Searching Footnotes in the NET Bible

I read a request last week from someone wishing for a way to search the footnotes in the NET Bible. If you’re familiar with the NET Bible, you know how valuable the notes are. While you probably normally want to see notes when you’re looking at a specific passage of Scripture, sometimes you may want to search them for particular words or phrases.

If you own one of our base packages, then it’s very likely that you have the NET Bible with notes. (The Christian Home Library is the only base package that doesn’t include the NET Bible.)

To search just the footnote text, you would want to use a field search. Simply put footnote: before the word or phrase you’d like to search for. Make sure to use the Basic Search rather than the Bible Search (or Bible Speed Search), since the Bible Search by default excludes footnotes (i.e., everything but Bible text). A search like this will return results only in the footnote text and eliminate everything else.