February 15, 2013 - David Lang — My wife and I homeschool four of our five children. (At four, Jo Jo hasn't begun formal schooling yet, although he seems to be learning more than all the rest of us combined.) To satisfy the older kids' high school language requirement, I've been teaching the whole family Greek using Bill Mounce's Basics of Biblical Greek. Since I have the textbook on Accordance, I've been viewing it on my laptop and projecting it to our Apple TV using Airplay Mirroring. My basic set up is a workspace with two zones. One contains Mounce's grammar and the ...

February 11, 2013 - David Lang — It happens every week: Sunday rolls around and my main Accordance workspace is filled with tabs and zones related to my current work projects. But I have to teach Sunday school, and I want to present the passages and visual aids related to my lesson without closing—or showing—the other stuff I've been working on. Obviously, I'll want to open an additional workspace and do my lesson preparation in that, but how do I make sure my class doesn't see my main workspace? The easiest thing to do is simply to hide my main workspace using the Hide ...

February 05, 2013 - Darin Allen — We have some exciting new releases available for you today, along with a couple of introductory specials! Whether you are looking for commentaries, Bible study guides, histories, or theological works, we have you covered! To start, we have two resources that you will want to pick up by February 18, 2013 in order to take advantage of introductory specials. The first of these resources is the Life in the Spirit New Testament Commentary. In addition to being an excellent one-volume commentary for Pentecostal and charismatic Accordance users, ...

February 01, 2013 - David Lang — When it rains it pours. The past couple weeks I have been doing my best to keep up with a flood of new Accordance modules which have come to me for final checks. Be looking for lots of new goodies to appear very soon. In the meantime, you can enjoy one of these new releases today: the Revised Edition of Expositor's Bible Commentary is now complete. We released the New Testament volumes of the Revised EBC last October, with a promise to release the Old Testament volumes "in a few more weeks." As weeks stretched into months, we've received ...

January 25, 2013 - David Lang — Last week I wrote a series of posts designed to teach you powerful original language search techniques. In the final post of that series, we did a search for any inflected form spelled epsilon-iota-sigma (regardless of its breathing mark and accent), finding two inflections of the lexical form εἷς, along with three inflections of the preposition εἰς. This screenshot shows both the Search tab and the Analysis which we customized to list the inflected forms beneath each lexical form. The unusual thing about this search result is ...

January 18, 2013 - David Lang — In this series of posts, we've been exploring some of the 'ace' techniques you can use to define very precise original language searches. Here's what we've learned so far: Part 1: To search for a Greek lexical form, simply enter the word and hit return. To keep things simple and minimize mistakes, Accordance ignores breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case—even if you happen to enter them. Part 2: To make sure Accordance uses breathing marks, accents, etc. to distinguish one lexical form from another with the same spelling (such ...

January 17, 2013 - David Lang — In yesterday's post, we did a search for the lexical form εἷς and showed the various inflected forms that were found. We explained that when you search for a Greek word, Accordance assumes you are entering the lexical form of that word and that you want to find every occurrence of that word no matter how it happens to be inflected. We saw that clearly when we customized the Analysis to list all the inflected forms beneath each lexical form: Here we see that the lexical form εἷς occurs 345 times in a variety of forms. We also see ...

January 16, 2013 - David Lang — In my last couple of posts, I've been showing you how to become a searching 'ace' by searching for the Greek word εἰς. You see, there is another Greek word spelled exactly like εἰς except for the breathing mark and accent: εἷς. As I explained in the first post in this series, Accordance ignores breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case even if you happen to enter them in your search. We do this to spare you having to get all those things right in order to do a basic search, but what if you want Accordance to pay attention to ...

January 11, 2013 - David Lang — In yesterday's post, I wrote that if you know how to search for εἰς, you're well on your way to being a searching "ace." It was an admittedly nerdy pun, since the Greek word εἰς is pronounced like the English word "ace." I'm feeling a little less nerdy today, however, since someone made the even nerdier observation that my pun only works for the artificial Erasmian pronunciation scheme as opposed to other systems! Whether or not my joke works in your preferred system of Greek pronunciation, my point is that searching for εἰς ...

January 10, 2013 - David Lang — Εἰς in the title of this post is a Greek preposition which is pronounced like the English word ACE. It's an admittedly nerdy joke, but searching for εἰς helps to illustrate several important aspects of original language searching in Accordance. In other words, if you know how to search for εἰς, you're well on your way to being a searching "ace." So if you have a tagged Greek New Testament text, open it up, select Words from the Words/Verses token, and type the letters "e, i, s." When you're finished, hit return to perform the ...

January 09, 2013 - David Lang — Just before the start of the new year, Accordance for iOS 1.6 went live in the app store. This new version features a host of interface improvements and feature enhancements. Be sure to check out Dr. J's excellent video introduction below, and if you haven't yet updated to this latest version of our mobile app, what are you waiting for?

January 01, 2013 - David Lang — When searching an Accordance Tool module, you may get results which are buried deep within a long article. When that happens, how can you see the wider context of where you are in the tool? For example, let's say I search the Titles field of the Holman Bible Dictionary for the word "judges." Here's the first result I get: This is obviously a subarticle within a much larger article, but how can I find out which one? I could obviously scroll back until I got to the beginning of the article, but if it's a very long article, that's not ...

December 28, 2012 - Darin Allen — We are excited to announce a major update to our Bible study app for iOS. Version 1.6 is a free update for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Similar to the 1.5 release before it, this update includes major design enhancements and readability improvements. We've also added some highly requested features like bookmarks and Dropbox syncing for notes, highlights, and user tools. For a full list of major new features, check out our New Features in 1.6 page. If you like what you see, consider leaving us a review in the App Store. Your reviews ...

December 28, 2012 - David Lang — In my last post, I encouraged you to use the Duplicate command to duplicate a tab that is already set up the way you want rather than creating a new tab and then going to the trouble of setting it up yourself. This is precisely what I did when preparing for a Sunday School class in which I wanted to display multiple passages in separate tabs. Today's tip is just as simple, but just as effective in streamlining your workflow: take the time to give your tabs names that will make it easy to tell which tab is which. After duplicating several ...

December 26, 2012 - David Lang — In last week's series of posts on Rachel Weeping at Ramah, I shared a few tips and tricks for using the Accordance Bible Atlas. There are, however, a few more general tips I used that may be helpful to mention now. The first is simply that it is sometimes convenient to duplicate an existing tab rather than creating a new one. In my case, I began with a tab displaying Matthew 2, and because I planned to display the text using a projector, I increased the font size to a very large size. I then wanted to have a separate tab for Genesis ...

December 21, 2012 - David Lang — I've got good news for Lutherans and anyone interested in historic Protestant theology: the Kolb-Wengert edition of the Book of Concord is now available as an Accordance module. The Book of Concord is a collection of creeds, confessions, and catechisms which set forth the historic doctrinal standards of the Lutheran churches. The English translation edited by Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert is a major revision of the older Tappert translation. Taking recent scholarship into account, this edition includes detailed introductions and ...

December 20, 2012 - David Lang — In this series of posts, we've been exploring why Matthew sees the slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem as "fulfilling" Jeremiah 31:15, which speaks of Rachel weeping for her lost children at Ramah. In part one of this series, we saw that the connection between Bethlehem and Ramah has to do with Rachel's death in childbirth on the way to Bethlehem. It appears from 1 Samuel that she died and was buried in the vicinity of Ramah. In part two of this series, we looked at the geographical and historical context of Jeremiah 31:15. There we ...

December 19, 2012 - David Lang — In yesterday's post, I began relating how I used Accordance to teach a Sunday School class on why Matthew saw the slaughter of the innocents at Bethlehem as the "fulfillment" of what Jeremiah wrote about Rachel weeping at Ramah. In that post, we saw that Bethlehem and Ramah, at eleven miles apart, are not exactly neighboring towns. The connection between them is not one of proximity, but of historical memory. Genesis 35 tells us that Rachel died in childbirth on the road from Bethel to Bethlehem, and 1 Samuel appears to indicate that she was ...

December 18, 2012 - David Lang — In Matthew's account of Jesus' birth, he points to specific events as the "fulfillment" of several Old Testament "prophecies." For the past several weeks, I've been exposing my Sunday School class to these Old Testament passages in their original context to show how Matthew's narrative is much more nuanced and profound than most of us realize. I wrote about doing this with the Immanuel prophecy in a previous post. This past Sunday, I talked about how Matthew saw the slaughter of the innocents as the fulfillment of Jeremiah's imagery of Rachel ...

December 14, 2012 - Helen Brown — We were confident that we would have The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew ready for the ETS/SBL meetings, and indeed, we almost did, but then we discovered one entire letter was missing! We now have the complete set and are pleased to announce its release to those who already bought it, and to those who wish to take advantage of the introductory special through the end of December 2012. < > This is the complete 8 volume set of The Dictionary of Classical Hebrew, edited by David J.A. Clines, a completely new and innovative work....