Not long ago I stumbled across a post on a Bible software forum that taught me a new word: "pangram." I had to Google it to find out that a pangram is a sentence that includes every letter of the alphabet. A classic example is that odd sentence used to display all the characters of a typeface: "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." The forum post I read cited Deuteronomy 4:34 and Zephaniah 3:8 as examples of pangrams in the Hebrew Bible, then asked how to find a pangram in the Greek New Testament or Septuagint.

Now, I have no idea why the person who wrote the post wanted to find such sentences in Greek, but I could certainly see it being useful in an introductory Greek course. As students are trying to learn the Greek alphabet, the instructor could assign a few sentences to read which would force them to deal with every letter.

Of course, regardless of whether such a search has any practical value, it is an interesting challenge, and it got me wondering how such a search could be constructed using Accordance. Here's what I came up with:

By using the asterisk wildcard on either side of each letter of the alphabet, I told Accordance to look for any word containing each letter. By joining those together with the AND command, I told Accordance it must find a verse containing at least one word with each letter of the Greek alphabet. Note also that I've enclosed each search term in quotation marks to make sure I am searching inflected forms (the words as they appear in the text) rather than lexical forms (the dictionary form of each word).

This search finds two verses in the New Testament which contain all 24 letters of the Greek alphabet: Matthew 5:30 and Revelation 2:10. However, Revelation 2:10 does not contain a true pangram, since the entire alphabet is contained in two sentences rather than just one. To make sure we find all the places where a single sentence contains all the letters of the alphabet, we simply need to click the plus icon to the right of the search field, then set the first pop-up to Scope and the second pop-up to Sentence.

When you hit return to run the search, Revelation 2:10 is eliminated, while a number of long sentences spanning more than one verse are added.

By the way, when I ran a similar search on the Hebrew Bible, Accordance found 17 verses, including Deuteronomy 4:34. However, it did not find Zephaniah 3:8, the second example given in the original post. The reason is that Zephaniah 3:8 has all the letters except sin. Since it does contain the letter shin, whether or not you consider Zephaniah 3:8 as a pangram depends on whether you treat sin and shin as one letter or two.

So there you have it. If you ever need to find sentences with every letter of the alphabet (and who doesn't?), Accordance can do it easily and accurately.

Accordance 10.1.7 was released over the weekend, free of course to all users of Accordance 10 (MacAppStore users will need to wait a few days). The improvements and bug fixes are listed here. The Help files have also been revised and updated.

Accordance for iOS 1.6.5 is now live in the App Store, with more bug fixes, and the improved display implemented in 1.6.

GNT28-T.syntax is now available to work with the GNT28-T. It is a free upgrade for users who own the GNT-T.syntax, but must be ordered in our store. This module provides full syntactical analysis and searching for the Gospels and Acts, with more books expected to be added soon at no further charge.

A while back, I started a series of posts on Accordance Preferences. So far, we've covered the General Settings (Part 1 and 2), the Appearance Settings, and the Workspace Settings. Now we're ready to tackle the Text Display Settings.

This is where you can set the font, size, color, style, etc. of text in all your biblical and extrabiblical Text modules. But before I focus on all the specific options in this Preferences panel, let me give you an overview of the various ways you can change the appearance of a Bible text.

Customizing the display of a single pane: Let's say you have a Search tab with two parallel panes: one containing the English Standard Version and the other containing the King James. You want to change the King James text so that it uses an Old English font. To do this, you don't need to go to the Preferences. Simply click the gear menu above the pane containing the KJV and choose Set Text Pane Display… (or use the keyboard shortcut Command-T).

This will open the Set Text Display dialog for that pane. In this dialog, you can choose from a variety of predefined themes, or you can customize a theme to look however you like. To set the text to an Old English font, click the Customize Theme button, then choose the desired font from the Font submenu under Contents.

When you click OK, your Search tab should now look like this:

By simply clicking OK to close the Text Display dialog, we are essentially telling Accordance to apply our font change to that specific text pane and that pane only. Thus, if we were to open a second pane containing the KJV, it would appear with the default font settings rather than the Old English font we chose.

Customizing the default display of a specific Text module: If you want every instance of the KJV to use the Old English font, you need to open the Set Text Pane Display dialog, make your selections, and then click Use As Default. An alert will ask you to confirm that you want to save those settings as the default for that particular Bible text. Click Save, then click OK to dismiss the Set Text Display dialog. From that point on, every time you open the KJV, it will appear in the Old English font.

Customizing the default display of several Text modules: Did you know you can select multiple Text modules in the Library and set the default display of all of them at once? Let's say you want to use the Old English font for other Bibles such as Wycliffe, Tyndale, the Geneva Bible, and the Bishops' Bible. You can simply command-click each of these Text modules in your Library, then choose Set Default Display from the gear menu at the bottom of the Library panel.

When you choose Old English in the dialog and click OK, the Old English font now becomes the default for those Bibles you selected.

Customizing the default display of all Text modules: Now, what if you want to set the default display of all your Text modules in one fell swoop. That's the time to open the Preferences dialog and choose Text Display from the list of settings categories. Make changes here and click OK, and your changes will be applied to every Text module in your Library. For example, if you choose Adobe Garamond in this dialog, all your Text modules will appear in that font. That includes the King James and other older Bibles that you had previously customized to use the Old English font. Once you make a change to the Text Display settings of the Preferences dialog, any custom settings you had for specific Bibles will have to be redone.

It is therefore important that you make any global changes in the Preferences dialog before you customize the default display of individual Text modules.

In my next post, we'll look at the various display options in detail.

Yesterday I talked about the Search menu, which conveniently lists everything you need to fill in a blank search box. Among the options in this menu are the various Search Commands in the Enter Command submenu. Today I'd like to point out something about that submenu: its divider line.

This line divides the list of commands into two kinds, and we even have special names for them. The seven commands above the line are what we call connecting commands. The eleven commands below the line are known as stand-alone commands.

Connecting commands do exactly what the name indicates: they connect two search terms in some way, defining the relationship between them. Thus, if I use the <AND> command between the words "Moses" and "Aaron," I am looking for cases where Moses and Aaron appear together. If I use the <FOLLOWED BY> command between the two words, I am looking for cases where Moses and Aaron appear together, and where Moses comes first and Aaron second.

The connecting nature of these commands can even be seen in the angle brackets used to enclose them when they appear in the Search box. They essentially point to the terms they connect. (You see? There really is a method to our madness!)

By contrast, stand-alone commands do not connect other search terms, but stand alone as search terms in their own right. For example, the command [COUNT 1] can be entered by itself to find every word that appears only one time in the search text. Note how the stand-alone commands are enclosed in square brackets—they don't point to anything else.

As search terms in their own right, stand-alone commands can be joined with other search terms by connecting commands. For example, [COUNT 1] <AND> Moses would find any word appearing only one time, together with the word "Moses."

Understanding this simple distinction between connecting commands and stand-alone commands can help you to know when to use each type of command, and when to use them together.

As a writer, I have often known the mockery of the blank page. It glares at you, laughing at your struggles to fill it with something meaningful.

As Accordance users, we are constantly presented with a blank search box, ever ready to be put to use. Experienced users know exactly what to do with it, but new users may experience something of the mockery I feel when trying to fill a blank page. They may conceive of a search they would like to do, but how to construct it? They know Accordance is capable of much more than simple word and phrase searches, but how do they go about learning all the Boolean commands, wildcard symbols, and other tools that make such power-searching possible?

Thankfully, everything you need to fill in that blank search box—and I mean everything—is always readily available through one of the menus at the top of the screen. Can you guess which one?

As I'm sure you guessed, the aptly named Search menu presents you with everything you need to fill in the blank. Not sure what word to search for? Choose Enter Words…. Want to search a Bible with Key numbers for a particular key number? Choose Enter Key Numbers…. If your search text is a grammatically tagged Greek or Hebrew text, these menu items will appear as Enter Lexical Forms… and Enter Inflected Forms….

Beyond simply helping you enter words and key numbers, the Search menu also includes submenus listing every search command (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), every wildcard symbol, and (in the case of tagged texts) every grammatical and syntactical tag. You don't have to memorize these options or go digging through documentation even to realize they're available; just go to the Search menu and browse through the submenus. Not sure what a command or symbol does, but want to try it out? Simply select it from the menu to insert it into the search box.

By making all these options readily available, Accordance does its best to eliminate the potential mockery of the blank search box. And while there are still aspects of these commands and symbols which need to be learned, you always have them listed in a convenient place whenever you need them.

If you've never paid much attention to the Search menu, you now understand it's importance. Just remember to look there whenever you need help filling in the blank.

Monday, I wrote about a panel discussion at a recent conference which compared the use of the words βασιλεια (kingdom) and ευαγγελιον (gospel) in the Greek New Testament. To see the relevant data for myself, I did a search for βασιλεια <OR> ευαγγελιον, then chose Analysis Graph from the Stats and Graphs icon of the Search tab. I then chose to have the Analysis Graph break down this search by Lexical form (LEX).

The resulting graph plotted the frequency of these two lexical forms across the entire New Testament, and I made some observations about what it revealed. I also mentioned, in passing, that when Matthew uses the term "gospel," he is speaking of the "gospel of the kingdom."

Now, by graphing the use of each Greek lexical form separately, the Analysis Graph does not make it easy to see where the two terms are used together in a phrase like "gospel of the kingdom." So how would we see something like that?

It's in situations like this that it helps to know enough about Accordance to know when to zig and when to zag. The Analysis Graph takes whatever search you do and then breaks it down by whatever category you choose. Thus, even if we were to search for the phrase "gospel of the kingdom," the Analysis Graph will never graph the occurrences of that phrase. Instead, it will go right on graphing each occurrence of "gospel" and each occurrence of "kingdom." In short, zigging won't work in this case.

There is, however, a way to accomplish this by zagging. The Hits Graph is an older, simpler analytic tool which does one thing: plots the frequency of occurrence of the search term. Thus, if you search for a single word, it will plot the frequency of occurrence of that word. If you search for two words connected by an <OR> command, it will plot the frequency of occurrence of both those words together. If you search for a phrase, it will plot the frequency of occurrence of that phrase. You get the idea.

Now, although the Hits Graph doesn't do the kinds of comparisons that are possible with the Analysis Graph, it does include a little known feature that can come in really handy: the Keep button. In the days before the Analysis Graph, this was the only way to compare two different graphs. In the case of our comparison of βασιλεια (kingdom) and ευαγγελιον (gospel), we would have first done a search for one of those terms and then done a HITS graph. Now, because the HITS graph is dynamically linked to the search tab, it will automatically update when you do a new search—that is, unless you click the Keep button on the graph before doing the new search. Thus, we would search for βασιλεια, open a HITS graph, click the Keep button, return to the search tab and search for ευαγγελιον. The resulting HITS graph will look the same as the Analysis Graph we did the other day, showing the frequency of occurrence of each term separately.

Obviously, the Analysis Graph is easier to use than the HITS Graph for comparing two lexical forms like this, which is why few Accordance users even bother with the Keep button any more. But it still comes in handy, like when you want to compare the use of a phrase like "gospel of the kingdom" (εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας). After doing a HITS graph of βασιλεια, clicking the Keep button, and doing a new search for ευαγγελιον, simply click the Keep button a second time, and search for εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας. The resulting HITS Graph will look like this:

Here we can see that the three occurrences of the phrase "gospel of the kingdom" correspond exactly to the first three occurrences of the word for "gospel" in Matthew. Nowhere else is this phrase used, though Matthew frequently uses "kingdom" outside the phrase "gospel of the kingdom."

If you find yourself wanting to compare the frequency of phrases like this, the Analysis Graph won't work because it wants to break everything down into individual words, but a HITS Graph with the Keep button will let you compare each phrase you search for. In Accordance, even when zigging won't work, there's usually a way to zag.

Last week, I was busy exhibiting Accordance at the Gospel Coalition's National Conference here in Orlando. During a few of the sessions, I stepped away from the booth to listen to the speakers. One of these was a panel discussion entitled "Did Jesus Preach the Gospel?" In it Don Carson, Kevin DeYoung, Tim Keller, and John Piper discussed the distinction some interpreters make between the "gospel" that Paul preached and Jesus' own emphasis on the coming of the "kingdom."

It was a lively, interesting, and collegial discussion. The speakers all agreed that the Pauline epistles use the word "gospel" more frequently than the Gospels themselves, and that the Gospels use the word "kingdom" more frequently than Paul. But they disagreed with the notion that we misread the Gospels by reading them through a Pauline lens, along with the related notion that we ought instead to read Paul through the interpretive lens of Jesus' message about the coming of the kingdom. They argued that the difference in vocabulary between the Gospels and Paul does not indicate two conflicting messages, and that any attempt to give one priority over the other represented the formation of a canon within a canon. In fact, Carson pointed out that the language of "kingdom" is likewise infrequent in the Gospel of John, so this line of reasoning leads to the Synoptic Gospels becoming a "canon within a canon within a canon." He then pointed out that the belief that Matthew and Luke were dependent on Mark ends up leading to Mark becoming the "canon within a canon within a canon within a canon!"

All this made me curious about the data on which they were basing these observations, and of course, Accordance makes gathering that data a breeze. So when the session was over I returned to our booth and searched the Greek New Testament for βασιλεια <OR> ευαγγελιον. I then chose Analysis Graph from the Stats and Graphs icon of the Search tab.

The Analysis Graph shows the frequency of occurrence of various criteria across your search range. By choosing Lex (for lexical form) from the pop-up menu at the top right, I can compare the use of βασιλεια (kingdom) and ευαγγελιον (gospel) throughout the New Testament.

Looking at this graph, we see that "kingdom" is indeed far less frequent in John than in the other gospels. Yet we also see that while "kingdom" appears frequently in Luke, it is relatively infrequent in the other Lukan book of Acts.

Another interesting thing to note is how much more frequent "kingdom" is in Matthew and Luke than in Mark. It would appear from this that rather than Mark, it is the hypothetical source known as Q, which allegedly contained the sayings of Jesus common to Matthew and Luke, which would comprise the "canon within a canon within a canon within a canon" which Carson mentioned.

With respect to "gospel," it certainly does receive more attention in the Pauline corpus than anywhere else, and is almost completely absent from the General Epistles and the writings of John (for whom "kingdom" isn't a major emphasis either). Interestingly, of all the Evangelists, Mark is the one who places the greatest emphasis on "gospel." Matthew, on the other hand, is interesting because almost all of his uses of the term refer to "the gospel of the kingdom."

I will leave it to the scholars to draw meaningful conclusions from all these observations, and of course, this search might need to be supplemented with searches for other related terms. Still, I hope you can see how analytic tools like this can make it easy to spot phenomena in the Bible worth exploring.

What about you? Can you spot any interesting aspects of the above graph which I've failed to mention?

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Accordance preferences. We've already covered the General and Appearance settings. Today, we'll look at the Workspace settings.

The first three options all have to do with the look and behavior of workspace zones. The active zone in a workspace is highlighted with a certain color. You can change this color by choosing a new one from the pop-up menu labeled Active Zone Color.

The next option lets you specify the maximum number of zones that can be opened in any given workspace. If you have a small screen, you may find that the third, fourth, or fifth zone that opens is too just too small to be useful. If you set the Default Maximum Zones pop-up to two, then Accordance can open no more than two zones in that workspace. If you open a resource that requires a third zone, Accordance will display that new zone in a separate workspace.

Now, even if you choose to set a maximum number of zones, that only prevents Accordance from opening more than that number of zones in a workspace. You are still free to drag a tab into a separate zone in order to create more zones than your default maximum.

Another option for small screens (or even those with large screens who like to save a little space) is Hide tab area if only a single tab. When you check this option, Accordance will show only a small title area for zones that only contain a single tab. As soon as a second tab is opened in that zone, the zone title area will increase in height to accommodate the two tabs.

Workspace with "Hide tab area" option unchecked

Workspace with "Hide tab area" option checked

The next three options have to do with how the Library and Instant Details panels operate. First, you can choose to have the Library always open as a popover rather than as a panel. Whenever you have a workspace that is too narrow or has too many zones to allow room for the Library to open as a panel, Accordance will automatically open the Library as a panel. If you want the Library to appear that way no matter how much room there is, simply check this option. Whatever your preference, you can always override it by holding down the shift key when you click the Library icon in the toolbar. In other words, if your default is to have the Library display as a panel, you can always force it to display as a popover by holding the shift key. If your default is to have it display as a popover, you can likewise force it to display as a panel.

Workspace with Library displayed as a panel

Workspace with Library displayed as a popover

If you would like the Library to be open whenever you create a new workspace, leave the previous option unchecked and check Add Library to new workspaces. If you would like the Instant Details to be displayed whenever you create a new workspace, check Add Instant Details to new workspaces.

The final option is to Limit window size of new workspaces. With this option checked, Accordance will open new workspaces at a specific size rather than having them fill the screen. If you have a really large monitor and you want Accordance to remain in one portion of the screen, you might want to consider this option.

When I was in college, I decided to take Greek and Hebrew at the same time. The Classics department didn't offer Biblical Greek, so I had to take Classical Greek with its dizzying array of paradigms and its wild-and-wooly approach to word order. By comparison, Biblical Hebrew was a breeze: there were only three "tenses," a relatively small vocabulary, and a relatively simple sentence structure (at least at first!). I left college with the firm conviction that Greek is a more difficult language than Hebrew.

Then I went to seminary, where I took Greek and Hebrew again. There I was surprised to find that to a man (and woman), my fellow seminarians firmly regarded Greek as the easier of the two languages. I thought they were all crazy, until I began to see the differences between their initial experience of Greek and my own. They were learning Biblical Greek, with its much simpler (and often much like English) sentence structure. The vocabulary was limited to words in the New Testament, and many of these words were already familiar to those who grew up hearing them in sermons and Bible studies. Finally, there was the motivation factor: if they learned Greek, they would be able to speak with the same authority as their pastor or favorite theologian. But how many pastors and theologians had they heard spit out words like chesed and chaim?

For these seminarians, Greek was at least somewhat familiar, while Hebrew was entirely foreign: read from right-to-left, with strange consonants and even stranger vowels, some of which represented unusual sounds. Even the grammatical terminology was different, with binyanim, "aspect," and "construct state" instead of tense, voice, mood, and case. Thus, they saw it as self-evident that Hebrew is harder to learn than Greek.

I'm here to tell you it's not. Hebrew is a fun language to learn and a relatively simple one to get started learning. If you can get past its apparent foreignness, you're well on your way.

That's one of the things I like about The First Hebrew Primer by EKS Publishing. Billed as “The adult beginner’s path to learning Biblical Hebrew, this grammar takes the time to help you get past the apparent foreignness of the language. For example, most Hebrew grammars will cover the consonants in one chapter and the vowels in a second, presenting you with a chart to memorize and lots of facts about which letters are silent, what a dagesh is and how it affects the pronunciation of some letters, etc. The student then has to absorb all this information just to get started. The First Hebrew Primer takes a different approach, teaching a handful of consonants and vowels together and then showing how you could use them to write simple English words like "Bob" and "odd." The Accordance module also incorporates the "audio companion" to the grammar, which you can play to hear how all of the Hebrew is pronounced. If you're trying to learn Hebrew outside a classroom setting, that help is invaluable.

Another thing I personally like about The First Hebrew Primer is that it teaches the script or cursive form of Hebrew in addition to the block letters you typically see in print.

I learned to write in script in college, and found it made writing Hebrew much quicker than trying to use block letters. That in turn, made doing the exercises much less painful. Over the years, I've forgotten many of the script letters, and when I was in Israel a few years ago I found myself struggling to make out the street signs and graffiti that were written that way. I'm personally glad to now have a refresher in script, and would recommend you take the time to learn it before you do too many of the exercises.

Beyond the alphabet, The First Hebrew Primer introduces just enough of certain concepts to get you reading Hebrew as quickly as possible. By chapter four, you're already reading simple sentences in Hebrew. The exercises in the Primer help you to put the concepts you've learned into practice, and the answer key at the back will help you to gauge your progress.

If you've ever wanted to teach yourself Hebrew, I strongly recommend you try The First Hebrew Primer. If you do, I think you'll come to agree with me that learning Hebrew is much easier than it looks. You can then wink at those Greek-biased seminarians and say, "Aw, what are you complaining about? Hebrew ain't hard!"

The First Hebrew Primer, which includes the text, the answer book, and the audio companion is normally $79.99, but is now on sale for just $64.99. Don't wait, though. The sale ends April 15, 2013.

This is the third in a series of posts on Accordance preferences. We've already covered the General settings here and here. Today, we'll look at the Appearance settings.

The Appearance preferences present you with a number of broad ways you can change the look of Accordance. While this is not the place to go to change the font used in your various texts and tools (click Text Display or Tool Display for that), Appearance is the place to go when you want to make more fundamental changes, such as the maximum width of a line of text or how quickly to auto-scroll.

The options under Text Appearance let you make some interesting typographic changes. The first of these lets you specify the maximum width of text in a window. For example, if you have a wide screen and a workspace with only one tab, you may end up with a very wide column of text.

Since this can be hard to read, you may want to specify that a column of text can be only six inches wide. To do that check Limit text width and then drag the slider to six inches. When you click OK, even the widest window will show a column of text no wider than six inches. Any additional space will appear as white space to the left and right of the text.

The next text display option is to use ligatures in fonts that support it. Ligatures are combinations of letters that share common elements, such as fl and fi. The following screen shots show the same text with the use ligatures option unchecked and checked:

Without ligatures

With ligatures

Remember that ligatures are only supported in certain fonts, so you won't see a difference with older, legacy fonts.

Another text appearance option is to use European verse notation. With this option checked, Accordance will display verse references according to European conventions. It will also interpret verse references in searches accordingly.

A similar option is to have Accordance use SBL standard abbreviations for Bible book names. Check this option, and Accordance will display book names using SBL abbreviations.

In addition to the Text Appearance options just mentioned, Accordance offers a few Other appearance options. Here you can set the font size of text in Browser panes such as the Library and the Tool window's Table of Contents. You can also adjust the speed of auto-scrolling, choose to use a white background for pictures instead of the default black, and turn on or off the automatic widening of the Tool window's Table of Contents browser when you mouse over it.