✡ HaRishon BaChidon – the first app for the Jewish Bible Contest (Chidon HaTanach), and it's free!
Love the Tanakh? Studying for the Bible Contest? Preparing for a Bible proficiency exam? Writing quiz questions?
This app brings together everything you need to build your knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, test it, and enjoy the journey.
Please note: the Bible text and the questions are in Hebrew. The app's menus are available in Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Russian and German.
What's inside?
• Random Verse – the app draws a verse and you identify the book, the chapter or the weekly portion. There is no small pool of repeating questions: any verse can come up. Show only half a verse, hide the names of people and places, or shake the device for a new verse.
• Complete Verse – get a verse with missing words, or half a verse up to the etnachta, and fill in the rest. Both full and defective spellings are accepted, and so are Qere and Ketiv.
• Complete Chapter – the same idea for a whole chapter, for memorizing familiar material.
• Multiple Choice Questions – four answers per question, refreshed every week and filtered by your study material.
• Open Questions – a collection of questions with detailed answers, including questions contributed by users.
• Pair Matching – pick a list from the Bible (for example, the tribes and the spies) and drag each item to its match.
• Pyramid Crossword – a Bible crossword whose rows grow longer from the top to the base.
• Biblical Names – choose a letter and a gender and get the names with all their sources.
• Browse the Bible – comfortable reading of the Torah, Prophets and Writings, by weekly portion and Haftarah, including Shnayim Mikra Ve'echad Targum with Targum Onkelos. Show or hide vowels and cantillation marks, choose the Qere reading only, and change the font and its size.
• Lexicographic Sorting – the verses you chose, sorted alphabetically, with export to PDF.
• Bible recordings, a page of links and study aids for contestants, and an updates channel on Telegram.
Study material (Mikud)
Not all of the Bible is included in the contest. On the Material screen you choose exactly which books and chapters are in, and the choice applies to every game and question. You can also load a ready-made selection for the youth and adult contests and their stages.
A search engine like no other
A concordance in your pocket, for question writers and contestants:
• Search with vowels and cantillation marks, using a built-in symbol bar – no special keyboard needed. Type, add vowels, copy and paste anywhere.
• Regular expressions with simple signs: word boundary, start and end of a verse, any word, any letter, alternatives, repetitions and back-references.
• Search by Hebrew root (√קדש), by number (#127) and by date (📅 10 Tishrei, or a whole month in chronological order).
• Equidistant letter sequences, acronyms and final-letter acronyms.
• First and last letter – a verse that begins with the first letter of your name and ends with its last, to say at the end of the Amidah prayer.
• Verse for an invitation – a verse with your name hidden in it, for a Bar/Bat Mitzvah or wedding invitation.
• Search the whole Bible or only your study material, with highlighted results, a jump to the full chapter, statistics, search history, copying, sharing a search as a link and exporting the results to a file.
• A detailed search guide in which every example can be tapped.
And more
• A main screen you can rearrange by dragging.
• The app is free and contains ads. You can remove them with a one-time purchase, or get ad-free time by watching a rewarded ad.
• Also available for iPhone, in the browser and for Windows.
All for the sake of preparing for the contest and delighting in the Torah, the Prophets and the Writings, in the words of King David:
"Unless Your Torah had been my delight, I would have perished in my affliction." (Psalms 119:92)