On our Theotek Podcast Dan Philips showed off the new features in BibleWorks 10. We hope you will watch the broadcast which we recorded on May 15, 2015 as we do every Friday morning at 9:00 a.m. ET.
If you’re not familiar with BibleWorks, it’s a text focused and powerful Bible study tool. They don’t clutter up the program with a lot of modern commentaries or other non-Biblically focused books. Instead, buyers just get great and powerful Bible study tools. It’s the best option for hardcore scholars of the Bible who don’t want to spend thousands on a digital library of books.
ePub Reader
The company did make a concession to users who want more than what BibleWorks traditionally publishes for inclusion in their software. They’re never going to add a book like Ed Stetzer’s church growth titles. Now, if a user buys and ePub version of these kinds of books, they can read them using the new ePub Reader.
Buy Christian ePub books at places like CDB or ChristianBook.com. I went ahead and bought one and loaded it in BibleWorks 10 to test out the feature. It works great.
To load an ePub, click on the ePub tab in one of the analysis windows on the right. Then click on the Open/Import button on the toolbar. This shows a list of all ePub books in the BibleWorks 10 library. The list is empty until you first import a book. Click on the Import button and find the book on your hard drive. This puts the book in your library, but doesn’t yet open it. Before you open it, make sure you add it to a category. There’s a button with three dots. Click it and a drop down list shows the Assign category to selected books flyout menu item. Now add the book to one of the BibleWorks categories. The category shows up in the Category column of the ePub library list. Now click on the title of the book and the Load button.
The library window lets users sort their books by Title, Author and Category. Click on the heading of the column to do that. Users can also show only books in a certain category making it easier to find books if the user has a large ePub library. Click on the Show only: drop down box.
Official BibleWorks 10 Videos
Watch the official BibleWorks intro videos of all the new features in BibleWorks 10.
Theotek Demo from Dan Phillips
On Theotek episode #024, Pastor Dan Phillips (Twitter) from the Pyromaniacs blog gave us a great demonstration of the program. Check it out in the YouTube video below.
Danker’s Lexicon
Danker’s Lexicon is a new Lexicon in BibleWorks 10. Find it in the Resources tab of the Analysis window. The currently loaded verse will show up with all the entries from the lexicon will show up in the list. Scroll down to find it.
BibleViews
BibleViews shows ancient culture in a visual way. Open it from the Resources menu. Click on Pictures and then BibleViews. It looks like a Windows help file. There’s a tablet of contents listing all the topics in the BibleViews Picture Library. Users can also search it from the Search tab in the column on the left.
Some items just show a picture while others give a some text explaining it. If there’s a Bible verse in the description it’s a hyperlink that the user can open by clicking or hovering over it.
New User Lexicon Feature
Now in BibleWorks 10 users can create their own lexicon. This means I can grab content from various tools and collect them in one place. The my lexical entry for that word will then show up any time I find that word in another place. This makes it possible for translators to work once and reuse their translation elsewhere.
Audio of Greek and Hebrew Bibles
Two new sets of audio files reads the NA27 in verse-by-verse recordings and the Byzantine Text in chapter-by-chapter recordings. Open these from the those books when they’re showing in the Browse window. Right click a verse and choose one or the other from the pop up menu.
Other New Features
The BibleWorks Manuscript Project added some new manuscripts to the tool. This gives scholars a look at the ancient manuscripts without going to them around the world. One of the cool new features is the tagging. Each manuscript gets tagged with the verse it’s showing. Open a Bible and the open manuscript will scroll along with the text of the Bible.
People who teach or preach showing the BibleWorks interface will love the screen scaling feature. It zooms the text and buttons so they can be seen on a projector from the back of the room.
The new user-interface color options show up in two places. The window colors and highlighting of text and parts of speech to make it easy to see the grammar of the text visually. For example, certain morphology tags get one color while others get another.
There are a number of new resources including…
- New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS)
- Samaritan Pentateuch (SMP)
- NA28
- Friberg Analytical Greek New Testament (AGNT)
- ESV Concise Bible Atlas from 2010 and 2012
- More languages like Vietnamese, Norwegian, Modern Hebrew etc.
We’ve only covered some of the biggest new features. To learn about every new feature, see the BibleWorks website that lists each feature added or updated in BibleWorks 10.
