The study tools

Original languages and definitions

The King James Version was translated from Hebrew and Greek into the English of 1611. Living Word lets you look through both layers.

Interlinear: Hebrew and Greek

Read the Bible word by word in its original language: Hebrew for the Old Testament and Greek for the New. Each word appears with its transliteration, so you can sound it out, and its English meaning. Hebrew reads right to left, just as it's written.

Strong's numbers and definitions

Look up an English word to find the Hebrew or Greek word behind it, its Strong's number, transliteration, pronunciation and definition. It's often where a familiar verse opens up, as when “firmament” turns out to mean an expanse.

Webster's 1828 dictionary

Noah Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, 1828. English words shift in meaning over the centuries; this shows how a word was understood when many older Bibles and reference works were in everyday use.

Numerics

Hebrew and Greek letters have long doubled as numbers, so every word has a value. Living Word calculates these values, counts how often words occur, and gives you a workbench for following what you find.

Forensics: a word at a glance

Type a word to see its gematria value in Hebrew, Greek and English, how many times it occurs in the King James Version, how many verses, chapters and books it appears in, and which books use it most. Select a book to list every occurrence in it.

The Sandbox

Start from a word or phrase, a verse, or a number. A verse card breaks the verse down word by word with a running total. From any card you can branch out:

• Check it: prime, triangular, Armstrong number, perfect square or cube, prime factorization, digital root.
• Combine it with another card or number: sum, product, or whether one divides the other.
• Keep going. Every result is a new card, so the path from your first number to your last stays visible.

Hebrew and Greek gematria are on by default, because they're long-standing historical practices. English gematria (A=1, B=2, and so on) is a modern convention, so it's there when you want it but off until you turn it on. Every card is labeled with the system it came from, and anything combined across systems is marked as mixed.

Save a whole session and pick it up later, or export just the cards you choose as a plain text file to share.

Scratchpad

Found something interesting that has nothing to do with today's study? Send it to the Scratchpad. It's copied there with everything branching from it, and waits until you have time to come back to it.

Common meanings, 1 to 40

A reference list of the traditional meanings associated with numbers 1 through 40, such as seven with completeness and forty with testing. It's there as background, kept apart from the calculations.

Translations

Compare

Read the King James Version beside any of seven other translations: the Berean Standard Bible, Literal Standard Version, American Standard Version, Darby, Webster's, Young's Literal Translation, and the Catholic Public Domain Version. Choose a verse and both sides line up with it highlighted. Where a translation leaves out a verse the King James includes, it's clearly marked rather than skipped.

Counts and locations

Count a word or phrase across all eight translations at once. Then list every verse where each translation uses it, with a summary of the verses where they disagree. Save the whole comparison to your notes.

Topics and connections

Cross-references

More than 340,000 links between related passages, drawn from the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.

Nave's Topical Bible

Study by subject rather than by word: find the verses on a topic even where the word itself never appears.

Journeys

Follow the journeys of Scripture, from Abram's travels to Paul's missionary journeys, on maps that show every named stop along the way, with references for each place.

Your research

Search the whole Bible or just the books you choose, and export your results. Keep notes as you go. Notes, Sandbox sessions and the Scratchpad are saved on the drive automatically, and you can back them up to your computer or anywhere else you like.