e-Sword: Bible Study to Go

About e-Sword: Bible Study to Go

I’m a retiree who spends a lot of time reading my Bible, but my eyes aren’t what they used to be and carrying around a big study Bible gets heavy. Bob from our men’s breakfast group at First Baptist told me about e-Sword one Tuesday morning when I was complaining about my old paperback falling apart. He showed me his phone and I thought, well, that looks simple enough. I’m not good with complicated technology—my daughter has to show me how to update my Samsung Galaxy S23 every time—but this app seemed straightforward from the get-go. It’s basically a whole library of Bible stuff packed into one place. No more lugging my heavy books to Wednesday night services or trying to read tiny footnotes in the pew. I can sit on my patio with my coffee and read the same thing without squinting. The font size is easy to adjust too, which matters a lot at my age.

Core Features

The main thing I use is the different Bible translations. I grew up with the King James Version, but I also like the New Living Translation when a verse just isn’t clicking. You tap the verse number and a little menu pops up showing you other versions—it’s that simple. There’s also commentaries included, like Matthew Henry, which I used to have in a big set of books that took up a whole shelf. Now it’s right there on my phone. Dictionaries too, for looking up words like “sanctification” or “phylacteries” that you hear in church but never quite understand. You can highlight verses in different colors, which I do in yellow for verses that really speak to me. There’s a search bar at the top where you type in a word, say “grace,” and it shows every verse with that word. I used that last Friday when I was preparing my Sunday school lesson on Ephesians. It even has maps from Bible times, which helped me picture where Paul traveled during his missionary journeys. My wife said, “Look at you being all technical,” but honestly, it’s just tapping buttons.

Real-World Use

Mostly I use it at home in my recliner after dinner. That’s my quiet time, about 7:30 PM, when the news gets too depressing and I need something better to focus on. I open e-Sword on my Galaxy S23, pick a book—lately I’ve been working through Psalms—and read a chapter. Then I look at the commentary to see what the scholars say about it. The other week I was reading Psalm 23 and the commentary pointed out something about “the valley of the shadow of death” that I’d never thought of before. I wrote a note right in the app by tapping the little pencil icon, so I won’t forget it. I also use it during church service on Sundays. Our pastor goes through verses pretty fast, and instead of flipping pages in my Bible and losing my place, I just search the verse number in e-Sword and it pops up. I’ve even used it at the VA hospital waiting room last month. I was sitting there for two hours, so I read through Philippians from start to finish. No one bothered me, and the app worked fine without Wi-Fi because I downloaded everything beforehand. It made that long wait feel productive instead of frustrating.

Pricing & Value

This app isn’t free, which gave me pause at first. I think it was around $10 when I bought it, maybe a little less. For me, that’s a fair deal considering what you get. The commentaries and dictionaries are included, and you’re not paying for every single word like some of those subscription-based apps that want $15 a month. However, not everything is included. There are extra resources you can buy inside the app—special translations or advanced study tools—but I haven’t touched those. What comes with the base app has been plenty for my needs. My neighbor Bill tried a free Bible app and he says his has ads popping up all the time. There’s none of that here. It’s clean. You buy it once and it’s yours. My daughter compared it to buying a good book instead of renting a library card. That makes sense to me. For the price of two fast-food meals, I got a tool I use almost every single day.

Updates & Support

Now, I have to be honest about support because this is where it gets frustrating. A couple months ago, I had an issue where the app kept crashing whenever I tried to open the Strong’s Concordance numbers. I’m not technical enough to know why. I emailed the developer Rick Meyers through the contact form on the website. The first reply took four days, which felt like forever when I couldn’t study like normal. Then the person told me to “clear the cache” and “reinstall the app” without really explaining what those words meant. I had to call my grandson Tommy to come over and help me do it. He had it working again in five minutes, but the support experience left a bad taste. They weren’t rude, just unhelpful. Like they assumed I knew what they were talking about. For an app aimed at older folks like me, you’d think they’d give simpler instructions. I sent a follow-up email saying thanks but that wasn’t very clear, and I never got a reply back. That part disappointed me. The app itself works fine most of the time, but if something breaks, you might feel a bit on your own.

Data & Privacy

I don’t understand all this data privacy stuff, but my daughter looked at it for me because she worries about identity theft. She said the app doesn’t ask for your location or track you around the internet, which she seemed happy about. It does back up your notes and highlights to a cloud account if you set one up, but that’s optional. I never bothered because I’m old-fashioned and keep my notes on paper in a notebook too. The app doesn’t have any advertisements, so nobody’s selling your information to advertisers. That matters to me. I read in the paper about apps collecting your personal info without telling you, and that creeps me out. With e-Sword, you download it, buy it, and use it. They don’t ask for your email except when you register. I trust Rick Meyers because he’s been making Bible software for a long time, even before smartphones were a thing. My friend Bob told me he used e-Sword on his old Windows computer back in the 2000s. So they’ve got a history, and that counts for something.