Generally speaking, Bible software is fun. But it gets even better when we come down from the abstract to the mundane, to the nitty-gritty. Who hasn’t had the experience of trying to remember the particular wording of a Bible verse? A good example of this can be seen in a couple of blog posts I’ve read recently.
It all started when David Lang blogged on how to look for a word in a verse in any Bible using Accordance. He talked about locating all the English Bibles that read “endurance” in Hebrews 12:1 (as opposed to the more traditional term “patience”). The question here is twofold: one must be able to search all the available Bibles at once (or the subset of English translations) and also limit the search to a custom range (i.e., Heb 12:1). Accordance, of course, can do both very easily, just as David showed.
Later on, Mark Hoffman explained in his blog how to follow the same process in BibleWorks and Logos. Prompted by a comment, he even added a couple on online solutions to his original post. Not a bad thing to do, particularly when you try to recall the verse while you’re surfing the web.
I don’t know about you, but I find the comparison of the different approaches to the same basic problem very stimulating. There isn’t a right and a wrong way of doing it. They all get the job done. Some programs may be more intuitive, or require less steps, and hence the beauty of comparing the workflow, but at the end of the day they provide the answer to our particular need. Examples like these help us see the usefulness of Bible software. It is a tool meant to make our lives easier.
Incidentally, there are excellent freeware programs that allow us to find a specific word in a verse in any Bible. I just checked with theWord and Bible Analyzer, and both of them offer the ability to search any number of Bible texts and set a custom search range.
