Ivan Jurik announces that a new Theophilos Discussion Forum has been set up. It is open to all people interested in Theophilos Bible Software, and will eventually substitute the current Theophilos Mailing List at Yahoo.

Also, there is a new Theophilos Online Library available. This means that almost everything contained in the Theophilos Library CD can now be downloaded online. There are a number of free add-on modules, while others require the purchase of an unlock code.

Today is a bank holiday here in Spain, and I’ve managed to finish and post a new article entitled Advantages of Bible Software: Louw-Nida’s Lexicon as a Test Case. I hope you find it interesting, and I will very much value your feedback.

I have also streamlined the main menu a bit. I’ve decided to mark with an asterisk (*) those sections of the website currently unavailable, so that nobody thinks the links are dead or something like that. As I’ve stated before (and it’s been on the FAQ section of BSR for quite some time), these menu items are placeholders. The stuff will be posted as it becomes available, but it is a lot of work, and it
takes time…

Update (October 18): As a result of the feedback, I have added a couple of explanatory sidenotes to the article. Hopefully, the Case Study section is much clearer now.

If you want to see, at a glance, a very general comparison of different Bible software packages, this table by Mark Vitalis Hoffman may prove to be a good starting point.

Contributed by guest blogger Ken Ristau

One of the challenges that many junior (and for that senior) scholars may have in reading Hebrew is the non-MT texts that do not have vowels, like the DSS modules in many popular Bible Software programs or other manuscripts and inscriptions. This is a challenging affair. Still, it is apparently possible because Israelis read modern Hebrew this way all the time. I have just never quite understood how it’s possible–until now. My brother-in-law recently posted this blog entry about a Cambridge study on his otherwise non-academic blog. If you are like me, this should give you some hope that it is possible!

As other fellow bloggers have already pointed out, Christian Origins has recently adopted the form of a weblog. Since Peter Kirby’s blog has some excellent material and is very focused, it is now included in my blogroll (list of recommended blogs that appears on the right hand side column – following a strict alphabetical order!). It even carries some news related to the Bible software scene (look here, and here). Welcome to the Blogosphere!