study-bible-software

Bible Software

By Joe Felim

It did not take long after computers became “personal” (early 1980s) for people to start using them for Bible study. The initial advantage computers had over printed Bible study tools and materials was speed; they could search large amounts of text relatively quickly. So the first Bible programs were little more than basic electronic concordances, useful for finding where certain words were located (at first in the King James Bible, then other translations were added). Later as computers improved in their ability to handle foreign language fonts, the original Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT) texts of the Bible were added. When working with the original biblical languages, one of the first capabilities to be added was morphology (often called parsing), information concerning the forms of verbs, nouns, adjectives, and other words (many of these parts of speech assume different forms in different contexts). At this point we saw the emergence of Bible software programs, some of which are still around today.

Bible software is software that is used to read and study the Bible. The available software packages have a wide range of capabilities, with some merely displaying the text of a Bible translation on the screen, while others include a wide variety of theological resources and Bible study helps and a large number of features. Software packages can include many different Bible translations in different languages, commentaries, cross references, lexicons, theological writings, maps, charts and language aids such as dictionaries, grammars and original language texts. Most Bible software allow users to choose from a number of different base packages containing different resources, then purchase or download additional resources as needed. Common features include Bible reading and searching, while some software offers features like gospel synopsis, morphological and syntactical searches of original texts, sentence diagramming, note taking, manual and dynamic highlighting, lectionary viewers and so forth.