Bible Search

Full-text Bible search and reading in a first-class Obsidian view. A setup wizard downloads public-domain translations, builds a searchable page from your vault, and opens it in a pane — no terminal, no build step, no extra tooling.

Works on desktop and mobile.

What it does

• Search the whole Bible from a pane. Click the book icon in the ribbon, type a phrase, jump to the verse. Results link straight back to the note in your vault.
• Sets itself up on first run. The wizard asks where the search page should live and which translations you want, downloads them, builds the index, and opens it.
• Survives interruptions. If a download is cut short by a quit, a sleep, or a dropped connection, the next launch picks up exactly where it stopped. A single bad chapter is recorded and skipped, not fatal.
• Adopts an existing setup silently. If the search page is already in the vault — a second device, a restored sync, a re-install — the plugin adopts it without showing you anything. Only genuinely empty installs see the wizard.
• Follows your theme. The view re-syncs when Obsidian's theme changes.

Install

From the community store (once approved): Settings → Community plugins → Browse → search "Bible Search" → Install → Enable.

Manually: download main.js, manifest.json, and styles.css from the latest release into <your vault>/.obsidian/plugins/bible-search/, then enable the plugin in Settings → Community plugins.

Getting started

On first run the wizard opens automatically. It asks for:

1. Where the search page lives — defaults to Bible Search.html at the vault root.
2. Which translations to download — KJV and BSB are pre-selected, WEB is optional. All three are public domain.

Downloading takes a few minutes per translation. When it finishes, the search page is built and opened.

Re-run it any time from the command palette:

Command	What it does
Bible Search: Run setup wizard	Re-runs the wizard (add translations, move the page)
Bible Search: Open search	Opens the search view
Bible Search: Rebuild search index	Rebuilds the page after editing vault content

Network use

This plugin makes network requests to exactly two hosts, both only during setup or a rebuild — never in the background, never on a schedule:

Host	What for
bible.helloao.org	Downloads the Bible text you selected in the wizard (Free Use Bible API)
raw.githubusercontent.com	Fetches the search-page template, only if your vault doesn't already have Bible/bible-search-template.html

No telemetry, no analytics, no account, and nothing is sent anywhere. Downloaded text is written into your vault as ordinary Markdown notes that you own.

Translations and licensing

The wizard only offers translations that are public domain: KJV, BSB (public domain since 2023), and WEB.

Copyrighted translations — ESV, NLT, AMP and most modern versions — licence passage quotation, not whole-Bible storage. They are deliberately not offered for download. If you hold the rights to a translation's full text, the plugin's in-app guide (in Settings) shows the exact note format to add it yourself.

Do not share a built search page from a vault containing copyrighted translations — the page embeds the full text. Each person should build their own from their own vault, which is what the wizard is for.

The full vault

This plugin is the search half of a larger starter kit. If you want the whole thing — the Bible note structure, the search-page template, the Node importer, and a Teaching article layout — see scripture-vault.

Credits

• Bible text: bible.helloao.org (Free Use Bible API)

Licence

MIT — see LICENSE.

That licence covers the plugin code only. Bible text downloaded by the plugin, and any translation you import yourself, are covered by their own licences — see Translations and licensing above.