In part 3 of the Sermon Prep series on Theotek, we covered digital reference books. Each member of the team recommends our favorite tools like Bible dictionaries, lexicons, and more.
For review we covered the first steps of sermon prep in part one of our series. Then in
We started out with English Bible dictionaries. Here’s a list of what we recommended.
- Anchor Bible Dictionary
- IVP Bible Dictionary
- Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary
- Biblical Archaeology Review
- Hermeneia
- Bible Illustration from Holman
- Accordance Photo Guide
- Wikipedia
- CCEL
- Harper’s Bible Dictionary
- Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs
Here’s a couple of Bible Background sources we prefer. These help you get at the cultural information that tells us more about the world of the Biblical writers.
- Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary
- Accordance Atlas – one of the best digital atlas resources in Bible software
Next we look at Bible commentaries. The series that we each picked included…
- Word Biblical Commentary
- Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary
- New American Commentary
- Ancient Christian Commentary
- IVP Bible Background Commentary
- JPS Commentary
To find the best sources, we all agree that just one series isn’t the best approach to building a good library of commentaries. Instead check out Best Commentaries on the web. It lists the commentaries by book of the Bible and rates the best options available. They update it when new works come out.
Our Favorite Things
I recommend Visual Theology, a work that Olive Tree released recently.
Antoine recommended the Google Cardboard, their inexpensive Virtual Reality tool that the user can put their phone into to get a VR experience. There are other VR options like Samsung Gear VR, which I don’t recommend. The children’s version comes from Mattel and uses the old View Master idea.
Rick went the opposite direction and shared one of his least favorite things. He doesn’t like the 12-inch MacBook. The screen’s nice but the keyboard doesn’t feel very good and performance suffers when doing more than word processing or surfing the web.
