My first exposure to studying the Bible on my own was at a high school youth retreat when I was fifteen years old. We were given a slip of paper with passages to be read and questions to be answered, all in the span of about 20 minutes. At that time, I didn't know one end of the Bible from the other, so I struggled to even find the assigned passages in the time allotted. But by the end of the week, I had come up with a basic system for helping me to know approximately where each book of the New Testament was located.
To me, the New Testament could be neatly divided into three basic sections: the "Names," the "Shuns," and the "Numbered Names." The "Names" were those books at the beginning which I have since learned to refer to as the "Gospels": Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The "Shuns" were the "Epistles," which all had names like Gala-shuns, Ephe-shuns, and Colo-shuns. Finally, the "Numbered Names" were all those "Pastoral" and "General Epistles" toward the back like 1 and 2 Timothy, 1 and 2 Peter, and 1-3 John. It wasn't a perfect system. I'm not sure what I did with "James" and "Jude" which were "names" in the "numbered names" section, but hey, it was the best I could do at the time!
What's that got to do with Accordance? Not much, except that Accordance has always let you define your own ranges of books, chapters, and verses so that you can narrow a search to appropriate sections of the Bible. If you want to use my system of "Names," "Shuns," and "Numbered Names," you can do that. Of course, it's more likely that you'll want to use more well known and logical categories. Thankfully, you can do that too!
Of course, it can be time-consuming to create a large number of ranges, so it would be nice to be able to use someone else's predefined set of ranges. Prior to version 7, however, that was impossible. Because ranges were one of the first custom options in Accordance, they have always been stored in the main Accordance settings file, which included lots of other kinds of settings. In version 7, we reorganized the way we store preferences to make Accordance more OS X compatible, and while we were at it, we moved the search ranges into their own settings file so that they could be shared.
For those of you who have never bothered to create many search ranges, I'm making my own ranges available for download in .zip (for Mac OS X) and .sit (for classic Mac OS) compression formats. Don't worry, you won't find any "Shuns," but you will find a few more traditional groupings of books, followed by ranges for each individual book of the Bible. To install these ranges, just download and uncompress them, then drag the "Search Ranges" file into the Accordance Preferences folder inside your Accordance folder. (In OS X, drag it into your User folder-->Library-->Preferences-->Accordance Preferences.) Be warned, doing so will replace any ranges you've already defined. And of course, this can only be done with Accordance 7. Once installed, you should see all of those ranges in the range pop-up menu inside the More Options section of the Search window.
I hope this is helpful to some of you.
# posted by David Lang @ 1:44 PM
