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.

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; press show original in the chapter header to reveal the Greek (or Hebrew). For Old Testament books, the LXX / עברית toggle switches between the Septuagint and the Hebrew Masoretic text.
• 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, original shown/hidden, LXX vs Hebrew, 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 in the Septuagint; a Hebrew word lists the whole Hebrew Bible. The NT / LXX / Hebrew OT buttons switch corpus. These are local database lookups — instant and free, no API calls.
• 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.
• The study trail — clicking any reference (an occurrence hit, a cross-reference in a definition, a search result) opens that passage in a drawer over the bottom of the reader, so your main passage never moves. Words in the drawer are fully clickable — same cards, same phrase building. Each hop adds a breadcrumb to the trail bar; click a crumb to revisit that stop, its × to drop just that stop, the dashed crumb to return to where you started, ↑ make main to load the drawer's passage in the main reader, or ✕ / Esc to close.
• Two word cards — clicking a word in the drawer doesn't discard the word that led you there. The main reader's word stays pinned as a compact reading strip while the drawer's word opens below it as the trail card — Greek and its Hebrew counterpart side by side. Click either card to flip which one is expanded; closing the drawer restores the single card, and ↑ make main carries the trail card over as your new reading word.

Studies — save your research

Sign in (invite-only) 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 LXX / in NT, 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 original, click Ἐν then shift-click ἀρχῇ, and search in LXX. 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 the LXX/עברית toggle keeps you in the same psalm. The two psalms the LXX splits (116, 147) show their first half in Greek — switch to עברית 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) · World English Bible & LXX2012 (public domain) · CSB © Holman, NASB © Lockman, NLT © Tyndale House Foundation, via API.Bible. Non-commercial use.