David Cox's How to Use e-Sword Bible Panel

 Overview  

Let's start off by saying that e-Sword has a very nice implementation of Bible use and study. For sake of explaining things, I will divide the e-Sword user interface into sections which I call "panels". This page will deal only with the Bible panel and the Bible Navigation panels. If you are not already familiar with e-Sword, open the program and the study the image below to familiarize yourself with the general panels and layout.

 Navigating the Bible

First to get around in a Bible we need to understand that we can scroll, or we can select with this navigation panel at left. It is a normal tree type menu structure where you click on a book of the Bible and it will open child entries, one for each chapter.

At this point you click on a chapter and the chapter will appear in the Bible Panel and you scroll down through the verses to get where you want to go.

At the top of this navigation panel is a drop down box that you can write things in. Enter a specific passage in this box, and press enter and you will go to that passage.

Notice the small triangle at the right of this box. Once you begin entering passages in here, you can click on the triangle and it will hold a list in reverse order of all the passages that you have entered in here.

Again I repeat that these references are only the ones you enter in this text box, to go directly to a passage.

Beside this direct passage "Go to" box is a set of two arrows and two more triangles. Once you begin to move around to different Bible passages this will produce a "verse trail" which can be navigated here by means of click the left or right arrow. If you go backwards on the trail, both arrows are dark, if not only the back (left) arrow is dark. When you first open e-Sword neither is dark.

Click on the triangle and you will see the verses where you have been, or if you go backwards in the verse trail, all the passages you skip back will move from one to the other. Neat!

 Changing Bible Translations

Above the actual text of the Bible you will see the above tabs and icons. Note that you will not have these Bible versions in these tabs yet unless you have downloaded them. If you want to compare versions, go to my Bible modules page and download what Bible versions you would like to use. I have links to about 105 English version Bibles, some 5 Hebrew Bibles, 12 Greek versions of NT and 2 LXX Versions, 2 Vulgate versions. I would recommend that at this point, if you are going to use anything other than one single version and nothing more, then download them all. Later I will show you how to hide versions that you don't use so often.

Always remember that e-Sword reads the folder contents of its home folder, "C:\Programs\e-Sword", normally and populates these modules with what it finds on the basis of file extension (all files ending with *.bbl in this case). If you download Bibles, then install them, make sure you close and then reopen e-Sword, and they should appear in tabs.

To change Bible versions, simply click a different tab. To see what the abbreviation stands for, hover the cursor over the tab for a minute and it will appear. To see a bit more information about the Bible, click Bible, then Information in the main upper menu.

There are two tabs that are special here, the Compare tab, and the Parallel tab. These are pretty clear. The Compare tab will show two Bible versions one version in then in the other kind of "in-line" in the Bible panel. To set the versions that appear here, use the Main Menu, and click Options, Compare, and all Bible modules in the e-Sword folder will appear with a check box beside it. Click what you want and close. They should appear (you of course need to click on the Compare tab to see the comparisons). The Parallel Tab is similar. Instead of putting one verse in one version then another in the next, this will allow you up to 4 columns with a version to each column. To set these up, click on the drop down box at the top of the column and it should contain all the Bible versions.

 Using the Bible Icons

These are the icon menus for the Bible Panel.

The first one is the Print Preview for printing Bible verses.
 

The second one is the format of the verses which you will print. This dialog box is seen in the image at right. This allows you to specify what range of verses to print, include the translation name abbreviation, include character formatting, Delimiters to start and end the passage, and you have 8 different formats to choose from. At the bottom you can choose a commentary version and include notes from that commentary version.

This icon is going to be our standard Bible search icon. Here you will get another dialog box like the one in the image at right. I have entered a search for the phrase "son of man" here. The triangle at right of the search phrase is a drop down box for past searches in this session. The "abc" icon is for doing a simple basic word check on the search terms. The Search button is to actually do the search, and Accept accepts the search and close this dialog, Cancel cancels the search.

The next line has what kind of search you want to do, all words, any words, or a phrase. Below that (if you chose all words or any words) are two check boxes for including partial matches, and for including synonyms. The Exclude box is to remove verses that have a certain word in the verse

On the right side, we will have the option of reducing the search range to Old Testament or New or specific books, or all.

In my search, there were 193 pages found, and in the box below that "193 verses found" is a scrollable box listing all of those verses. You can click on one there and it will appear in the bottom box.

There are three icons above and to the far right of our hits box (the box below the "193 verses found").

Starting at the right (two white pages) is to copy the verses found to the clipboard. The icon of the printer is for printing these verses.

The far left icon of a red Bible with a yellow cross is to add the verses to you verse list. This is a special list of verses like the verse trail that you can keep as a separate file and navigate. In e-Sword, do a search, and press "Search". Now press this verse list icon button.

The dialog box at right is what I got with my search. Here we can individually review and select what verses we will add, and also create a new verse list or add to an existing verse list.

Our next Bible menu icon is like sheets of paper.

This icon is for selecting all in the Bible window. It is limited to the chapter at hand, so don't get worried about selecting the whole Bible for something.

This button will copy what text you have highlighted in the Bible to the Windows clipboard.

 This will open our verse format dialog to format the verses for the copying operation.

E-Sword will allow you to create a Topic of personal notes (which a lot of people have put a lot more than there own notes into these topic files for use in e-Sword). If you have a topic open that is not locked (nothing you create within e-Sword is locked), then you can select verses and click and it will automatically go into your topics notes where the cursor is there at the moment you left it last.

Our next icons are mark up icons. The marker is for marking text in your Bible. The triangle allows you to choose between a few different colors. The icon that says "God" is actually for selecting the type of underling that you want to use to underline. ("God" is the test word here and if you click on the triangle you will see the options.

The magnifying glass with a "+" is for amplification of the Bible text. The two rectangles at the end are for splitting the window so that you can move in two different places in the Bible and compare.

  Special Bible Bookmarks and moving in the Bible Text

Here we have a battery of icons on the far right side of the Bible panel. These icons are grouped, two at the top, and two almost identical at the bottom. The first one (top most) is for moving the Bible text up or back one chapter. The one below it is for moving it up (previous) one verse. At the bottom of this battery are similar icons for moving the text forward one chapter or one verse.

The yellow tabs (1-10) are for leaving Bible bookmarks. Left click on one of these yellow tabs and you will go to that bookmark. Right click on a yellow tab and you will set that tab to the current verse.