Alfred Workflow: Blue Letter Bible Search

One of my favorite Bible study tools is Blue Letter Bible, a website with access to a wide variety of Bible versions, commentaries, concordances, and dictionaries. It’s pretty much my go-to place when I want to dig deeper into a specific text.

Super Helpful Bible Study Tools

My usual workflow is to search for a passage by reference (example: Rev 2:4), and then select the verse I want to study deeper. Clicking the “Tools” link off to the side of the verse brings up a handy Interlinear study tool where I can see the Hebrew/Greek words alongside their English translation.

https://files.mttjhn.com/interlinear.png

I can dive even deeper into a specific word by clicking on the Strongs Concordance number, which provides both the definition and all of the occurrences of that word in the concordance. Super helpful!

https://files.mttjhn.com/strongsgreek.png

One final thing that I really love about Blue L etter Bible is their copy feature. I can select a handful of verses, using checkboxes, and then press the copy button on the site. This puts a nicely-formatted version of the text in my clipboard, based on the “Copy Options” I defined.

https://files.mttjhn.com/copyfeature.png

I usually have my settings configured with no verse numbers and a simple reference at the end in parentheses. For example:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16 ESV” >}}

Workflow Automation To The Rescue

As you can see, this is a powerful website - lots of very useful Bible study tools available for free! The only gripe is that searching feels cumbersome. I need to open a browser, type in the site URL, then find the search, look up my reference, and then change to my Bible version of choice, which is usually ESV.

Just this weekend, I did some poking around on their site to see if it’s possible to do all of that simply from a URL call. Turns out that it’s possible! This means I can use Alfred, my favorite automation tool on my Mac, to run a quick workflow that will open a Blue Letter Bible search automatically (for a Bible reference or a word), using the ESV by default.

https://files.mttjhn.com/blbsearch.png

I’m already using this workflow a ton, and I’m still amazed that it only took me about 2 minutes to create! If you’d like to try it out, feel free to download it on GitHub.