Category: Bible Study Tools

Bible Study Tools

Rumblings From a Deep Slumber

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Rumblings from out of a deep slumber at MaybeToday.org, as I turn the lights back on to note some activity… WORDsearch LifeWay this week released WORDsearch 11, which is the first major version release in almost four years. I haven’t run the new version yet, and very well may not, at least for the foreseeable future, as the marketing approach being taken ($50 for an engine-only upgrade, discounted to $40 through September) seems hard to reconcile against new product descriptions that identify a few nice-sounding but hardly game-changing improvements to w...

Bible Study Tools

WORDsearch, LifeWay, and the Future of Bible Study Software

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

It’s been a couple of months now since the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm, LifeWay, announced that they had gotten into the Bible Study Software publishing market by buying WORDsearch – a sale that included QuickVerse, which had just been bought by WORDsearch a couple months earlier. I wasn’t thrilled by either of these announcements (especially the second one), and the passing of time has not made me feel much better. As I mention in the summary of my analysis of QuickVerse, I think the sale to WORDsearch was a good thing overall for Quick...

Bible Study Tools

Updated WORDsearch Tweaks

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From the better-late-than-never department, I’ve updated my Overview of WORDsearch Bible Study software to account for version 9. I’ve also updated the customizations under the Tweaks tab: more color schemes, more Internet dictionary resources, and a minor re-work of my Bible Search Range Defaults file that works better with the new indexer engine in WS9. This can all be found here.

Bible Study Tools

WORDsearch 9 Released: Initial Impressions

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WORDsearch 9 was released Monday, roughly two years after the release of version 8. This is the third release of WORDsearch developed on the Bible Explorer platform for CROSS eBooks. Long-time WORDsearch users who have been waiting for a return of the search results management genius of the old Ref List will not find what they’re looking for, but some significant improvements have been made to version 8 nonetheless. The biggest improvement, by far, was a complete reworking of the window syncing mechanism. In the two previous iterations of WS, as in...

Bible Study Tools

Pradis Bites the Dust

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

Not exactly a big surprise coming out of Zondervan today, as they have announced plans to drop their Pradis Bible Study software. Not a big loss to the industry either, I dare say, as Pradis was pretty narrowly focused on Zondervan resources (most of which were exclusively available in Pradis format), and always struck me as more geared toward promoting the interests of Zondervan than that of the Christian community. That’s OK – no law against that – but don’t look for any tears to be shed in this poor corner of the world. Frankly...

Bible Study Tools

WORDSearch Releases HCSB Reverse-Interlinear

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WORDSearch released a reverse-interlinear based on the HCSB last week, further extending their original language capabilities with this translation. I wish I liked the HCSB better as a translation, because I really like WORDSearch as a study environment, and this looks like a very useful tool. As far as I know, this is only the 3rd interlinear commercially released in a “reversed” format, which orders the text according to the translation rather than the manuscript, making it easier for novices, in particular, to work with the interlinear tex...

Bible Study Tools

QuickVerse Bible Software Review: Searching

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

This is the first installment in a series I plan to write, performing a side-by-side assessment of WORDsearch, Logos, QuickVerse, and Pradis. QuickVerse has two tools for searching Biblical text: an Analytical Greek search tool designed to work with a morphologically tagged Greek NT module, and a general search tool used for searching English language Bible, as well as all other books – including user-created books. The most recent versions of QV introduce a couple other specialized searching tools I’ll discuss below. The Search Dialog: The g...

Bible Study Tools

Reviewing Bible Study Software

Posted on by John W Gillis / 0 Comment

One of my main goals for this site when I launched it last year was to provide assessments and comparisons of some of the Bible Study programs on the market – assessments based on what the various programs allow users to do, and how well they support those things, rather than focusing on the books available in different libraries. I haven’t gotten very far to date, having started and stopped several times, and with course work looming on the horizon for me, my schedule is not going to be getting any looser. Given that, it seems like it’s now or never to ...

Bible Study Tools

The HCSB 2nd Edition and the Tetragrammaton

Posted on by John W Gillis / 9 Comments

In between disasters and duties, I’ve been spending a bit more time looking at the new 2nd edition HCSB this week. Perhaps the most significant change from the first version is the greatly increased tendency to transliterate the Tetragrammaton (Yahweh), instead of following the standard practice among English translations of rendering it as LORD in small caps. Among major English translations, only the ASV (“Jehovah”) and the JB/NJB (“Yahweh”) have used a transliteration more than occasionally. Curiously, the HCSB does not transliterate consistently, as ...