In the Beginning was the Word Bible software (The Word) was created in order to be a valuable, everyday tool for every Christian that wishes to read and study the Bible, the Word of God. We believe that In the Beginning was the Word Bible Software is one of the very best Bible study software programs available, commercial or otherwise. The Word is comparable to and in many cases, if not most, better than its commercial counterparts. Although the price tag for The Word is free, do not be fooled into thinking that its price tag reflects its feature list.

The Word is designed to be a tool for everyday use, always running in the background and ready to respond whenever you need to look-up a verse, read the Bible, or study a passage or theme of the Bible in depth. It’s quick to load, easy to customize and intuitive to use. We feel that its value and quality cannot be fully presented through a feature list, so we urge you to try it out. Each little detail has been carefully contemplated, designed and implemented with many options and customizations. This is exactly what makes people stick with The Word, once they give it a try. That’s the best way to make up your mind too!

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↓ Clear and Unobtrusive User Interface
↓ Unmatched Customization of Bible Viewer
↓ Compare Multiple Translations of the Bible
↓Designed for Every Language
↓Search the Bible Effectively and Quickly
↓Make It Personal – organize your thoughts
↓User Highlighting Everywhere
↓Verse lists
↓Intuitive and Extensive Cross-Reference Support
↓Book View: A Place for All Your Non-Bible Resources
↓Book Search View—Find Everything!
↓Clipboard Monitor: Read the Text of Any Verse in Any Program
↓Greek and Hebrew Support
↓Copy Verses Out of the Program and Print Everything
↓Tailor Your Layouts; Save and Restore Them When Needed
↓Take It With You: The Word is Portable
↓Numerous Skins to Customize the Look of The Word
↓Ever Expanding Library
↓And…There is More Than What You Read Here

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There are two main views (sub-windows) that host all available resources:
  • The Bible View that displays Bible translations
  • The Book View that displays all non-Bible resources (commentaries, dictionaries, devotionals, books, maps, etc.)
Each view is fully customizable and can contain any number of resources, neatly organized with button-style tabs. The program allows you to create many views of each type. Every view is automatically arranged within the main window, with no overlapping of surfaces, and uses a unique color to be easily identified. You can drag-n-drop any view to relocate it and create customized layouts. The possibilities are endless.
Apart from these two primary views, there are three more: the Bible Search View for searching the Bible, the Book Search View for searching non-Bible resources and the Bible Tree for navigating through the Bible.

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There are more than 60 different options that allow you to fully customize the way the Bible text is displayed. The Bible texts may contain cross-references, footnotes, grammatical analysis links, Strong’s indices, and more. Everything can be switched on/off with a single key. Even the buttons that display the various Bible translations can be customized with icons, colors and custom titles.

All these options can be different for each Bible View! So, you may have a stripped-down Bible View that only displays the Bible text in a verse-per-line mode and another that displays another translation laid-out in paragraphs, with section headings, footnotes, cross-references, Strong’s numbers, grammatical codes, even links to commentaries with relevant content.

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Choose any number of translations and put them in a Bible View horizontally or vertically. You may even add one or more commentaries on the side to view in parallel. Compare text in a glance, and if you want, add some more columns/rows with commentaries. Of course, you can also display your own notes in the Compare mode (since The Word allows you to create any non-Bible resources from within the program itself – no need for external tools). It is personal-note-taking at its best.

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The Word has been designed to be used in any language. The Word utilizes full Unicode support, full localization capabilities and comprehensive support of Unicode languages (including the reader/editor, the verse recognition algorithms and all widgets and menus). All is designed with one goal in mind—to be used globally. There are translations and resources available in many languages, including Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and more. The program supports right-to-left languages and those that require contextual-shape rendering (e.g. Arabic).

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Searching the Bible is easy and fast…really fast. Search results are displayed in their own separate view that stays visible and docked within the main window. You may have more than one search views visible to compare search results for multiple searches. The matching verses can be copied to the clipboard, put in a verse list, or made simply to display the actual matched verse text inline. The search engine supports a variety of search operators in the Boolean logic mode (e.g. "AND", "OR", "NEAR", “XOR”, “*”, “?” etc.), and the use of Regular Expressions.

Although there are many predefined search ranges (NT, OT, Paul’s epistles, Synoptic Gospels, etc.) you can also create your own, non-continuous search ranges to limit your searches.

The search engine is fully Unicode! This means that you can perfectly search in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic or Chinese without a problem and you can even ignore accents, diacritics and letter-case in all languages. And if you have difficulties typing in a language such as Hebrew, Greek or Arabic, there is also a virtual keyboard available to help you type any letter you want.

Search results are ranked and presented in a color-coded style to help quickly identify the books of the Bible with more matches. And of course, just hovering your mouse over any verse will display the content in a popup window.

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Probably the single most important concept of the program is its versatility in allowing you, the end-user and student of the Bible, to put down your notes and thoughts. This translates into a myriad of unique functions which are properly organized to help you register your thoughts.
The program knows no separation between add-on modules (such as commentaries, maps or books) and personal, user modules. What you can get as an add-on resource you can also create for yourself directly from within the program (actually, most of the add-on resources of the library were created directly from within the program itself).

You can:
  • Write down your notes on Bible verses, chapters, books and passages within a user-commentary
  • Create books with multi-level hierarchies within a user book
  • Edit your own word-lists in a user dictionary

You can make modules to hold personal notes, make custom modules for distribution, or transfer an already written commentary/dictionary/book into a module for The Word. Once completed, the module can be made read-only and prepared for distribution to other users. Some modules can also be submitted to be made a part of the official The Word library on The Word website. There is also a useful external tool (Importer) that will let you convert and import notes and modules from other sources (e-Sword, Zefania, standard rtf files, etc.).

Moreover, for custom user modules, you may
  • Use the integrated editor that allows you to format your text with full support for tables and embedded pictures, footnotes and more.
  • Paste any content from your web browser in your notes, and all formatting and even pictures will be transferred properly.
  • Input verse references, all of which will be recognized and hyperlinked as you type them. You can automatically scan any text and recognize and hyperlink all verse references at once.
  • Use the available hyper-linking system to link everything in your modules: verses, topics, commentary entries, footnotes, etc.
  • Add your own cross-references (see below).

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You can highlight text in any resource using several different styles, colors and underlines. No limitations whatsoever. You can do so with Bible and non-Bible resources.

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Group verses together and create your own verse lists. You may view, edit, copy, print, etc.

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The Word provides support for multiple user cross-reference sets. Adding cross-references is easy and intuitive. The Word cross-references (a.k.a. xrefs) are "smart" in that they also perform backward referencing so placing xrefs is not double-duty. Also, The Word provides access to all xrefs in a set in one place. You may also copy references from existing sets to new sets. Xrefs can be displayed inline with a Bible text in several positions or overlayed over existing xrefs of a Bible.

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The Book View hosts all add-on, non-Bible resources. All non-Bible modules, user-created or not, are displayed in this view. You can organize your modules in Book Views and create several resource-sets to group your library modules under logical names (e.g. Church Father’s writings, Dispensational Commentaries, etc). Each Book View can host any number of resources, organized in folders using standard buttons. Every book resource has its own button and can be accessed easily with a click. If you add to it the ability to create multiple views, you can see that the options are endless: you make your program as you want it with no restrictions.

Of course, there is automatic linking of the resources with the Bible! So, clicking on a verse in a Bible View will highlight for you all commentaries that contain an entry for this verse. Clicking on a word anywhere will highlight all dictionaries and books that have a topic/entry for this word.

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All resources are fully searchable. You can define your own collections of books to be searched or choose to search within previously defined resource-sets. Matched words are highlighted and navigation within big articles/topics is very easy.

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Reading something in a web page or a PDF file that contains a verse reference? No need to stop and go to your Bible program to check what the verses say anymore: you may just select the verse reference with your mouse and copy it to the clipboard. If running, The Word will instantly display a popup window under your mouse displaying the verse text. You don’t need to leave your web-browser and go back to your Bible program!

And it does not stop there. You may copy a whole article from a web-page and The Word will automatically detect and display all verse references in this text. From there, you can create a verse list, go back to see the verse context or just copy the verse text back in the clipboard.

Even when typing in your favorite word processor, you can just insert the text of a verse with a few keystrokes—no reason to change programs.

Clipboard monitor can recognize verse texts in all supported languages, not just English.

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Since the Bible was written in these two languages, special support for them is included in every function in the program. There are many Bible texts that integrate Strong’s numbers and concordance modules that display info for the original words, roots and grammatical information. Special Unicode fonts are used and included. Of course, the search engine handles them properly as well.

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If you write your own book, notes or prepare texts in other programs, The Word offers unique features in copying verses. You can customize the format of the copied text in a multitude of ways (including headers, customizing the numbering, etc) that matches your needs. Of course, copying content from all resources is well supported. Greek, Hebrew and other Unicode texts are copied properly, well formatted and ready to be pasted in your favorite editor.

Full printing support is also available for every text of the program, including a WYSIWYG preview, custom margins and page layouts.

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With so many options to customize the program, it is natural that you want to create special layouts (workspaces) for special occasions!

The program comes with 8 predefined layouts (novice, standard, advanced, etc.) that allow you to quickly change the organization of views in a single click. The layouts do not just include the position of the windows but all settings of each view (remember there are many). So, you can create a simplistic workspace with just your Bible and 2 Bible Search Views for everyday study, or you can create a full study layout with 4 Book Views, loaded with your custom resources and corresponding Bible views to show in parallel your favorite translations.

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Designed from scratch to be portable, The Word offers a compact mode of running that allows you to put it on your personal USB flash drive and run it from there. All features are available in this mode, except no trace is being left on the host PC. You can run it on the Internet cafe computer or your friend’s laptop. All your notes are always with you.

The official installer can create compact installations with a click; no hassle, no messing with registry settings or tweaking. If you wish, you may also get a pre-installed USB flash drive with a donation!

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The Word comes preloaded with more than 20 skins. You can preview any skin easily, and if none suit your taste, making an entirely new skin is not just for those who have a college degree in C++, but only require altering a text file, or using a simple skin builder to create your own.

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The Word comes with many resources which you can download from the official The Word site. But that’s not all: you can find literally thousands of user-made modules or make your own and share them. Moreover, locked-modules are available for a nominal fee for commercial resources.

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