Guide

Getting started

Tiqvah is 100% free: no account, no ads, no tracking. It draws the Bible’s cross-references as arcs. Each arc joins two passages that a reader, editor or scholar has judged to be connected — by a shared word, a quotation, an allusion, a theme or a person.

In three minutes

1. Look. Along the bottom, every small bar is one chapter, from Genesis 1 at the left to Revelation 22 at the right. Taller bars have more verses.
2. Hover. Move over the bars. The threads of that chapter brighten and the rest fade.
3. Click. Click a chapter to read it in the panel on the right. Click any verse to see what it points to (gold) and what points to it (blue).
4. Follow. Click an entry in either list to travel along that thread. Use the arrow keys to step through verses.
5. Focus. Open the Lens on the left to filter what is drawn. Every control has an ⓘ that explains it.

Reading the picture

Bars are chapters. The coloured underline beneath each book name shows its historical era. The red vertical line marks the start of the New Testament.

Arcs are cross-references. An arc’s height grows with the distance between the passages, so short arcs link nearby passages and the great outer arcs link Genesis to Revelation.

Brightness adds up where arcs overlap: bright regions are passages that many threads pass through. The Luminance slider changes the overall brightness.

What “connected” means depends on the source you choose: OpenBible’s links are rated by thousands of readers; the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge reflects 19th-century editorial judgement.

Exploring

• Zoom with the mouse wheel or trackpad; pan by dragging; double-click or press 0 to reset the zoom. Zoom far enough in and you can select individual verses.
• Layout: switch between Arc, Circle, Timeline and Sunflower (press C to cycle, T for Timeline, S for Sunflower). The Sunflower arranges every verse like sunflower seeds along golden-angle spirals, Genesis at the centre and Revelation at the rim, giving small books as much room per verse as large ones.
• Journey (J) follows the strongest unvisited thread every six seconds, leaving a gold trail — a way to see how passages chain together.
• Search (/) accepts references in any interface language (John 3:16, Juan 3:16, 约翰福音 3:16) or words to search in the current translation.
• Links: the address bar always records the current view. Copy it to return to exactly the same filters and selection.

The reading panel

When you select a chapter or verse, the panel on the right shows its text, its dates and era, and its cross-references.

Translations

Choose a translation from the menu. Eleven public-domain translations in several languages are included. The ESV, NIV, NLT and CSB are copyrighted: they load a chapter at a time from their publishers’ official services. Click the key button to add a free key (ESV from api.esv.org; NIV and CSB from API.Bible; the NLT works without one). Keys are stored only in your browser.

Hebrew and Greek

On a verse, switch to the Hebrew or Greek tab to see the original text word by word, with an English gloss and Strong’s number. Select a word to see its lexical form, parsing, definition, and every verse where it occurs. Linked passages that use this word shows which of the verse’s cross-references share the same Hebrew or Greek word — a quick way to test whether a connection is verbal or thematic.

Topics

If the verse appears in OpenBible’s topical index, its topics are listed as chips; click one to open that topic.

The Lens: filtering what you see

• Canon order — Protestant, Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Septuagint, Catholic or Orthodox. The arcs rearrange; deuterocanonical books appear as red bars you can read (the cross-reference datasets do not cover them).
• Layout — Arc, Circle, Timeline or Sunflower.
• Dates — Events, Traditional authorship or Critical scholarship. Affects the timeline, era colours and time gaps.
• Colour by — distance, origin, testament, consensus, era, time gap or source.
• Scope — whole Bible, only links between the testaments, or within one testament.
• Genre — restrict to Law, Prophets, Gospels, Epistles and so on, at the citing end, the cited end, either or both.
• Source — OpenBible, the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, both, where they agree, or what only one of them has.
• Consensus — the minimum number of OpenBible reader votes. Raise it to keep only well-supported links.
• Reset — restore every setting.

The number under the Lens counts the threads currently drawn. Everything else — analysis, exports, citations — uses exactly these threads.

Timeline and dating

The Timeline layout places each book at its approximate date instead of its canonical position. The coloured band shows historical eras; the stacked strips below are the books.

Three dating systems are available under Dates:

• Events — when the narrative or message is set (e.g. Exodus in the 15th century BC on the conventional chronology).
• Traditional — composition according to traditional authorship (e.g. Moses for the Pentateuch, Daniel in the 6th century BC).
• Critical — the final-form composition dates most common in critical scholarship (e.g. the Pentateuch in the Persian period, Daniel c. 165 BC, the Pastoral Letters after Paul).

Switching between them is a quick way to see how a dating hypothesis changes the direction of dependence: under critical dates, some “later texts citing earlier ones” reverse. All dates are approximate ranges; scholarly notes appear in the reading panel.

Comparing sources

Two cross-reference datasets are included:

• OpenBible.info — 344,799 links, each with reader votes (CC BY). Largely derived from the Treasury, then rated by readers.
• Treasury of Scripture Knowledge — about 377,000 links compiled in the 19th century (public domain). No ratings.

Use Agree for links both datasets contain, or OpenBible only / TSK only to study their differences. Colour by → Source shows all three categories at once. Reference lists in the reading panel mark TSK links with a TSK tag.

Names, map and topics

Two views of the 2,539 people and places named in the KJV, inspired by the companion graphics Harrison and Römhild made alongside their arc diagram. The Name Constellation links names that share a verse, so related people and places cluster together. Names Across Scripture places each name where it appears from Genesis to Revelation. Select a name to see where it occurs, the names it appears with, and its verses. Note that different people with the same name (for example the several Johns) share one node.

The Map plots 1,335 biblical places using OpenBible’s geocoding. Red dots are confident identifications; grey are uncertain. Select a place to list its verses, mark them on the arcs, or open the same name in the Name Constellation.

Topics opens OpenBible’s topical index of 6,713 subjects. Choose a topic to list its highest-scoring verses or mark them on the arcs.

Analysis for research

The Analysis dialog computes network statistics from the threads currently drawn. Choose Chapters or Books as the unit.

• The Web of Books — a 66 × 66 matrix of how often each book cites each other. Click a cell to draw only those threads.
• Centrality — PageRank (how much a chapter is cited by other well-cited chapters), betweenness (how often it bridges others) and weighted in/out links. Click a column heading to sort; click a row to open that chapter.
• Clusters — groups of chapters more tightly linked to each other than to the rest (Louvain method), with the modularity score. Mark a cluster on the arcs to see its shape.
• Genres — a table of how threads flow between genres.

Download the full table as CSV, or export GraphML from Cite & export for further work in Gephi, Cytoscape, R or Python. Methods are described under the ⓘ.

Citing and exporting

Cite & export gathers everything needed to use a view in a paper, thesis, dissertation or lecture:

• Permanent link reproducing the exact view.
• Figure caption describing the filters, source and dating in words.
• SBL footnote and bibliography, APA references and BibTeX entries for the datasets, the original visualization and this view.
• A methods paragraph stating data sources, counts, versification and filters.
• Images: PNG, print-resolution PNG, and editable SVG with legend and caption.
• Data: CSV of every thread drawn; GraphML networks of chapters or books.

Research workflows

Old Testament background of a New Testament passage

Search for the passage, set Scope → OT ↔ NT, and raise Consensus. The gold list shows the Old Testament texts it points to. Open the Greek tab and check which links share vocabulary.

How firm is a connection?

Set Source → Agree to keep only links found in both datasets, then compare with TSK only. Check vote counts and shared Hebrew/Greek words.

Following a word

In the Hebrew or Greek tab, select a word (for example חֶסֶד or λόγος) and choose Mark on the arcs. Then colour by era or switch to the Timeline to see its spread.

Prophets and Gospels

Under Genre, select Major Prophets, Minor Prophets and Gospels with Both ends. Open Analysis → Centrality to see which chapters carry the most weight, then export the figure and methods paragraph.

Dating hypotheses

Switch Dates between Traditional and Critical with Colour by → Time gap and the Timeline layout to see which intertextual relationships change direction.

Data, licences and limits

• Cross-references: OpenBible.info (CC BY); Treasury of Scripture Knowledge via CrossWire (public domain). Links reflect editorial and reader judgement, not proof of literary dependence.
• Versification follows the King James Version. A few translations and the Hebrew/Greek texts number some verses differently; these are aligned as closely as possible.
• Hebrew and Greek: STEPBible.org / Tyndale House, Cambridge (CC BY 4.0). Verses absent from the critical Greek text (for example Acts 8:37) show no Greek words.
• Dates are approximate and many are disputed.
• Names: Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary matched against the KJV; people who share a name are merged.
• Places and topics: OpenBible.info (CC BY 4.0); place identifications vary in certainty. Base map: Natural Earth (public domain).
• Deuterocanonical books: World English Bible (public domain); no cross-reference data.
• Licensed translations (ESV, NIV, NLT, CSB) are not stored by Tiqvah and are subject to their publishers’ terms.

Inspiration and credits

Tiqvah was inspired by Bible Cross-References by Chris Harrison and Pastor Christoph Römhild (2007), whose arc diagram of 63,779 cross-references showed the Bible’s interconnection in a single image. Their companion graphics of biblical people and places inspired the Name Constellation and Names Across Scripture views.

The name Tiqvah (תִּקְוָה) means both “cord” — the scarlet cord of Joshua 2:18 — and “hope”.

Keyboard, language and theme

• / search · C cycle layout · T timeline · J journey · R reset · L light or dark · G guide
• ← → previous or next chapter or verse · 0 reset zoom · Esc close or clear

Choose the interface language from the globe menu; book names and search follow it. The sun button switches between the dark and light themes.