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library.dts.edu
Turpin Library, Dallas Theological Seminary
"Providing Information for Christian Ministry & Scholarship"
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Bible Study Tools OnlineQuick LinksPick one of these frequently used links . . . . . . or read the analysis and recommendations below to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of various resources. Introduction and OverviewTwo categories of electronic bible study aids are listed here: online web sites and offline personal computer programs. The online web sites enable you to search English, Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible. Most tie at least one English translation to Strong's numbers to aid lookup by Greek and Hebrew word. Most provide hot links to dictionaries, commentaries and various reference works of some kind. And all of this is free. These web sites are useful for Bible study but they have some real limitations. The search engines do not support proximity searching or grammatical searching. Because of copyright and data-input constraints, the "libraries" of reference works are tiny collections of antiquated works. There are no free web sites that support sophisticated grammatical searching of the bible or that provide access to a significant number of modern scholarly theological reference works (but note Perseus web site provides free access to some important scholarly Greek tools). In contrast, several offline personal computer programs offer stellar search engines and useful collections of substantial scholarly literature. But of course you must buy and install the programs and their associated reference libraries. Expect to pay several hundred dollars for biblical texts and modern scholarly lexicons/dictionaries. Expect to pay several thousand dollars to amass a digital reference library. See the descriptions of Logos/Libronix, BibleWorks, and Accordance below. Bible Study Tools Online (on the web)StudyLight.orgStudyLight allows you to search and display over 20 English Bible translations, including the NRSV, Holman CSB, and NASB, but not NIV or ESV. KJV and NAS are keyed to Strong's numbers. Once you search/display KVJ or NAS then you can also display the BHS Hebrew text, the NA26 Greek text, and Rhalfs Septuagint. There is an easy to use interlinear display option. The Greek and Hebrew texts are lemmatized and morphologically analyzed; grammatical parsing is available verse by verse. (Don't assume the morphological analysis is accurate.) StudyLight offers a Greek lexicon and a Hebrew lexicon, also keyed to Strong's numbers. So it is very easy for someone with no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew to move from an English Bible to the underlying Greek or Hebrew words, to search by Greek or Hebrew lemma, and to lookup definitions in the lexicons. The software assumes the user will first search an English text and then move to the Greek or Hebrew. Software does not comfortably accommodate searches that begin with the original texts. You must use StudyLight's (free) fonts to see Greek and Hebrew characters. Vowel points and accents do not display by default. The search engine is adequate for basic needs. You may search for exact phrase (delimited by quotation marks) or word combinations using logical operators (AND, OR, NOT). Logical operators apply to verses boundaries, not sentences or paragraphs. For example, grace AND mercy retrieves only verses that have both words. The asterisk (*) is a terminal wild card (as in demon* to match demon, demons, demoniac, etc.) The search engine lacks some standard features. Parentheses cannot be used to order search sets. Grammatical searches are not supported. For example, it is not possible to search for aorist imperatives in Corinthians. It is not possible to specify word proximity (this word witin 4 words of that word) or word order (except you may search for exact phrases). Online help about search operator precedence was incorrect as of May 2003. The most surprising shortcoming is that OR takes precedence over AND. This is unconventional and yields unexpected results, as illustrated in the following searches of the NABS NT.
Some reference works and commentaries are indexed by bible passage, and whenever you display a bible passage in any translation or version, access to the relevant portions of these reference works is just a single click away. Available reference works include a Greek lexicon abridged from Thayer’s Lexicon (1889?), a Hebrew lexicon abridged from BDB(1907), ISBE (1915 ed.), Smith's Bible Dictionary (ca 1900 one vol abridg. of 1868 orig.), Easton's bible dictionary (ca 1890), Nave's topical listing of verses (1896?), Torrey's Topical Textbook (1897?), Treasure of Scripture Knowledge cross reference list and a few others. StudyLight also includes a few commentary sets: Adam Clarke (ca 1825), Abbott Illustrated NT (1878), John Gill's exposition (1771?), Matthew Henry (1706; based on 6 vol ed.), Barne's Notes on the New Testament (1832), Robertson's Word Pictures (1933), Wesley's Explanatory Notes (1765) and others. These same works are available at many other websites. BibleStudyTools at Crosswalk.comBST is very similar to StudyLight. Use the "Interlinear Bible" tool to search and display the same Greek and Hebrews texts (NA26 and BHS, both morophologically analyzed and lemmatized), the same lexicons (abridged Thayer and BDB), approximately the same English translations, reference works, commentaries, etc., that StudyLight has. BST has a few modern resources you will not see at StudyLight, most notably Baker's Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology. Use the free BST fonts to view Greek and Hebrew. Don't count on seeing vowel points and accents. The BST search engine has approximately the same limitations as the StudyLight search engine (including the limitation of combining no more than three words with logical operators, and the odd precedence of the "OR" operator). The BST interface differs significantly from StudyLight and you may find it more to your liking. For example, if you are not hot linking from a word in the Bible to a lexicon, but simply wish to search a lexicon, BST is easier to use. But StudyLight allows you to display parsing details for every word in a verse all at once, while BST seems to limit parsing info to one word at a time. And by default StudyLight displays entire verses in parallel origianl language and English. There are many little differences of detail between the two systems, but over all they are roughly comparable. Turpin reference staff find StudyLight easier to use. Perseus classical studies web sitePerseus is not a Bible study web site, but it is extraordinarily valuable for NT studies. Search and display full-text of many, many, ancient Greek and Latin primary source documents (but the TLG cd-rom has far more ancient Greek text). Search and display English translations. Use links to LSJ and other lexicons. This vast body of primary source materials is a treasure trove for serious research. If you have never used Perseus, see our one page intro to Perseus. Other useful sites
Bible Study Tools Offline (on your PC)There are many useful bible study tools available on the web, but even better tools are available for your personal computer. What is the best bible study software for you personal computer? What should you buy and install on your machine? There are many, many bible search programs, but here are the three you should consider. Logos/LibronixLogos/Libronix is first of all personal library software. Hundreds (if not thousands) of books are available in the Logos format, including bibles, commentaries, ministry resources, devotionals, and all sorts of general religious literature, including a strong assortment of modern, highly quality, scholarly works, and many popular (non-scholarly) devotional works. There are also a lot of low quality works available in the Logos format. Be cautions of the package deals. Logos/libronix software lets you search every word of every book in your personal library. It has a powerful Bible report function which can excerpt "all" the material from all the books in your library on any specific bible passage. This is not just a software gimmick; it actually produces useful results IF you have purchased high quality books for your personal library and IF you organize your non-research books into sublibraries that you can exclude from searches when you wish. Logos is also a Bible study tool. Logos will search and display English, Greek and Hebrew texts, link to high quality lexicons and reference works, etc. It supports Strong's numbers, and those who know no Greek or Hebrew can easily use nearly all of its features. It will do some simple grammatical searches, but not complex searches. The Logos software has a lot of options but it is a reasonably easy product to use. As a Bible study tool, it is more than adequate to meet the needs of the average Sunday School teacher, but it is not powerful enough to satisfy the needs of a biblical scholar or anyone else who works a great deal with Greek/Hebrew, with grammatical analysis, and with other biblical studies primary sources (like Dead Sea Scrolls, for example.) BibleWorks and Accordance are the tools to use for scholarly biblical studies. BibleWorksBibleWorks is the tool of choice for scholarly biblical research on the Windows platform. It has a fast, very powerful search engine which supports complex lexical and grammatical queries of the Greek and Hebrew texts (far beyond what Logos can do, for example). While some features of BibleWorks are pretty easy to use, the idiosyncratic interface is hard to master, and hard to remember. Only those who use the tool very frequently acquire the skill necessary to truly benefit from the advanced capabilities in BibleWorks. The Gramcord Institute continues to refuse to license the highly regarded Gramcord NT to BibleWorks, so BibleWorks uses both the Friberg NT and a lesser known proprietary Aletti/Gieniusz/Bushell NT. Please notify us if you find a scholarly published critique of Aletti/Gieniusz/Bushell. BibleWorks is focused on bible study tools and makes no effort to provide a large library of secondary literature comparable to Logos/Libronix. While Logos alone is probably adequate for the needs of most bible students, many scholars own both BibleWorks (for work with the bible and other primary sources) and Logos (for access to commentaries etc.) The products are complementary, not competitive. AccordanceAccordance runs on the Mac OS. Like BibleWorks, Accordance is focused on the Bible, primary sources related to Biblical study, and scholarly tools. It is not a general e-book library and it has a much smaller collection of books than Logos/Libronix. Accordance is generally regarded as the best bible study software available on any platform. In other words, for bible study it is better than BibleWorks or Logos. It has an elegant, easy-to-learn, easy-to-use, easy-to-remember interface, very powerful search and display capabilities, and a good selection of highly quality, scholarly research databases. It is suitable for both expert scholar and amateur bible student. Read about it at the Accordance web site. |