Accordance Blog

In Accordance, "amplifying" is the term we use for the process of automatically searching for any text you select. For example, if you select the word "earth" in Genesis 1:1 and then choose Holman Dictionary from the English Tools pop-up menu of the Resource palette, the Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary will automatically open to the article on "Earth, Land."

Most of you already know how to amplify to your various Accordance modules, but you may not have realized that you can also amplify to Spotlight or to Google. You can do this simply by using OS X's built in Services.

Services are features of an application which you can access from other applications. You can find all of the services which are available from within Accordance by looking at the Services submenu of the Accordance menu. The two services I want to highlight today are Search with Google (keyboard shortcut shift-command-L) and Spotlight (keyboard shortcut shift-command-F).

The Search with Google service does just what you would expect: launches your default web browser and does a Google search for the selected text. To test it, I selected the name and institution of a former professor of mine who wrote an article in Anchor Bible Dictionary. In seconds, I found a multitude of information about him on the web.

The Spotlight service does a Spotlight search for your selected text, finding any files on your computer's hard drive which contain that text. For example, let's say you're researching some theological concept and you remember that you wrote a paper on it. Select the name of that concept in Accordance and hit shift-command-F to find that paper quickly.

Using these two OS X Services, you can effectively "amplify" to Google and Spotlight.

# posted by David Lang @ 8:05 AM 3 comments

Proverbs 30:28 speaks of a creepy-crawly that is easy to catch, but which nevertheless lives in kings' palaces. Yet what kind of creepy-crawly it is appears to be unclear. According to KJV/NKJV, it's a "spider." But according to most other translations, it's a "lizard." So which is it, and how do you explain the difference?

Blogger Rick Mansfield writes about how he used Accordance to tackle that question, and I think you'll find his approach instructive. Be sure to check it out.

By the way, if exploring obscure translation issues is too heady for you on a Friday afternoon, here's a lighter look at a spider versus a lizard. :-)

# posted by David Lang @ 9:39 AM 1 comments

Recently in our family devotions, we were reading about Josiah, the young king of Judah who turned his country upside down in an attempt to purify its worship. In the course of reading, we ran into a lot of references to other historical events.

Though God told Josiah that he would not see the coming wrath against Judah, he made it clear that Judah would indeed be sent into exile. To understand God's unwillingness to relent, I went back to his miraculous deliverance of Judah from the Assyrian king Sennacherib, then talked about how it was followed immediately by the extreme idolatry of Hezekiah's son, Manasseh.

When Josiah destroyed the high place at Bethel, I had to go back and talk about Jeroboam's rebellion, the start of the divided kingdom, the high places Jeroboam set up at Dan and Bethel, and the prophecy that a king named Josiah would one day destroy the high place at Bethel.

When Josiah destroyed Topheth, the shrine to Molech in the valley of Hinnom, I found myself explaining how Topheth and Gehenna became synonyms for hell. And when Josiah destroyed the pagan shrines Solomon had set up, I had to talk briefly about Solomon as well.

As you can imagine, my children started to feel like they were listening to an old Abbott and Costello sketch. Hezekiah did what? Who was Sennacherib? Where's Bethel? It was clear I was giving too much background information in the most confusing manner possible.

So I switched gears and opened the Accordance Timeline. Rather than showing All Items, I chose just to show the Rulers. I could then show how the kingdom of Israel split after the reign of Solomon, how Assyria conquered the northern kingdom and nearly conquered Judah during the reign of Hezekiah, and how quickly Manasseh had led Judah back into idolatry. I then pointed out the reign of Josiah, and showed how soon after his death Judah was conquered by the Babylonians.

At various points I also turned to the Atlas and showed the divided kingdoms, pointed out the location of Dan and Bethel, showed the location of Assyria and Babylonia, and displayed the animated route of Pharaoh Neco's campaign (in which Josiah was killed).

By using the visual assistance of the Timeline and Atlas, I was able to recap the history of ancient Israel in a way that helped the story of Josiah make more sense to my family. Perhaps if Abbott had drawn a diagram of the players' positions, Costello would have understood Who was on second . . . or was that What? I Don't Know. Oh yeah, he's on third! :-)

# posted by David Lang @ 12:17 PM 0 comments

I'm not generally much of a sports guy. During college football season, I admittedly obsess over how my alma mater is doing, but that's pretty much the only sport I care about. That is, until the Olympic Games roll around every four years. Then, all of a sudden, I get hooked on all kinds of sports I otherwise wouldn't follow.

In honor of the Olympic Games, I am going to award a few medals of my own. Now, while there can be no shortcuts to winning a gold medal (just ask Marion Jones!), Accordance does offer many keyboard shortcuts which are worthy of Olympic gold. In this post, I will award bronze, silver, and gold medals to those keyboard shortcuts which I think are the fastest, most powerful, and most versatile.

The Speedsters: These are keyboard shortcuts which enable you to get your work done faster.

The bronze medal goes to command-semicolon, which is used to toggle between Searching for Words and Verses in the Search window. This lets you keep your hands on the keyboard while entering a verse search or word search.

The silver medal goes to control-command-C, the keyboard shortcut for the Copy As Citation command. This little shortcut lets you copy text out of Accordance and have it formatted according to the custom citation style you set up in the Citation settings of the Preferences. When you paste into a word processor, the citation is already formatted the way you like, saving you lots of time.

The gold medal for speed goes to all the shift-command keyboard combinations, which we've reserved for inserting search commands into a search argument. Use shift-command-A to insert an AND command, shift-command-O for OR, etc. Let these shortcuts become second-nature to you, and you'll begin entering complex Boolean and proximity searches very quickly. Check out the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu for a complete listing of these I-feel-the-need-for-speed key commands.

Honorable mentions for speed go to the tab key for quickly selecting the contents of the argument entry box, the return key for quickly performing a search, and control-tab for quickly cycling through the tabs in a workspace.

The Heavy Lifters: These are keyboard shortcuts which give you access to power . . . Power . . . POWER!!!

The bronze medal goes to command-F, which opens the Search All window so that you can search some or all of your Accordance modules at once. Of course, you can also amplify to the Search All window directly by clicking and holding on the Search button of the Resource palette.

The silver medal goes to command-single quote, which is equivalent to clicking the Details button after doing a search. Using this shortcut gives you instant access to a wealth of statistical information about your search.

The gold medal goes to command-1, command-2, and command-3. These three shortcuts will automatically open a construct window and link to it. Command-1 opens the Simple Construct for searches in English (and other languages). Command-2 opens the Greek Construct for searches in Greek. And Command-3 opens the Hebrew construct for searches in Hebrew. The Construct window is incredibly powerful, enabling you to build very complex searches using a simple drag-and-drop interface. Innocuous as they seem, command-1, command-2, and command-3 give you quick access to some serious muscle.

The All-Around Athletes: These keyboard shortcuts offer the greatest amount of versatility, and so are likely to be the ones you use the most.

The bronze medal goes to command-comma, which opens the Preferences dialog. The Preferences include so many different options for customizing the appearance and performance of Accordance, that you'll find all kinds of opportunities to use this shortcut. By the way, command-comma is the standard Mac OS X shortcut for accessing a program's preferences, so this one will work for all your OS X programs.

The silver medal goes to command-U, which is the keyboard shortcut for editing a User Note, a User Tool, or a User Layer of the Atlas. That's a triathlon of custom resources you can create using a single, easy to remember keyboard-shortcut. By the way, you can also edit user notes and user tools simply by clicking in them and starting to type. Doing so will automatically open the Edit window for that user note or user tool.

The clear gold medal winner in terms of all-around usefulness has to be command-T, the one keyboard shortcut I say you absolutely must learn. Command-T was originally the shortcut for opening the Set Text Pane Display dialog, which lets you customize the display characteristics of your Bible texts (see the last couple of posts for more on that). As we've added new windows to Accordance for Tools, Maps, the Timeline, the various tabs of the Details workspace, and so on, Command-T has been extended to enable you to customize the appearance of a wide variety of resources. Basically, no matter where you are in Accordance, if you want to see what display options are available to customize, just use Command-T. You're almost certain to find a host of options you may never have realized were there.

Well, that's my breakdown of the medal-winners among Accordance keyboard shortcuts, but there are so many I'm sure I missed a number of worthwhile contenders. For a complete listing of keyboard shortcuts, go to Accordance Help and click on the "Reference section."

By the way, if you've got a favorite shortcut which you think got "robbed" by partisan judges, feel free to mention it in the comments on this post. As for me, I'm off to watch a blistering game of Olympic Badminton! ;-)

# posted by David Lang @ 10:57 AM 1 comments

In my last post, I described the different ways you can change the display settings for Bible texts. These were (1) temporarily changing the appearance of text in a specific window or pane, (2) setting the default display for a single Bible text, and (3) setting the default display for all Bible texts at once. A key point of that post was that when you change the default display of your Bibles, the change only affects new instances of those Bible texts; existing windows and panes containing those Bibles are not changed unless you specifically update them. In a comment on that post, Helen pointed out that this applies to saved windows as well. So that Helen's point does not get lost in a comment, I want to reiterate it here.

Just as we don't want any new display changes to overwrite or mess up some custom display you may have set up on screen, so we don't want to mess up some custom display you might have saved. Imagine that you have some window setup that you use for creating slides for a congregational setting. To make copying and pasting as seamless as possible, you have that window set to some large san-serif font with superscript characters and red letter turned off. You have saved this window to use whenever you're working on the slides, but for your personal study you prefer a smaller serif font with superscript characters and red letter displayed. If, when you made some change to your global display preferences, Accordance automatically updated your slide-making set up to reflect those new settings, you would lose the custom settings you chose for that specific task. So we just don't do that.

Unfortunately, this can be confusing to people who have saved some setup they use all the time and who want any display changes to be reflected in that setup. For example, let's say you have a Greek studies workspace that you have set up. You don't use it all the time, but you do turn to it quite frequently. When version 8 came out with the option to change the background color, you gleefully set the background color for all your Bibles and tools to "Parchment." Unfortunately, whenever you open your Greek studies workspace, the background color is still white! This is because that window is still using the older settings. To remedy this, you need to update the text or tool in each window and pane so that it now appears with your new parchment default. Then you need to save that Greek studies workspace again.

Now, here's the tricky part. Accordance will only save a window or workspace if some change has been made to the search argument in that window or in one of the tabs of the workspace. Merely scrolling the text or changing the display characteristics will not cause Accordance to recognize that a savable change has been made. So to resave your Greek studies workspace, you can either use Save As... to save the workspace with the same name and location as your previous Greek studies workspace (which, of course, will replace the old one), or you can make a simple change to a search argument, like just typing a space after the current search argument, and then choose Save (or use the keyboard shortcut command-S).

The same thing applies if you have saved some window arrangement as your Default Startup. If you've set Accordance to start up with a specific workspace and then you make some change to the default display of your Bibles, that change will not be reflected in the workspace Accordance starts up with. You will need to update the display of that workspace, and then save the updated workspace as your Default Startup (in the General settings of the Preferences).

I hope this helps to clarify the setting of text display defaults even further.

# posted by David Lang @ 11:50 AM 0 comments

Accordance offers an incredible range of options for customizing the appearance of text. You can set the font, style, text color, background color, leading, paragraph formatting, and more. You can also suppress things like superscript footnote markers, red letter, poetic formatting, etc. One need only open the Text Settings dialog box to see the variety of options available.

In addition to all the options, you can apply these options in a variety of ways: you can make temporary changes to the text in a display pane, you can set the default appearance for an individual Bible text or translation, or you can globally set the default appearance of all your Bible texts. While this flexibility is nice when you need it, it can be a little confusing to people. Hopefully this blog post will help clear up any confusion.

I think the best way to illustrate the different ways to make formatting changes is to have you do an experiment. To set up this experiment, all you need to do is open a search window with your favorite Bible. Then add a parallel pane to that window containing the exact same Bible. In other words, you should have the same Bible appearing in two parallel panes. In the following screenshot, I have two panes displaying the Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB):

Now, click in one of the panes, then choose Set Text Display from the Display menu (or use the keyboard shortcut command-T). This will open the Text Settings dialog for that pane. In the dialog, make some change to the display which will be readily apparent. I'm just going to change the background color to "Mint." When you're done making whatever changes you wish to make, click OK.

The display changes you made will immediately be apparent in the selected pane, but will not affect any other panes. In the screenshot below, you can see that while the left pane has the mint green background, the right one does not. I now have two instances of the same Bible with different display settings.

When you make changes to a pane, those changes will remain in effect only as long as you don't change the text displayed in that pane. To see how this works, change the pane you modified to a different Bible, then switch that pane back to the original Bible text. When I switch to a different text and switch back to the HCSB, the HCSB reflects its default display settings, and my mint green background is lost.

Now, let's say I want to make the mint green background appear every time I open the HCSB. To do that, I will use command-T to open the Text settings dialog, and I will once again select Mint from the background color pop-up menu. Only this time, before I click OK, I will click the Use As Default button. An alert will appear asking if I really want to save these settings as the default display for the HCSB. After clicking Save to dismiss this alert box, I can click OK to dismiss the text settings dialog box.

The pane that I am modifying immediately reflects the changes I made, and I once again see the mint green background. However, even though I made this setting the default for the HCSB, the other pane containing the HCSB is not updated to reflect the new setting. The reason for this is that we don't want to override any custom appearance settings which you may have set for open windows or panes, so when you change the default appearance settings for a Bible text, those settings will only apply to any new windows or panes containing that text.

To see that the mint green background is indeed the new default for the HCSB, I can change the other pane to a different text, then change it back to the HCSB. This effectively "new" instance of the HCSB will reflect the new default I just saved.

If I want to set the default display of ALL my Bibles in one fell swoop, I can do that by going to the Preferences dialog and choosing the Text Display settings. Let's say that I want to set all my Bible texts to use the background color named "Book." Once I make that change in the Preferences dialog box and click OK, all new instances of a Bible text will reflect that default setting, but my existing Bible panes remain unchanged until I update them. This is again to avoid overwriting some custom setting or messing up some existing display.

So to summarize, when you modify a pane using the Text Settings dialog and you simply click OK, the changes will apply to that pane only, will appear immediately, and will last only as long as you don't change the text which appears in that pane. Clicking Use As Default in the Text Settings dialog box and then clicking OK will immediately apply your changes to the pane you're modifying, and those changes will be reflected any time you open a new instance of that Bible text, but other open panes containing that Bible will remain unchanged. Finally, when you modify the Text Display settings in the Preferences dialog box, the changes you make will apply to any Bible text you open from that point on, but will not apply to any panes which are already open.

I hope this gives you a better understanding of the different ways you can modify the display settings of your Bibles.

# posted by David Lang @ 2:23 PM 1 comments

For several years now, we have been offering free training seminars at strategic locations around the country. This Fall, we have a slew of new seminars planned, and more may be in the works.

Although other developers charge substantial fees for training like this, we have always offered these seminars completely free of charge. Unfortunately, when you sign up for a free seminar starting early on a Saturday morning, it's easy to hit the snooze button and decide not to show up. In the US, a growing number of no-shows is starting to make offering seminars cost-prohibitive. We have therefore decided to change our registration policy to make that snooze button a little less appealing.

You can now pre-register for an Accordance training seminar with a $25 non-refundable deposit. As long as you show up for the seminar, or cancel no later than five days in advance, your entire deposit will be credited toward your next Accordance purchase. In this way, the training is still "free," because all your money is actually going toward expanding your Accordance library; but of course, there is now a cost associated with attending the seminars which was not there before.

Those who sign up at the door will pay a $30 deposit and get $20 of that credited toward their next Accordance purchase. Obviously, it pays to pre-register.

Complete details about the new policy can be found here. We're confident that you'll find the training you receive well worth the money you spend . . . especially when you get it back on your next Accordance purchase.

# posted by David Lang @ 1:05 PM 2 comments

The other day, we released a free update to 8.0.3 which fixed a number of bugs. Unfortunately, 8.0.3 also introduced a bug in the rendering of 3D Maps. We've corrected that problem and released Accordance 8.0.4 for download.

By the way, in response to my last post, some people asked about the possibility of an auto-update feature within Accordance. It's coming. :-)

# posted by David Lang @ 10:38 AM 0 comments

A new update to the Accordance application, version 8.0.3 has just been released for download. It is free to all users of Accordance 8, and fixes a number of minor bugs, as well as two serious crashes on some Intel Macs. One occurred when printing to certain HP printers from OS 10.5.3 on the iMac. The other happened on opening the 3D Map window on Macs which use an NVidia graphics chipset with OS 10.5.2 or above. These issues should now be corrected, and the warning on Intel when opening the 3D has been removed.

In addition to the bug fixes, 8.0.3 also includes a minor extension of a feature introduced in Accordance 8: namely, the option to open a module when a selected word cannot be found. Let's say you have an English word selected, and you go to the Resource palette to open a Greek or Hebrew text. Instead of just getting an error message telling you that the language of the word you selected is not used in that module, Accordance will now give you the option to open the module without searching it.

Obviously, this update is recommended for all users of Accordance 8.

# posted by David Lang @ 10:45 AM 2 comments

In yesterday's post, I recounted a study I did of the word meaning "desire" in Genesis 3:16. An internet discussion had prompted me to examine a popular interpretation first proposed by Susan Foh in 1975: namely, that the "desire" spoken of in this verse does not refer to sexual desire, but a desire for mastery or control.

I began my study by consulting a variety of lexicons and looking at every place I could find that this word is used, including extrabiblical texts like the Qumran sectarian manuscripts. Doing that gave me a good sense of this word's semantic range, but it did not really provide any certainty as to whether Foh's interpretation is correct. So I decided to look at a few commentaries.

The easiest way to do this was to go back to my window containing Genesis 3:16, and add a parallel commentary pane. Since it had been alleged that Foh's interpretation is suspect because of its novelty, I was curious to see how this verse had historically been understood. I therefore started with the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture (ACCS), which includes comments by a variety of church fathers. Unfortunately, when I added the pane containing the ACCS, I discovered a mistake where a reference to Numbers 3:16 is mistakenly tagged as Genesis 3:16, and since the parallel panes always go to the last comment on a verse (since that is usually the most specific one), I found myself looking at the comments on Numbers rather than Genesis!

Embarrassing as this is, particularly since I'm the one who worked on the ACCS and so am responsible for the mistake, I mention it to help you learn how to get around such tagging errors. One option would be to open the ACCS in a separate Tool window and then browse or search for Genesis 3:16 in the Reference field. Another option, and the one I chose, is to keep working with the ACCS as a parallel pane, and to scroll the Bible text back until the ACCS pane jumped back to Genesis. Since the mistagged reference in Numbers was to Genesis 3:14-20, I only needed to scroll back to Genesis 3:13 to get the ACCS pane to sync back to Genesis. Then I just selected the ACCS pane and used the scroll bar to scroll down to the comments on Genesis 3:16. It's not the most elegant solution, and I'm sorry about the mistake, but I hope this negative example helps you to understand how to forge past our faux pas.

The comments in the ACCS were interesting. Most focused on the first half of Genesis 3:16, which deals with pain in childbirth, and did not seem to address the nature of the woman's desire. Those that did seemed to understand desire in a sexual sense. The ACCS was actually more helpful in elucidating other aspects of the creation story and the relationship between the sexes. The interesting thing is to see which interpretations of this passage are still being discussed today, and which rise out of perspectives and assumptions which are largely foreign to us.

Another commentary which was interesting from a history of interpretation perspective is the JPS Torah Commentary, which surveyed the perspectives of two Medieval rabbis before giving the modern commentator's perspective. The rabbis both seemed to view the desire in a sexual sense, while the modern commentator suggested that it was descriptive of economic dependence.

I then turned to Calvin, who understood the woman's desire as a kind of psychological orientation leading to her "subjection" to her husband. To use a modern psychological term, we might describe it as a form of "enablement." Calvin observed the parallel with Genesis 4:7 and emphasized a "battle of the sexes" dynamic in Genesis 3:16 (though he obviously didn't use that terminology).

When looking at Old Testament passages, I always consult Keil and Delitzsch. Although written in the nineteenth century, it is in depth and technical, and I usually come away feeling like I have a better grasp of the Hebrew in a passage. Keil and Delitzsch understood teshuqah as a "violent craving" and a "desire bordering on disease." Their conclusion was similar to Calvin's that this desire contributes to the woman's subjection by her husband.

At this point, I began turning to modern commentaries, such as Expositor's Bible Commentary and Word Biblical Commentary. EBC, which contains the main text of Expositor's Bible Commentary, offered a good summary of the passage, but the EBC Notes (which contains the text of the footnotes) offered an excellent technical discussion of the passage. Word also offered a good technical discussion. Both EBC and Word understood the woman's "desire" to be a "desire for control," and Word actually cited the article by Susan Foh which the internet discussion I had been following had mentioned. It turns out that the article was published in the Westminster Theological Journal, which is included in the Theological Journal Library. So I opened TJL-Westminster and browsed to the article cited.

The article in question actually surveyed historical understandings of "desire" in Genesis 3:16, including those of Calvin and Keil and Delitzsch which I had already read, and showed how they had not fully taken into account the parallel usage of teshuqah in Genesis 4:7. Foh's argument was actually more sophisticated than I had assumed. Rather than arguing that teshuqah always refers to a desire for control, Foh emphasized the fact that Genesis 3:16 and 4:7 both use the exact same sentence structure, and asserted that the two passages should therefore be understood in the same way. Whether Foh's argument is correct, it certainly struck me as sound; and it appears to have been highly influential—at least on modern conservative commentators.

Again, my point in recounting this study is not to focus on the theological discussion in question, but to offer a kind of case study for how Accordance can be used to examine various interpretive stances. First I did my own study of the word in question, examining lexicons and then exploring the usage of that word in whatever contexts I could find. Because teshuqah is a rare word, I ended up turning to extrabiblical texts, like Qumran, which most people don't have and which they probably don't need. For most words, a search for every occurrence in the Biblical text is more than sufficient to give a good handle of its usage in context. And if you don't have the Hebrew or Greek texts, you can right-click a word in a Strong's number text and Search For Key Number to look up every occurrence of the Greek or Hebrew word.

Once I had studied the word in question on my own, I began turning to commentaries. I don't always do the kind of historical survey I described in this post, but since it had been alleged that Foh's interpretation is excessively novel, I thought it appropriate in this case. There are certainly other commentaries I could have surveyed. For example, the NET Notes and IVP Bible Background Commentary on the Old Testament might also have been helpful, and of course there were numerous other classic commentaries I could have consulted.

When I got to the modern commentaries, I found a reference to Foh's article and realized that I had access to it from within Accordance, so I was able to examine it for myself.

All of this took maybe a half hour to forty-five minutes to do, and most of that time was spent reading Foh's article. Obviously, the more Accordance modules you have, the more likely you are to find helpful information, and I hope this case study has helped expose you to resources you may not have known were available. But the kinds of things I've done in this study are easily done with even a basic package of Accordance modules.

# posted by David Lang @ 11:38 AM 3 comments

Recently, an internet discussion prompted me to look at the meaning of the Hebrew word translated "desire" in Genesis 3:16. Someone remarked that a popular understanding of that passage results from a "completely new and never before written" interpretation introduced by Susan Foh in 1975. Curious to find out more, I naturally turned to Accordance.

Now, my intention in recounting my course of study is not to focus on a particular theological debate so much as to highlight ways Accordance can be used to examine any interpretive stance. I would ask that any comments on this post be restricted to a discussion of the use of Accordance in this study and that you avoid giving us your thoughts on the debate in question. There are other forums devoted to such theological debates.

Okay, now that I've made the necessary disclaimers, let's look at different ways to examine the meaning of Genesis 3:16.

The interpretation proposed by Foh is that the woman's "desire" for her husband is not sexual desire, but a desire for mastery or control. To examine this, I turned to the passage in question: Genesis 3:16. Viewing this passage in an English text with Strong's numbers, I dragged my mouse over the word "desire" and discovered that the Hebrew word in question is teshuqah. To look this word up in a Hebrew lexicon such as HALOT, I selected the English word "desire" and held down the option key while selecting HALOT from the Resource palette. Had I not held down the option key, Accordance would have searched HALOT for the English word "desire," which would have found any Hebrew word with that meaning. By holding down the option key, I tell Accordance to look for the Hebrew word represented by the Strong's number with which the English word is tagged.

HALOT defines teshuqah as "desire, longing," but it says nothing about what kind of desire is in view. So I turned to other Hebrew lexicons. In hindsight, I should have just chosen "All Hebrew" from the Hebrew Tools pop-up rather than choosing HALOT by itself, and I could then have cycled through each open lexicon tab (using the keyboard shortcut control-tab to cycle from tab to tab). Since I didn't do that at first, I could select the word teshuqah in HALOT and do it now, or I could just cycle through my Hebrew lexicons using the current window. To do that, I would use the keyboard shortcut control-plus to switch to the next lexicon, and hit return to perform the search.

From a quick survey of the available lexicons, I found that NIDOTTE offered the most thorough discussion. It addressed each usage of teshuqah and dealt with the interpretation advanced by Foh.

The thing I love about NIDOTTE (along with NIDNTT for Greek) is that it surveys the usage of a word in extrabiblical contexts and other periods of time. For example, the article on teshuqah dealt briefly with the usage of this word in Ancient Near Eastern literature and its translation in the Septuagint. Unfortunately, all it told me was that teshuqah appears in Samaritan and Mishnaic Hebrew, and that the LXX apparently translates a different Hebrew word! Add this to the fact that teshuqah only appears three times in the entire Hebrew Bible, and there aren't many examples of its usage.

Still, perhaps there are examples of teshuqah in other Hebrew texts that NIDOTTE did not mention. It's easy enough to find out. I merely selected the word teshuqah and chose All from the Hebrew Texts pop-up menu of the Resource palette. This enables me to find any appearance of teshuqah in the Mishna, Qumran, Ben-Sira, Aramaic texts like the Targums and Elephantine Papyri, even Hebrew translations of the New Testament!

The results of this search were interesting. In Biblical texts like the Samaritan Pentateuch and Dead Sea Scrolls Bible, I found Genesis 3:16 and 4:7, as expected. But in the Qumran sectarian manuscripts, I found eleven occurrences of teshuqah, most of which were translated as "longing" or "desire." Interestingly, in most of these cases the object of desire was something negative or in some way related to destruction. The desire spoken of was not clearly a "desire for control," but it certainly seemed to connote some kind of negative longing or obsession.

Another Hebrew text in which teshuqah was found was the Delitzsch Hebrew New Testament (DHNT). This is a nineteenth century translation of the New Testament into Hebrew by Franz Delitzsch (of Keil and Delitzsch fame). Delitzsch used teshuqah to translate epipothesis in 1 Corinthians 7:11, a word meaning "deep yearning for, longing." While interesting, this usage of teshuqah can only tell us what Delitzsch understood it to mean. It doesn't really tell us anything about what the original audience of Genesis understood it to mean.

At this point, I've already found out more about this word than is available in the standard lexicons, and I've only explored a few of the resources available to me. Tomorrow, I'll discuss the rest of my study of how teshuqah is used in Genesis 3:16. Until then, I hope you've been able to glean a few tips for how to use Accordance to do this kind of study.

# posted by David Lang @ 2:38 PM 3 comments

Someone on the user forum recently complained about the speed of Accordance 8:

One problem with the new version (i.e., 8): I'm wasting time waiting for the search to process and display the results. I enter my search arguments and hit return, and then wait, and wait for the results to display... only to discover that they already have been before my eyes refocus from the search box to the text box! This new version is really fast! (My students thought v 7 was fast on my *8 year old* TiBook (300 MHz!); wait until they see v 8 on a MacBookPro this fall!

As you can see, this tongue-in-cheek "complaint" was that Accordance is now even faster than before. Obviously, the fact that Accordance 8 is Intel-native has made things faster for those on Intel Macs, but we also improved the speed of basic search routines, so that everyone can enjoy the speed boost. We've never gotten complaints about Accordance's speed, and we don't typically list such under-the-hood enhancements with our new features, but if you needed one more reason to upgrade to Accordance 8, now you have it. :-)

# posted by David Lang @ 2:04 PM 0 comments

Someone asked me recently if there is a more elegant way to zoom into an area of the Atlas than using the In and Out buttons. Of course there is! In fact, there are several ways to zoom.

First, you can hold the Shift key down while clicking the In and Out buttons to zoom in and out more quickly. You can also hold the Option key while clicking the Out button to instantly zoom out far enough to see the entire map.

If you don't want to use the buttons at all, you can hold down the Shift and Command keys while clicking any point on the map to zoom in on that location.

My favorite way to zoom in on an area is simply to drag my mouse to draw a marquee around it (a marquee is one of those flashing selection boxes) and then to double-click anywhere inside the marquee. Doing this will essentially fill the window with the area you've selected. So if you're zoomed all the way out and you drag a tiny box around some portion of Israel, you'll immediately zoom in to that area.

Another favorite Atlas trick of mine is the ability to option-drag to measure distances. When you option-drag from one point to another on the map, the distance between those points will be given in the Instant Details box. If, while doing this, you click the mouse button and drag in a different direction, the distance will continue to accrue, so that you can follow along with a route to measure its real distance. For example, if you display Paul's Second Missionary Journey and then option-drag-click-and-drag to follow each change of direction, you'll discover that he traveled more than 700 miles from Syrian Antioch to Troas. If we could only measure the distance between those points as the crow flies, we would get a very misleading distance of 585 miles.

By the way, you can also option-drag across the Timeline to measure temporal "distance." For example, you can option-drag from the beginning of David's life to the various events in his life to find out how old he was. Drag to his adultery with Bathsheba and the age you get might surprise you.

# posted by David Lang @ 12:50 PM 1 comments

In yesterday's post, I highlighted some of the graphics which are available in various Library 8 modules. I talked especially about how much I like the reconstructions of ancient cities in the Holman Dictionary and Holman Charts modules. Then it occurred to me that it would be cool to take those graphics showing city-level detail and display them with the Accordance Bible Atlas. To do this, you simply need to copy those images from their various sources and paste them into a User Layer of the Atlas.

User Layers are sort of an unsung feature of the Atlas, but if you really want to create custom maps, they open up an incredible range of possibilities. A User Layer works just like the pre-fab Site, Region, and Route layers included with the Atlas: you simply select a user layer from the User Layer pop-up and whatever features it contains will appear on your map. The difference is that the features included in a user layer are those which you have drawn or otherwise created yourself.

The first thing you need to do is to create your user layer. This is done simply by selecting Define User Layers... from the User Layer pop-up menu of the Atlas window. In the dialog box which appears, click the New button to create a new layer, enter the name you want to appear in the pop-up menu, and click OK. I'll name this layer "First Century Cities."

Now that I've created a user layer, Accordance automatically displays that layer on the map, because it assumes I will want to edit that layer right away. To edit my user layer, I simply choose Edit User Layer from the user layer pop-up, or I can use the keyboard shortcut command-U (the same shortcut you use to edit a user note or a user tool). This will open a palette of drawing tools which I can use to draw lines, shapes, bezier curves, text labels, etc. In this case, I don't want to draw anything, I just want to paste in some pictures. For example, I copied the reconstruction of "Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus" from the Holman Charts module, and then pasted it into my user layer just above Jerusalem. I also did the same with the reconstruction of New Testament Jericho as well as a picture of the Qumran caves I found in the Holman Dictionary.

When you paste an image into a user layer, it will scale with the map as you zoom in and out, so it's important to paste it into the layer at a zoom level that will be appropriate. For example, if I zoom way out before pasting my Jerusalem image in, that image will appear at a very large scale, likely covering a large portion of the map. As I zoom in, it will get even larger. Since I want the Jerusalem image to appear near Jerusalem without taking over the entire map, I will zoom way in to Jerusalem before pasting my picture in. Now the image will get smaller as I zoom out, and come into greater and greater focus as I zoom in.

In the screenshot above, you can see what the images look like when I'm zoomed way into Jerusalem. Notice that I dressed them up a bit by drawing a thick black line around the edges of each picture, as well as a line from each image to the site it represents. In the following screenshot, you can see what these images look like when I've zoomed out and combined my user layer with a region layer like New Testament Palestine.

Once I'm done editing my user layer, I just click the Done button on the drawing palette to save my changes. Now, any time I place my "First Century Cities" layer on the map, those images will appear; and whenever I don't want them, I can simply choose not to display that layer. Pretty cool, huh?

# posted by David Lang @ 10:31 AM 2 comments