David Servant, host of the video devotional HeavenWord TV, goes through the entire New Testament in chronological order, following a verse-by-verse, expository approach. His free 7-minute videos are really nice. In the special episode called Behind the Scenes, he explains how the program is produced, and that’s how I discovered the Bible software he’s using (around 2:09): Accordance Bible Software. If you pay close attention and know the application well, you will even find out what version he has installed on his MacBook Air

In a recent blog entry, Darin Allen showed one way to quickly look up a word in various lexicons in Accordance. The article included a helpful video describing how to set up the program and follow the process.

Yesterday, Mark Barnes uploaded a video in which he reproduced the same steps using Logos 5. He then went on offering yet more options, including his preferred method: the Power Lookup feature.

I’d like to add to this interesting comparison by showing you in the following video how to look up a Greek word in multiple lexicons using the Search All feature in Accordance 10. In Accordance, too, there is more than one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI).

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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.

The following video is a good-humoured response to the latest Accordance Podcast (Lighting the Lamp #80) on Flex searches in Accordance 10.

In a good-humoured way I show how Dragon Dictate for Mac (version 3) can do what Siri is unable to accomplish: open Accordance, set Flex search as the default, build a search, run it, and see the analysis of the search. All done by voice, without moving a single finger!

All you see is real and doable, but it would not have been possible without the help of scripter extraordinaire Joe Weaks.

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If you are a Mac user, I recommend you take a look at Donovan Palmer’s article on “Logos versus Accordance” and the short follow-up “More about Accordance versus Logos.” I can sympathize with many of the things he says, and it makes for some interesting reading. Check it out!