases better than what Open Search calculates, and removes unfortunate side effects from reducing search words to the root word and other scoring idiosyncrasies of Open Search.

The result is displayed in highest score sorted first order, with 30-50 results displayed. This means you may see results that don't actually match your search phrase, but this by itself is useful because you may see context about your words you would not catch without a thorough and tedius word study.  If you don't see non-matching results it may be an indication that there are results you cannot see due to too many possible results of your search query. For example searching for "LORD" returns far too many results to display.