So the good news first? Yesterday, I received in the mail a parcel I’ve been eagerly waiting for: BibleWorks version 8! This may not be exciting to most of you, but to me this is a lot of fun. Let me tell you why. Since my first year of seminary, I’ve been using BibleWorks software on my computer. What sets BibleWorks apart from other Bible software, like PC Study Bible or Logos or Online Bible, is the many tools included in the software for advanced study of the Greek and Hebrew text in Scripture. For example, when I’m working on a series of sermons on a hard-to-understand passage of Scripture, one of the first things I do is use BibleWorks’ diagramming tool to draw up a graphical outline of the passage showing the grammatical relationships in the text. Then I would use the built-in lexicons to look up any Greek or Hebrew words I didn’t already know (my vocabulary is incredibly small!). Next, I would use the statistics tool to see how often the various words in the passage occur throughout the rest of the Bible. A nice feature of BibleWorks, even back when I started with version 5, was that the software made it easy to search not just for a given word in Greek or Hebrew, but for a particular grammatical form of a given word, or for a particular grammatical form of a given word occuring within a specified range of verses with another particular grammatical form of a word. Pretty cool. All of these tools have made BibleWorks my favourite software for studying God’s Word.
As I mentioned, when I first began using BibleWorks, I was using version 5. A year or two later I took advantage of the special upgrade pricing to obtain version 6. Since that time I’ve drooled for version 7, and then, when it was released, for version 8. I was in the process of saving up my Amazon.com commissions to purchase version 8 (this would have taken a fair bit of time since my commissions are usually only a few dollars per month), when I was contacted by the nice people at BibleWorks with an offer I couldn’t refuse. They’ve kindly provided me with a copy of version 8 on condition that I would write a series of blog posts showcasing BibleWorks 8 on Keruxai.com. If the people at Logos had asked me to do that, I would probably have agreed. But being asked to show and tell you why I love BibleWorks is a delight and joy to me. In an entry way back in April 2008, I gushed about why I like BibleWorks 7 (long before anyone from BibleWorks asked me to do so–In fact, that was just shortly after Keruxai.com was born). I’m grateful to the BibleWorks people for this chance to feature a product I have enjoyed and that I believe in. And I’m very grateful for the gift of this software I eventually would have purchased anyway.
BibleWorks: Software for
Exegesis and Research
In the near future I will begin a series of blog posts showing how I use BibleWorks for a particular project—probably a new series of sermons. Please stay tuned and, especially if you are a Bible college or seminary student, a pastor, Bible teacher, or just a lifelong student of God’s Word, consider purchasing BibleWorks to help you in your work.
And now the bad news. Following up on an earlier post, I read today that CMI has tentatively concluded, following their investigation, that the reports of the discovery of “Noah’s Ark” are most likely the result of a hoax. Nonetheless, with or without the Ark find, the evidence for the global flood is very convincing and should give all people pause to think through the big questions of life: Is the Bible true? What does God expect of me? What happens when I die? I wrote a blog entry over at ProphecyBlog.net on this topic just the other day.
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