Greek & Hebrew word study on iPhone (LSJ, BDB)

20 June 2026

You do not need a desk full of reference volumes to study the original languages anymore — but you do need the right references, not a thin gloss. Good Greek and Hebrew word study on a phone means reaching the actual scholarly lexicons behind a verse, in a few taps, without a connection. Here is how that works in Scribe.

Step 1: Start from a tagged translation

Word study begins with a translation whose words are linked to the original languages. In Scribe, every word in the Berean Standard Bible (BSB) and the Majority Standard Bible (MSB) is tagged with its Strong’s number. Both are free, so you can do real word study without unlocking anything. (The other translations are for reading and search; the tap-a-word study runs on the BSB and MSB.)

Step 2: Tap a word to open its entry

Tap any tagged word and a study panel opens with the original Greek or Hebrew token, its transliteration, the Strong’s number with a brief gloss, and — for Hebrew — its grammatical parsing. This is the moment most apps stop — a number and a one-line definition. Scribe keeps going.

Tapping a word in Scribe opens the full scholarly definition — Liddell-Scott-Jones for Greek, Brown-Driver-Briggs for Hebrew — plus transliteration, Hebrew morphology decoded into plain English, and a concordance of every verse the Strong’s number appears in. All of it is bundled on-device and works with no connection.

Step 3: Read the real lexicon, not a summary

The difference between a casual Bible app and a study tool is whether it names its sources. Scribe puts the Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) lexicon behind Greek words and Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB) behind Hebrew — the same standard references serious software relies on — alongside the shorter TBESG and TBESH glosses for a quick read. You see the nuance a single English rendering cannot carry. This is where a Strong’s number stops being enough. Explore the word study feature in full, or the dedicated Greek & Hebrew lexicon app for iOS.

Step 4: Decode the grammar

Parsing codes like “Qal Perfect 3ms” are a wall if you have not learned them. Scribe decodes Hebrew morphology into plain English, so you can tell what the form is doing — tense, stem, person — without memorizing the abbreviations first. It is word study that meets you where you are.

Step 5: Trace the word across Scripture

A single definition is a snapshot; a concordance is the whole picture. Tap through to the concordance and Scribe lists every verse where that Strong’s number appears, so you can see how a word is used across books and authors — the classic word-study move, done on a phone, offline.

What about interlinears and AI?

Scribe shows a word-by-word interlinear on tap — the verse broken into each word with its original script, transliteration, and gloss — rather than a continuous side-by-side parallel column. (There are no readable parallel original-language Bible texts; the originals live at the word level. That includes the Greek Old Testament — the Septuagint isn’t a readable text in Scribe, though LSJ records its usage.) If you want to go further, the optional AI research assistant reasons over the passage, the Strong’s entries, and the LSJ/BDB definitions, using your own AI key (Anthropic or OpenRouter).

Putting it together

A good word-study session looks like this: read in the BSB, tap a word that carries weight, read its full LSJ or BDB entry, check the morphology, then run the concordance to see the word elsewhere — all without leaving the verse or the building’s dead zone. That is the whole point of doing it on a phone: the depth of a research platform, in your pocket, for a one-time price.