How to use Beside the Waters

The name is from Psalm 1 — the one who delights in Scripture is “like a tree planted by streams of water… its leaf does not wither.” Beside the Waters is a word-study tool built around one idea: the Greek New Testament and the Septuagint (LXX) are tagged to the same dictionary numbers, so any word or phrase in one can be traced through the other. The Hebrew Old Testament is included too.

▶ Take the interactive tour — a quick guided walkthrough inside the app.

Reading

• Books — choose a book and chapter in the left sidebar. The collapse button (⟨) next to the “Books” title tucks the sidebar away. The Deuterocanon & alternate texts group at the bottom is collapsed by default; click it to reveal Tobit, Sirach, Wisdom, Maccabees, and the alternate LXX text-forms (e.g. Joshua (Alexandrinus) — Rahlfs prints two ancient editions of a few books; the plain-named one is always the standard text).
• Original language — chapters open in English. The picker in the chapter header chooses what (if anything) is printed beneath each verse: English only, + Greek · Septuagint, or — for Old Testament books — + Hebrew (the Masoretic text). This is purely about display: English words stay clickable either way, and the references panel is unaffected by what you choose here.
• Translations — the picker beside the search box offers BSB, WEB and Brenton (stored locally) plus CSB, NASB and NLT (fetched live from API.Bible). The BSB is word-tagged: every English word knows the Strong's number of the original word behind it. Brenton translates the Septuagint itself, so it matches the Greek exactly — including LXX Psalm numbers and the deuterocanon.
• Your choices — translation, what's shown beneath the English, sidebar — are remembered between visits.

Word study

• Tap any Greek or Hebrew word to open its card: dictionary form, transliteration, parsing (“verb, aorist active indicative 3rd sg”), a brief gloss, and the full lexicon entry (Abbott-Smith for Greek, with LXX/Hebrew equivalents noted). Scripture references inside definitions are clickable.
• Occurrences load automatically: a Greek word immediately lists every place its lemma appears across the whole Bible — Old Testament (Septuagint) first, then New — with tabs to narrow to one testament. A Hebrew word lists the Hebrew Bible. These are local database lookups — instant and free, no API calls.
• The bar over the list shows how the word spreads across the canon — Law, History, Poetry, Prophets, Gospels, Letters. Click a section to see just those books; click again to clear.
• Two faces — every Old Testament word has two identities: the Hebrew word and the Greek word the Septuagint used for it in that verse. The word card shows both side by side; click the inactive one to study through it. Hebrew words never appear in the New Testament, so their NT tab reads via Greek → — following it crosses to the Greek counterpart (with a breadcrumb back), because the Greek is what the apostles quoted.
• Apocrypha — hit lists cover the Hebrew-canon books by default; a sentence under the list says how many hits are in the deuterocanon and includes them with one click (they join the bar as a hatched segment).
• Book chips filter — in an occurrence list, click a book count (e.g. Jeremiah 6) to see only that book’s hits; click it again to clear.
• Names — clicking a proper name shows its meaning when the lexicon records one (✦ Isaac means “he laughs”), along with family relationships in the definition. Greek names inherit the meaning of the Hebrew name behind them — clicking Ἀβραάμ in Matthew shows אַבְרָהָם, “father of a multitude.”
• Tap an English word — with the BSB selected (the default) this is an exact join: each English word is tagged with its original word’s Strong's number, so “beautiful” in 2 Samuel 11:2 lands directly on טוֹב (tov, “good”) even though the idiom is rendered freely. With WEB, Brenton, or a licensed translation, Beside the Waters falls back to gloss matching: one clear match jumps to the word card; otherwise a word-by-word breakdown of the verse opens. The verse ⊞ button on any word card opens that breakdown directly.
• Reading tabs — clicking any reference (a cross-reference in the margin, an occurrence hit, a search result) opens that passage as a tab beside the one you're reading. The passage you started from keeps the pinned ⌂ tab, so it's always one click away. Words in every tab are fully clickable — same cards, same phrase building. × closes a tab (or Esc closes the one in front of you), and ↑ move to ⌂ loads a tab's passage in the ⌂ reader.
• Two passages at once — ⊞ beside splits the column so a reference sits next to the text that sent you there. The layout is fixed: the passage you're reading always holds the left pane, and references always open on the right. Following a reference from inside the right pane opens another tab there — what you're reading never gets pushed aside. Reference panes carry their own margin rail, so you can keep walking a chain of citations without losing your place. On a narrow screen the two panes stack instead.
• Two word cards — clicking a word in a reference tab doesn't discard the word that led you there. The ⌂ reader's word stays pinned as a compact reading strip while the reference's word opens below it as the reference card — Greek and its Hebrew counterpart side by side. Click either card to flip which one is expanded; closing the last reference tab restores the single card, and ↑ move to ⌂ carries the reference card over as your new reading word.

Cross references

Verses that the Berean Standard Bible cross-references grow a hairline rail in the right margin — quiet on the verses that have none. Each entry says which way the reference points: cites the Old Testament passage a New Testament verse is quoting, cited in the New Testament passages that quote an Old Testament verse, and parallel for the passages the BSB lists under a section heading (the ⊞ parallels button next to a heading opens all of them as a tab group at once).

The display button next to the chapter title turns three more things the BSB ships on and off:

• Footnotes — a small ‡ after a word opens the BSB's own translator note. 4,854 of them: alternative renderings ("Or born from above" at John 3:3), the literal wording behind a smooth English phrase, weights and measures, name meanings, and — most usefully here — 1,140 notes recording where the Hebrew, Septuagint, Dead Sea Scrolls, Syriac and Vulgate read differently.
• Poetry & paragraphs — sets the Psalms, Proverbs, Job and the prophets as verse lines with the BSB's own indentation instead of one flat block per verse.
• Words of Jesus in red — off by default.

A rust LXX marker means the BSB's own footnote names the Septuagint there — which is usually the interesting part. Hebrews 1:7 quotes Psalm 104:4, but the English of the two looks like a contradiction: “He makes His angels winds” against “He makes the winds His messengers.” Open the Psalm beside it and the Greek settles it — Hebrews is quoting LXX Psalm 103:4 word for word. There are 295 such flagged references, and they are the shortest route into what this whole app is about.

Studies — save your research

Sign in (free — Google or email) and Beside the Waters becomes a research notebook: studies collect the words and phrases you're investigating as re-runnable anchors, gather passages into named groups with your comments, and remember which hits you've already reviewed and set aside — so a 222-occurrence word list only ever has to be worked through once. Studies open as full documents with verse text, export to markdown, and can be shared with a read-only link.

→ Read the studies guide — accounts, capturing, triage mode, a worked narrative-analogy example, sharing & backups.

Phrase search — NT phrases in the LXX

This is the tool’s reason to exist. When the New Testament quotes or echoes the Old, it usually echoes the Septuagint’s wording. Phrase search lets you take any sequence of words and find it across corpora at the lemma level — inflection is ignored, so ἀρχῇ finds ἀρχή, ἀρχῆς, ἀρχήν…

1. Show the original text and click a word — it appears in the dark tray at the bottom of the screen.
2. Add more words: turn on Phrase in the tray (every click then adds), or hold shift while clicking. Click a tray chip to remove it.
3. Choose the corpus (in Old Testament (Greek) / in New Testament, or in Hebrew OT for Hebrew selections) and a gap tolerance, then Search phrase.

Each hit is classified:

• quotation — the lemmas occur contiguously, in your order;
• close — in order, but with up to the chosen number of intervening words;
• allusion — all the lemmas occur near each other, in any order.

Try it: open John 1:1, show the Greek, click Ἐν then shift-click ἀρχῇ, and search in the Old Testament. The first hit is Genesis 1:1 — ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ θεὸς… — marked quotation. Or select ποιμὴν + καλός in John 10:11 and hunt the shepherd language of Ezekiel 34 and Psalm 22(23).

A single selected word searches that word alone (same as the word card). The gap setting controls how far apart the words may sit: exact demands a contiguous quotation, while near (≤ 15) and scene (≤ 40) find narrative motifs that span whole verses — e.g. select רָאָה (saw) + לָקַח (took) in Genesis 3:6 and search the Hebrew OT at scene width: Eve who saw and took, the sons of God (Gen 6:2), Pharaoh and Sarai (Gen 12:15), and David and Bathsheba (2 Sam 11:2–4) all surface — the same sin-pattern told in the same two verbs.

Search box

• Keywords — type words to full-text search the selected translation: steadfast love, propitiation, "son of man" (quotes force the exact phrase). WEB and Brenton search locally; CSB/NASB/NLT search via API.Bible. Searching Brenton reaches the deuterocanon.
• References — type a passage to jump straight to it: John 5:1, jn 5, Ps 44, 1 cor 13:4, matt 24. Most common abbreviations work; a bare book name (job, acts) works too when it’s unambiguous. With a verse (John 5:1) the reader scrolls to and highlights that verse.

Texts & numbering

• Texts: Greek NT = STEPBible TAGNT (Nestle-Aland text-form); LXX = Rahlfs 1935 (via Eliran Wong’s tagged edition); Hebrew = Leningrad Codex (STEPBible TAHOT); lexicons = TBESG/TBESH, keyed to extended Strong’s numbers.
• Psalm numbering — Psalms always display with the familiar Hebrew/English numbers, even when reading the LXX (where Rahlfs runs one behind for Ps 10–147). A note under the chapter shows the LXX number, and switching between Greek and Hebrew keeps you in the same psalm. The two psalms the LXX splits (116, 147) show their first half in Greek — switch to + Hebrew for the whole psalm.
• Other LXX versification quirks remain: LXX Jeremiah 25+ is ordered differently — Brenton matches it, WEB will not.

Data: STEPBible (Tyndale House, CC BY 4.0) · LXX-Rahlfs-1935 (Eliran Wong, CC BY-NC-SA) · Berean Standard Bible (public domain) — the tagged English, the cross references and section headings shown with every translation, and the translator footnotes, poetry layout and red letter shown with the BSB itself · World English Bible & LXX2012 (public domain) · CSB © Holman, NASB © Lockman, NLT © Tyndale House Foundation, via API.Bible. Non-commercial use.