Search box

The search box can be used for opening Bible passages as well as Bible text searches.

Open Bible passage

You can enter a Bible passage in the search box (e.g. John 3) and send it with the Enter key. The Bible text will then open in the selected Bible translation.

ERF Bibleserver automatically recognizes the common abbreviations of biblical books. It is therefore not necessary to write out the biblical book in each case (e.g. Joh 3). If you add a verse or verse range, it is automatically marked and the browser scrolls to the corresponding place (e.g. John 3:16).

You can also select separate areas within a chapter (e.g. Joh 3:12-16.20-21).

Alternatively you can open a Bible passage via the icon book selection on the left side of the search box. Further information can be found in the help section book selection.

You can change the translation of the Bible passage in the search box on the right by clicking on the short form of the Bible translation (e.g. ESV). Details can be found in the section Translation selection.

Tip

If you know the short forms of the Bible translations, you can enter them in the search box followed by a colon at the beginning and the translation will automatically change to them (e.g. ESV: or KJV:).

Search Bible text

ERF Bibleserver offers many ways to search the Bible text. Type one or more words into the search box and send it with the Enter key. By default the search result lists the Bible verses in which all terms occur as a whole word.

There are no pages to browse in this pageview. At the end of the list, further search results are automatically loaded.

If you are looking for a term that also corresponds to a biblical book (e.g. John), you must click on the search entry with the magnifying glass in the selection menu. Alternatively, you can put the search term in quotation marks. If you are looking for several search terms this has the meaning search exact word order.

ERF Bibleserver by default displays those verses as the search result in which all searched terms are contained (AND-link). If you also want to find verses which contain only one of several terms (OR-link), separate them in the search field with a comma.

Words can also be excluded from the search. This means that Bible verses will be displayed that contain the term A, but not the term B. This is possible by a minus sign before the word (e.g. Jesus -Christus).

To search for substrings that begin with the search term, you can append * to the end of the term (e.g. rich* also finds verses with the term riches).

You can find further settings like partial words within a word or searching through headings in the search filters. The corresponding funnel icon is displayed to the right of the search box.

When searching for terms that contain umlauts, these can also be entered in the spelling without umlauts (e.g. Suende also finds Sünde).

The search for numbers from 1-12 also shows hits where the number is written out (e.g. 2 also finds two). This function is limited to German and English.