Vale BibleWorks

In case you haven’t heard, and you’re interested in Bible software (which means you probably have heard, but anyway), BibleWorks has ceased operations as of 15th June, except for supporting BW10 with compatibility updates. I’d like to commiserate with other users who will miss BibleWorks, and are now left with two main paid rivals for serious Bible study in the original languages, Accordance and Logos, along with alternatives like the free StepBible, which I like to use for quick student study tasks in the classroom, because it will do everything needed at that level, and students can take their understanding of the tool home and use it straight away without a major financial investment. But it is not sufficiently developed to act as the main Bible study tool for me, and I have been purely a BibleWorks user for about 18 years now, opting not to even venture into the Logos cosmopolis. Accordance is attractive to me, but became an option later in that it was originally tailored for the Apple universe, and I’ve dwelt in the Windows one. What I’ll miss most is having a package devoted to primary text study, rather than to the assembly of a suite of secondary resources that, I have observed, can often be overpriced in the two rivals’ offerings, or else sometimes represent resources that can be found cheaply or freely elsewhere. BibleWorks stuck to what it was good at, and though a little dated in appearance and involving a learning curve before its full power could be unleashed, is lean and lightning quick in its sweet spot of textual search functions.

So, where to from here? I can imagine that new, imaginative digital solutions will and probably already have appeared for serious biblical study. There are some nichy options, like the sophisticated analysis tool for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, Shebanq, and its associated HB/OT text analyzer, Bible online learner, which is fantastic for grammatical and syntactical analysis. For other such tools, see my Pinterest page on digital tools for Bible study and another focused on biblical Hebrew. Yet the Big Three were the main options for heavy-duty study in the original languages, and BibleWorks’ demise leaves the bulk of the field to Logos and Accordance. I will be keeping my BibleWorks 9 running as long as possible, having baulked at a US$200 upgrade for little else than insurance that I will get those compatibility updates, and then will eventually have to shell out for one of the others. I hope that’s ten years from now, at least. I’ve invested heavily in using the notes function of BibleWorks, to the level of a quasi-commentary on a lot of the chapters of the OT. But those notes files, despite their .bww extension, are simply rich text files, and easily cross-compatible, so they won’t be lost. For fellow BibleWorks users wanting to make the jump to either Logos or Accordance sooner rather than later, there is good, compact advice about this over on the Bible and Tech blog.

A Second Interlude: Back to Digital Bibles

The test case for online Bible tools that I floated in my last post was, which freely available tool caters well for the Septuagint (LXX, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament) reader? I’m imagining the reader (easy, because it’s me) who can read the Greek reasonably well but has a knowledge of Greek birthed in the New Testament and will often not recognize LXX-only Greek terminology, or words familiar in classical Greek but missing from the New Testament. The pricey tools, Logos, Accordance and BibleWorks (best value, in my biased opinion), provide such helps in spades, but what’s there for the ordinary punter not yet ready to splash out to the extent of many hundreds of dollars in order to read the Bible on his/her tablet in the original languages?

I can reaffirm from further looking what I said in my last post. It looks as though you cannot get a free tool that offers definitions and parsing for all of the words in the LXX for just a click or hover. Tools like Step Bible and MySword offer ready access to roots available in the old Strongs dictionary for NT Greek words. But a fully tagged Septuagint in a cheap or free Android or Windows app or online, I can’t find.

But here are a couple of handy workarounds.

• I remembered that Tyndale’s http://www.2letterlookup.com/ is really quite a quick and handy way to look up biblical roots in original languages, hooking in to all the old-but-good lexica such as Liddell, Scott and Jones. Works very well indeed for the triliteral roots of Hebrew. Greek, however, is not so simple, since so many Greek roots incorporate common prefixes like ‘epi’, ‘pros’ and such like and so open with the same pair of letters, leaving you to look through hopelessly long lists of words. This is helped by a graphical bar diagram that appears once you click a lexicon link under a word listing. It looks like this (below, for the lexicon known as ‘Middle Liddell’)…but for common prefixes, it’s still just too cumbersome.

• Better is a solution that was staring me in the face from my Android tablet the whole time. Open up the Bible app of your choice; I’d recommend one that has really attractive Greek typeface in the LXX. I found Blue Letter Bible and Academic Bible really good this way, and in the latter case, you’re getting the text of a recent, critical edition. Just double-click on the mystery word/form and your tablet offers you a Google search on the term. I was thinking that with the language barrier involved it would never yield meaningful results, but I was wrong. We live in Unicode World now, where you can move digitally from one language to another with ease. Every search on a Greek term brings up meaningful search results. Admittedly, some of them are modern Greek web pages that still use the term in question. But nearly every search I did brought up the form, fully parsed and defined, in the Perseus Greek word study tool, which is absolutely the best online tool since sliced virtual bread for this kind of thing, and an old favourite of mine. (It’s not working as smoothly on my Windows PC as I write this, but it’s the tablet where I was looking for a good solution in any case.) And it’s quick, quick enough not to lose momentum while reading.

I should mention that I’ve been corresponding with David Instone-Brewer, the head sherang at Step Bible, who tells me that a fully tagged Septuagint is well into preparation by the Tyndale crew (see the Tyndale Tech blog), so I encourage you to keep checking the Step Bible tool regularly. It keeps getting better, and will no doubt have this cracked before long.

Digital Document Detective, Interlude: Online Bibles and Their Limits

My new task for this and subsequent years is to read the Septuagint (LXX), the Greek translation of the Old Testament that forms the basis of so much New Testament teaching and gospel proclamation. But I have wanted to get my technology right first. My question has been:

Can I find an online bible, or better, a downloadable app, that would provide parsing of difficult Greek terms in the Septuagint, with root definitions?

Out of the ‘big three’ Bible software universes, Logos, Accordance and BibleWorks, I made my choice a long time ago, more or less in ignorance, of going with BibleWorks. I don’t regret it, either, primarily in value-for-money terms, where I think BibleWorks really excels. Logos does many, many things well, but is chiefly for the building of a large, digital library of secondary sources. I feel a little intimidated by how much it seems to cost, and continues to cost, and feel as if it’s the Hotel California of Bible software. You can check out any time you like, but you’ll receive promotional emails practically forever. Accordance would tempt me more now, but I have always been a Windoze user and it was once a Mac thing, so the die was cast. Oh, and my devices now are Android, and I move in Google and Microsoft online spaces.

So what is out there that might let me, rather than booting up my PC proper to read the Septuagint of a morning, just boot up my tablet and browse the Septuagint, but get help with those rarer or forgotten Greek words I need definitions for, and occasionally, parsing?