In the early years of the Crystal Palace, Grove devoted much of his leisure time to Biblical scholarship. Discovering that there was no full concordance of the proper names in the Bible, Grove, helped by his wife, began work in 1853 making a complete index of each occurrence of every proper name in the Bible, including the Apocrypha. Between 1860 and 1863, Grove was assistant editor to Sir William Smith in a comprehensive Bible dictionary, contributing more than a thousand pages. Some entries written by Grove, such as that on the prophet Elijah, were equivalent almost to book-length. He visited the Holy Land in 1859 and 1861, and helped to found the Palestine Exploration Fund, of which he became honorary secretary, labouring incessantly on its behalf. The Archbishop of York said that Grove was "virtually the founder and institutor of the Society, and has done wonders for it throughout." Grove later observed, "People will insist on thinking of me as a musician, which I really am not in the very least degree. I took quite as much interest in my investigations into the natural features and the little towns of Palestine which I did for "Smith's Dictionary of the Bible" or for Arthur Stanley's "Sinai and Palestine," as I did for Beethoven and Mendelssohn, indeed perhaps more so."