e-Sword: Bible Study to Go

Review by eFreeware

The pitch behind e-Sword: Bible Study to Go is unusually blunt: it promises a seminary-sized library for about the cost of one coffee. Rick Meyers has packed dozens of Bible translations, commentaries, dictionaries, lexicons and full-length Christian books into a single $2.99 Android app, and it's billed as including material that comparable products charge hundreds of dollars to access. That framing is the whole reason the app exists, and it's the first thing worth weighing.

This is a study tool rather than a reading app. It suits people who want to compare translations, follow a commentary verse by verse, look up a Hebrew or Greek word, and keep a devotional routine going, all without buying a stack of separate volumes. If your interest in the Bible is casual, the sheer amount of material here may be more than you need. If you already keep a study Bible on your desk and wish it fit in your pocket, the overlap is obvious.

What one purchase actually gets you

The core of the app is a library of texts. On the Bible side alone, the developer lists the American Standard Version, the Berean Study Bible, the Contemporary English Version, the Douay-Rheims, the English Standard Version, the Good News Bible, the Jewish Publication Society Old Testament, the King James Version with Strong's numbers, the Lexham English Bible, the Passion Translation, the Tree of Life Version, the World English Bible and more, plus many further translations in over 70 languages. For anyone who studies in a language other than English, that last point matters more than any single English edition.

Around those translations sits the apparatus that turns reading into study. There are commentaries spanning the whole canon and individual books, from Matthew Henry and Albert Barnes to Adam Clarke, John Gill, John Wesley and David Guzik's Enduring Word. There are dictionaries, including Easton's, Smith's, Hastings', the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia and Nave's Topical Bible.

Then come the language tools: Strong's Hebrew and Greek dictionaries, Thayer's Greek Definitions, Brown-Driver-Briggs' Hebrew Definitions, the Ancient Hebrew Lexicon and Mounce's Concise Greek-English Dictionary. A reader who wants to check what a word carries in the original text has the standard references on hand without a separate purchase or a shelf of print volumes.

Reading, devotionals and the wider shelf

The app isn't only for reference work. Six daily devotionals are included, among them Morning & Evening, Streams in the Desert, Our Daily Walk and Day-By-Day By Grace. That gives the app a second, quieter role: a place to start the day with a short reading rather than a research session.

The reference shelf is broader than most people would expect from a Bible app. It runs from John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion and A. W. Tozer's The Knowledge of the Holy and The Pursuit of God, through Andrew Murray on the deeper Christian life and E. M. Bounds on prayer, to Flavius Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews and The Wars of the Jews, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, Philip Schaff's History of the Christian Church and Creeds of Christendom, and Alfred Edersheim's studies of Jewish social life and the life of Jesus.

That range is the strongest argument for the price. A reader working through church history, or preparing a lesson that needs a quotation from a classic author, has the sources at hand. The trade-off is that this is a lot of material to move around in, and the value of it depends on whether you actually reach for commentaries and lexicons or just want a clean text to read.

The new selection menu

The most recent update adds three actions to the text selection menu, which is a small change with a large effect on how the app is used. Highlight a passage and you can search for that text across the module you're in. Select a single word and you can look it up in any dictionary you have installed. Select the name of a biblical city or region and you can locate it on the map.

What appeals to me about this is how closely it mirrors the way study actually happens. You're reading a verse, a word seems important, and you want to know where else it appears or what it means before you move on. Search, lookup and locate cover the three most common detours in that process, and having them in the selection menu means the detour doesn't break the reading.

The locate option is the one I'd single out, because place names carry a lot of weight in narrative passages and a map reference is often the fastest way to make sense of a journey or a campaign. It's a modest addition, but it's aimed at the right moment.

Cost, ads and what the price covers

e-Sword is a paid app at $2.99, with no ads and no in-app purchases. That combination is increasingly rare, and for a study tool it matters. The developer's central claim, that much of this material is normally sold at a far higher price, is the reason the app can be pitched as a bargain at all.

Whether that bargain holds depends on how much of the library you use. Someone who wants one modern translation and a daily devotional is paying for a great deal they may never open. Someone who would otherwise buy a commentary, a lexicon and a couple of classic Christian books separately is looking at a very different calculation.

There's also the question of format. A phone screen is fine for reading a chapter or checking a word, but commentaries and reference works are long-form texts, and reading them on a small display is a different experience from reading them in print. The app's value is in having the material with you, not in reproducing the comfort of a printed volume. That's a fair trade for most people, but it's worth being honest about what you're trading.

Who this library is built for

The clearest fit is someone who already studies seriously: a teacher preparing a lesson, a student working through a passage in the original languages, or a reader who likes to compare how several translations handle the same verse. For that person, the combination of translations, commentaries, dictionaries and lexicons in one app is the point.

The second fit is the reader with a devotional habit who wants more context than a plain Bible app provides. The included devotionals and the classic books give that reader somewhere to go after the daily passage.

The app's focus is textual and historical study, and it shows in what's included. Someone whose interest is mainly audio, or who wants a highly visual or social experience around reading, may find the emphasis here sits elsewhere. That's not a flaw so much as a description of what the library is: a reference collection, organized around texts and the tools for reading them closely.

A strong pick for close readers

The 4.7 average across more than 2,400 ratings suggests a lot of people have found it worth keeping, and the material itself, from the Berean Study Bible and the ESV to Matthew Henry, Strong's and Josephus, is the kind of collection that would cost considerably more assembled any other way.

I'd recommend it to readers who want to study a passage rather than simply read it: compare translations, check a word in the original language, follow a commentary, and pull a quotation from a classic author when a lesson calls for one. The recent selection-menu additions make that workflow noticeably smoother, and the map lookup is a genuinely useful touch for narrative passages.

If your Bible reading is occasional and light, the depth here will go unused, and a simpler app would serve you just as well. For everyone else, this is one of the better arguments I've seen for paying once and getting a library instead of a single text.

What's new in version 8.0.0

New text selection menu choices make using e-Sword even easier! SEARCH — Instantly search for the selected text throughout the module. LOOKUP — Instantly lookup the selected word in any installed dictionary. LOCATE — Instantly locate the selected biblical city or region on the map.