|
|
 - One of the best for the linguistic study of the BibleBibleWorks is the premier software for the serious linguistic study of the Scriptures. Comes with Greek, Hebrew, and Septuagint Bibles, as well as translations in English, German, Spanish, and many other languages! This is the best of the best for serious Bible Study of the Masoretic text of the Old Testament. I have been a loyal BibleWorks customer for years, since version 3.x, and have routinely found their support to be excellent whenever I needed assistance. Rating:  - BW a good program but in need of more extra-biblical textsI first purchased a Bible Works program back in about 1996. I have used it very much since then and still do use it. However, I gave up on customer support very early on, after a few months of trying to contact them. Service was very lousy back then so I had to learn the program on my own and still feel somewhat limited. I'm told the service is better now. What I'd like to see in future versions (which I hope would be upgradable from the most recent one) are more primary source documents outside of the Bible. This newer version is a major improvement from my old Bible Works 95. It still has the Masoretic, the LXX and the "Standard Text" of the NT as well as the Majority Text. And it now has the Targums (fully lemmatized which is awesome) but no English translations (which makes my life rather difficult as my knowledge of Aramaic is fairly limited), the Qumran scrolls (well, sort of - they need to be purchased separately in order to read them), Josephus (Niese's outdated text) and Philo in Greek and English, the Apostolic Fathers in Gk and Eng and a few other important documents. I'd like to see more texts added in the future, in their original or extant languages: e.g. the Book of Jubilees (in Greek and Hebrew), Enoch (in Greek and Aramaic), the Testaments of the twelve Patriarchs (in Greek and Hebrew), perhaps some of the important texts of Ugarit, Akkadia and Babylon, the Gospel of Thomas, the Protoevangelion of James, texts from the early Fathers (beyond the Apostolic Fathers, e.g. Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alex, etc.). Or it would also be nice to have the texts of authors contemporary with the NT such as Epictetus and the papyri of the first and second centuries BC and AD. If disc or hard drive space is too limited for some of these extras, Bibleworks could easily dispense with some of the unhelpful commentaries, sermons and other such things which don't really help in ones pursuit of strict biblical studies. Those sorts of resources are available in any number of places and don't need to clutter up a program like Bible Works which is apparently designed for work in biblical studies. I'm very impressed that the Liddell-Scott and the Gingrich dictionaries have been added, as have some other Greek and Hebrew dictionaries. It would be amazing if they added a Latin auto-parser in the future as well as an auto-parser for Aramaic that is not limited to biblical words. Rating: - Love to use this software for bible research & studyI use BibleWorks 7.0 professionally, pretty much on a daily basis. I would not want to operate without it. There are other great programs out there, but this is the one I find myself using over and over. The others sit on the shelf unused in my office. Many years ago I bought BibleWorks 3.5 and a competitive Windows based program. I ran identical searches with both programs. I found they gave different answers. Then I discovered the BibleWorks competitor had a big problem running complex searches accurately. It was disclosed in their readme.txt, but even their sales people didn't know about the bug. I ended up using BibleWorks instead. That was version 3.5 or so. The difference today in improvements over my old BibleWorks program is akin to the difference between a Model T and a Cadillac. Today's Bible Works is so much better it's amazing. I have watched the BibleWorks people roll out several versions. They always add an overwhelming list of new features that make the upgrades a sweet deal for anyone. Some of the new things in BW 7.0 (just released this year) include a newly finished diagram for every verse in the NT. All of the steps that Gordon Fee suggests in his NT Exegesis book (get it if you don't have it) are now possible in this software. I use a checklist from his book and work through it with BW 7.0 open, a word processor, and an internet browser. Everything is very intuitive. They offer training courses around the nation (see their website for dates/locations). Those courses are helpful. If you are working on a passage, you can pull up multiple versions and paste them into a word processer for formatting and printing. This allows you to highlight either in the software or with a real highlighter on your paper. You can easily mix Greek with English...and if you have people like I do who are not really good at English, paste in the Russian, Spanish, French or whatever language they need....and you can provide printed text for them to read. This can be done in seconds. The program is flexible, and easy to use. The fastest way for us to print out our Sunday Worship Service text for reading is to use BibleWorks. I pull up the program, enter the version and the reference. Paste it into my Word Processor or drag it there..and click print. One of the things that Gordon Fee (Exegesis expert) recommends is for students to diagram their text. The new diagramming canvass is great. Just insert the text. Drag and drop it into place and drag the symbols for diagramming to where they belong. That's it. For comparison, BW 7.0 now includes diagrams for every verse. If you have kids in school, they can use it for diagramming English as well-which can give them a professional look in high school papers/class assignments. With a click of the mouse you can search the lemma (root) of a word in Greek or Hebrew from Genesis to Revelation (LXX & GNT). Or Hebrew OT only. You can do almost any kind of search. I own the major competitors to this program. To use Gramcord you have to own a Mac or you can install a program that simulates Mac Operating system on your computer. The Mac feel to Gramcord has a very archaic feel to it and I never got used to it. I cannot tell if Logos is currently accurate in it's searches, so I don't know if you can trust that program to produce correct results. I've found that BibleWorks is a great program for my use. Some other things you can do: Look up all major lexicons on a word in a few seconds. Paste the results into your word processor embedded where-ever you want. Basically, you can quickly do exhaustive word studies. You can outline a passage in a word processor. Add in whatever you want and blog the results, print it or save it to your computer. You can highlight anything in any color, size or shape. Just drag, pull down the menu you want and that's it. Let me talk a bit about the BibleWorks people. They seem to have a 'we can do it' attitude. They work hard and add new features and improve existing ones. Years ago I was one of their customers who asked for diagramming. Now it is reality. And it's slick. If you are studying a passage and you are not up on all the Greek words...you can click on the flashcard module. It pulls up the passage and drills you on the words you don't know. You can configure everything on it from the amount of time a word is displayed to the fonts used or the actual definition. With BW7.0 you can compile your own version of the bible. This allows one also to have other books besids the bible added in. There are user provided modules online that include a ton of documents. Plus, the Apostolic Fathers in Greek is now available. This means you can see exactly how a word is used by the disciples of the apostles and other early church fathers. Users have added tons of other ancient books, some seem to be worth having. I now have hundreds of books in my computer freely contributed through the work of many BibleWorks users who maintain a free unofficial blog service that allows users to download hundreds of ancient books...books I've heard of and always wanted, and many books I never knew existed...apocryphal books, apocalyptic literature and a variety of language and historically vital resources. There new volumes being added all the time and the BW users who manage that entire effort are very helpful if you have a problem. That feature would cost thousands of dollars on Logos. It's all free in BW (but is not currently officially supported...it does work just fine from my experience). There are so many features in this program that I cannot review them all. I don't have time to get into the search engine and it's rich feature list. It's great. Help is right there. The resource center has a wide array of resources. It includes things like Zerwick's analysis, Word Pictures by Robertson and many other classic resources...all built in for your convenience. There are grammar paradigms/forms for refreshing the memory of almost every greek student who walked the face of the earth. Let me say this too...I took a class early this year at Wheaton College Graduate School. In the class I discovered they had a special exegetical process that included atypical symbols. With a quick check on the forum for bibleworks, I found an answer from another user that enabled me to use BW 7.0 for a customized exegetical process. Color coding and special insert symbols. It is fantastically flexible. I would not want to function without this program. Another great feature is the flashcard module now has Erasmus or Modern Greek pronunciation for each word! So if you want to learn Modern Greek pronuniation, you are off to a start for a trip to Greece because 70% of biblical Greek is used in Modern Greek. To see this, all you have to do is pull up a passage of Modern Greek and the GNT original and do a side by side highlighted comparison. That's another slick feature on this program. I'm skipping perhaps a couple hundred features and this is a pretty long article already. Perhaps the best thing about BibleWorks 7.0 is that the users forum hosted by BibleWorks has a lot of knowledgeable and active members. Almost anything you can imagine has been asked and answered about this program. For those who are new to professional grade exegesis software, there are detailed tutorials explaining every movement of the mouse. You can review them over and over until you know your stuff...or just jump in like I do. It's fairly intuitive if you have any computer sense. Once it gets beyond your insight, the user forum is excellent. Many very knowledgeable and helpful guys on there. I also have found that the grammars included in BibleWorks are helpful. For example, Futato's Hebrew grammar is built into BW and is so good that I am learning Hebrew primarily from that book digitally integrated into BW. The flashcard module allows me to drill myself in Hebrew words too. It's wonderfully simple and very helpful. The grammar even pronounces words for me by clicking on the sound icon next to words. Go for BW 7.0. You won't be sorry. Let me know you saw this review. I will help you as much as I can. Hope to see you in the BibleWorks forum. Rating: - M.D. SandersI have been a BibleWorks user since version 4 and have always been amazed with the commitment that the programmers have to making the program meet the needs of the users. They have an ongoing commitment to correcting bugs that might come up and have proven customer service in such situations. There is a very broad range of reference tools that are included in the 'standard' program, these tools can only be appreciated as you use the progam and become aware of the ease with which you can do multiple things while at the same time doing very basic searches or doing very specific grammatical searches. I admit I have personaly just scratched the surface of the power of this program, mainly due to my lack of a knowledge of the languages and just because of insufficient time. The designers have not only made the program capable of making vocabulary flash cards but they have included many grammar and language tools to actually help the user teach themselves the biblical languages. The resources have been made even easier to access in version seven by the use of tabs which quickly uncover many standard tools and some new additions to the program. If you want to do serious study in the biblical languages and possibly compare many various translations you can do that with much greater speed with BibleWorks.
|
