A good review of Accordance v Logos

[Michel Gilbert]

 

around mid-April, I'll start my project of tagging the Data Bank to Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Joaquín Sanmartín's Dictionary of the Ugaritic Language in the Alphabetic Tradition, Daniel Sivan's Ugaritic Grammar, and Mark Smith's The Ugaritic Ba'al Cycle vols I and II. Looking forward to it!

 

With kind regards

 

Peter Christensen

 

 

That's great news Peter.

 

Regards,

 

Michel

[Enoch]

Quote is not working.

 

 

 

 

I don't know any laymen who have the intellectual capacity to understand all the resources in Logos & Accordance. I wonder how many people in all the world can do that? Are all those who can't handle Old Church Slavonic, संस्कृता वाक्, & Sumerian laymen?

 

If I were to ditch the general Bible software & use the DSSEL, how would I do computer based Bible research? The DSS are a corner of Biblical studies to be sure, but hardly so important that you could ditch everything else. Of course there are a handful of specialists in various fields who would want to do more than use Bible software. But how should persons who know Greek, Hebrew, & Aramaic & are graduates of both seminaries & universities be called laymen???

 

IMHO, to speak of laymen vs scholars is the fallacy of binary thinking. I suppose we could all be rated on a scale of 0-10 on such a scale even with decimals added. (Hopefully our rating will not be 3.14159265358979323846264338327950.) And sometimes those who know the least, know the most. IMHO, the resources of Logos & Accordance go beyond the intellectual ability of everyone who uses them.

 

I would like someone to give me 3 New Testament verses which cannot be understood without recourse to the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library, verses which cannot be understood using the resources in Logos & Accordance.

 

As to crashing, yes I do experience Accordance crashes. But it starts up quickly again.

Edited January 6, 2015 by Enoch

[Natan Rubenstein]

The Dead Sea Scrolls are a part of a larger component of Second Temple Judaism. It's not a small subsection, but part of a much larger area of specialists. In my review phase of these softwares, I am currently analyzing each software in terms of their integrity of the reproductions. Quite frankly, reproductions are less than a facsimile, but reproductions gained traction of course with the growth and ease of computer software. To my mind, manuscripts are always predominate. You know why E.Y. Kutscher gave a negative critique of Segal's Mishnaic Hebrew Grammar, don't you? I've read Hebrew texts since I was a kid! I don't need some parsing crutch to help me along, and I find that my students who do use software are not sufficiently mastering the language (especially those without a Jewish background). This was not case before software became so prevalent!

 

My recommendation of DSSEL was for the scrolls. If you want reproductions which mirror the fragment as much as reproductions can and having images for the fragments, then I would recommend DSSEL to you (be aware that DSSEL does not contain all the recent scrolls publications but I am told they are updating it). I did not even know Accordance had the scrolls, for no one in scholarship seems to use the Accordance's reconstructions (just peruse the front matter of a series like Studies in the Judaean Desert [sTDJ] and see what resource is referenced). I would also like to say, Dr. J., you are gravely misinformed if you think the DSS images you offer in Accordance are superior to the images found on the Leon Levy Website. To even suggest as much leads to me wonder whether you've even used them! Moreover, you also do realize that you have only the St. Mark's Monastery scrolls images (by Trever). These were and are an important history of the images, but dear sir, you must use proper language and say, we have some images of the scrolls, and a vast majority of the others we do not.

 

Some of my best students have been those who have mastered their research by means of reading their sources, analyzing their texts, and using the tools of philology and linguistics to tease out the issues in the text. This sort of research is done in the library, in the stacks, not it bible software.

[Timothy Jenney]

Hi, Natan!

 

I think you misunderstood me. I did not mean to imply Accordance's DSS images are better than, or as complete as, DSSEL. I merely pointed out that we had a collection of DSS images. I also agree that using the actual manuscripts is the ideal, but few of us get that sort of opportunity, especially on a daily basis. We must make do with facsimilies, photographs, and transcriptions. I do have hopes that Accordance resources will expand to include more DSS images, as well as images of other important texts. Meanwhile, Accordance offers accessibility to those at some remove from a major research library and with no active connection to the internet required.

 

It's true that some students use Bible software as a crutch. It's also true that Bible software offers today's scholars many advantages, advantages I (for instance) did not enjoy when I completed my doctorate in 1993 (UMich). My dissertation included some statistical analysis, which I did by hand with Evan-Shoshan and Moulten-Geden at my side. Accordance would have saved me months of research! When I needed to consult a facsimile of a text, I was fortunate enough to find it at a nearby university, as I was teaching at a small college in Minnesota at the time. (The alternative would have been a very long drive to the University of Chicago.) Today, that text (and many, many others) reside nicely on my laptop, where I can consult it at need.

 

One of the other things I enjoy most about Bible software is being able to explore the text with a class in a seminar. We can search resources together, find parallel passages, check definitions, look for appearances of a word or phrase in other corpora, etc.—all without interrupting the creative process with endless trips to the library. Research libraries still have their place, mind you, but 80-90% of the work can be done anywhere, at any time. I think that is a great advantage.

 

Bible study software has come a long way since 1994, but it still has room to grow and improve. Just as I couldn't have imagined today's Bible software back in 1993, I can't envision what sorts of improvements tomorrow's scholars will enjoy twenty years from now.

[Peter Brylov Christensen]

 

...Except that the DSS is a small subsection of Biblical Studies (albeit a very important one). That also goes for the ANE, although I hate to admit it. There are so many small, but vast fields of study being relevant to the Bible in which you could easily spend at least five lives and still not be able to finish your work. Even though I personally believe that in order to understand TaNaK at all, you need to know your Gilgamesh, Atra-Hasis, Enuma Elish in Akkadian and The Ugaritic Ba'al Cycle in Ugaritic and so on, I still wouldn't dare say that other fields of study are less important in an academic sense, nor that a lack of ANE materials makes Accordance unfit for academic audiences. It all depends on what you favor the most. Accordance wouldn't have survived very long if it only focused on one little niche field as it would only attract a minimum of people, be it scholars or laymen. Besides, it is a Bible study program in the broadest sense of the term after all, and being true to that, it has to branch out into many fields and not just one.

 

All in all, I must say that it is very unfair to pass such harsh judgment based on your specific narrow field of study alone, which is but a drop in the ocean that makes up Biblical Studies. The lack of photographs for the DSS is a genuine and serious problem, but this is most likely due to licensing problems, which can be a real pain to fix. These things take time and is a constant work in progress - I would guess that this is also why there aren't any pictures available for the Leningrad and Aleppo Codices in Accordance (and any other Bible Software out there to my knowledge). Actually, if you ask me, I'd rather have the development team focus on getting hold of the latter first over images of all the DSS scrolls. Even if it also meant that the ANE texts would have to be put on hold, too.

 

In spite of these problems, the program still excels when it comes to textual comparisons, presenting a broad field of Bible editions in different languages: While photographs obviously are superior to a facsimile or a reproduction, it is not unusual for scholars to mostly work with these reproductions and only consulting photographs when there is a serious textual problem, making it only a small fragment of their total textual studies. I'm sort of unorthodox in that way, seeing that I always, and if possible, consult photographs first no matter how trivial the issue, but I do acknowledge that it is a major time sink - sometimes unnecessarily so. But I have only my own stubbornness and meticulousness to blame for that.

Finally, I do wholly agree with you that any Bible Software has the inherent risk of making people lazy when it comes to learning and maintaining languages, which is why it must always be used with great care. As such, I'd always strongly recommend against using it until a sufficient level of mastery is attained. I spend at least 8 hours a day reading texts the old school way, be it Hebrew or Sumerian, and I refuse to make things easy for myself by using a concordance or the Instant Details in Accordance.

 

With kind regards

 

Peter Christensen

 

*EDIT* Didn't see Dr. J's post until I had posted mine.

Edited January 6, 2015 by Pchris

[Λύχνις Δαν]

Natan: "...and I find that my students who do use software are not sufficiently mastering the language (especially those without a Jewish background). This was not case before software became so prevalent!"

 

PChris : "Finally, I do wholly agree with you that any Bible Software has the inherent risk of making people lazy when it comes to learning and maintaining languages, which is why it must always be used with great care. As such, I'd always strongly recommend against using it until a sufficient level of mastery is attained. I spend at least 8 hours a day reading texts the old school way, be it Hebrew or Sumerian, and I refuse to make things easy for myself by using a concordance or the Instant Details in Accordance."

 

This issue has been commented upon before. The fault of course is not with the software and indeed it can be used in such a way as to minimize this problem. One can disable ID and one can not open a parallel pane when reading the OL text. I don't quite do it this way but I do read the text unaided (this is why I use flashcards so much - to learn vocab sufficiently to do this, though they are not perfect for several reasons) several times and then I struggle with the parsing and so on. Then I start to use methods available to look up and double check what I have constructed. I usually write my own translation before comparison with an existing one. It is not the same as looking up manually in resources I grant, and I believe that effort has a correlation in absorption so unfortunately SW can tend to work against that. People using software need to be aware of this and be disciplined in their use. One can of course cheat with printed materials as well - get an interlinear or read English beside the Greek/Hebrew/Ugaritic etc. without making sufficient effort on ones own.

 

Oh to have 8 hours a day to read ! Nice job you have there Peter.

 

Thx

D

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi Natan,

 

Just a few thoughts.

 

In the course of your review, I think it would also help to review the history of Accordance. Their claim of academic strength, especially in the area of original language study, has become a sort of tradition in the company. At the beginning of this tradition, it was inconceivable to have a large number of manuscripts or any other images in the program. There wasn't enough disk space. A week ago I put a 32 mb gb micro ssd card in my wife's smart phone. That card stores 1600 times more data than my first hard drive.

 

I think you should define "scholarship" in your review - along the lines of using original sources, manuscripts and critical editions, reference grammars, etc., vs how scholars use Bible software to save time at various points in their research. For example, would you accuse the Bar Ilan Responsa Project, with its focus on scholarly editions of texts (i.e., mss vs printed editions), of being unscholarly? Again, in the history of editions, they are making progress. Perhaps one day there will be synoptic presentations of all the witnesses, along with mss images. One of the scholarly uses of software is to cut and paste (hopefully) Unicode text to edit and save time typing.

 

Finally, at one point you "did not even know Accordance had the scrolls, for no one in scholarship seems to use the Accordance reconstructions." Were you also or are you still unaware that Acc is tagging DSS Hebrew for their syntax database? Dr. Holmstedt mentioned this today again: "I decided to push our syntactic tagging into more texts (i.e., DSS and epigraphy)" at

http://www.accordancebible.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14989&do=findComment&comment=72423

I'm not a DSS scholar, although I did buy the DSSEL for teaching a course on them. But if I was, I think that I would also avail myself of Accordance. I bought Accordance for the Hebrew syntax database. It was worth the entire price just for it. In the same way, I suspect that DSS scholars will pay the whole price for the DSS syntax database when it becomes available.

 

Regards,

 

Michel

Edited January 6, 2015 by Michel Gilbert

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi,

 

The discussion about Accordance offering more manuscript images got me thinking: if Acc ever offered cuneiform images, how would it handle writing on the edges of tablets? Would they use 3-D photography and offer the glasses as a download for our 3-D printers? Or, even better yet, would our 3-D printer replicate the tablet exactly? They could also offer the same capabilities for hieroglyphs, and anything else from the ANE for that matter. They could add a category in the Info Pane - 3-D replicas of biblical and ANE artefacts - scaled down temple complexes, cult paraphernalia, houses, clothing, weapons, etc. Perhaps I should post this as a Feature Request.

 

Regards,

 

Michel

[Peter Brylov Christensen]

Hi Michel

 

The InscriptiFact Project solves this by having several photographs of the same tablets, but it's an interesting feature that you mentioned, which certainly would make it a lot easier to work with..

 

With kind regards

 

Peter Christensen

Edited January 6, 2015 by Pchris

[ukfraser]

Dr j

You state:

 

Personally, I find Accordance (and have found Accordance, for more than 20 years!) an excellent academic tool.

 

I am a lay leader and am very much aware of how poor my 'formal training' was and One of the things i really value about accordance is that not only are tools available for study but that i have benefited from this forum, podcasts, webinars and blogs as it has opened areas for ongoing personal development.

 

With the demise of christian bookshops here in the uk, my library has really benefitted from the recommendations and guidance.

 

It took me ages to find a suitable bible study resource when i moved to mac, (my background was with zondervan software on windows) but i dont have any hesitation in recommending accordance as a must have, especially by the 'love' and desire to help shown in the discussions even when in disagreement which i have found not to be always the case on some other Christian forums.

[Timothy Jenney]

Thank you so much, Fraser!

 

I hadn't really thought about how hard it is to find a local Christian bookstore these days. We have that same issue here in the US, though.

 

On behalf of the whole Accordance team, I can say it is our honor to be able to assist you.

[Robert Holmstedt]

Michel,

 

"I bought Accordance for the Hebrew syntax database. It was worth the entire price just for it. In the same way, I suspect that DSS scholars will pay the whole price for the DSS syntax database when it becomes available."

 

I am thrilled to read this. The syntax project has been (and continues to be) both exhilarating and humbling. It's very rewarding to know that a few other intrepid souls find is worthwhile.

[Michel Gilbert]

Hi Robert,

 

It's worth much more than I paid; it's almost priceless.

 

I praise God for the syntax database. Thanks for your work.

 

Regards,

 

Michel

[jeremyduncan]

I just bought the new upgrade from a competitor to Accordance and it is unbearably slow. I'm using a new MacBook Pro with 16GB of Ram and I can't even scroll smoothly through content.

 

It feels like bad form to needlessly badmouth another software package on those forums but minor quibbles with Accordance aside, thank you for keeping a healthy balance between acquiring solid resources, and keeping the actual software running smoothly and reliably.

[Abram K-J]

It feels like bad form to needlessly badmouth another software package on those forums but minor quibbles with Accordance aside, thank you for keeping a healthy balance between acquiring solid resources, and keeping the actual software running smoothly and reliably.

 

Agreed!

[Enoch]

Natan: "...and I find that my students who do use software are not sufficiently mastering the language (especially those without a Jewish background). This was not case before software became so prevalent!"

 

PChris : "Finally, I do wholly agree with you that any Bible Software has the inherent risk of making people lazy when it comes to learning and maintaining languages, which is why it must always be used with great care. As such, I'd always strongly recommend against using it until a sufficient level of mastery is attained. I spend at least 8 hours a day reading texts the old school way, be it Hebrew or Sumerian, and I refuse to make things easy for myself by using a concordance or the Instant Details in Accordance."

 

This issue has been commented upon before. The fault of course is not with the software and indeed it can be used in such a way as to minimize this problem. One can disable ID and one can not open a parallel pane when reading the OL text. I don't quite do it this way but I do read the text unaided (this is why I use flashcards so much - to learn vocab sufficiently to do this, though they are not perfect for several reasons) several times and then I struggle with the parsing and so on. Then I start to use methods available to look up and double check what I have constructed. I usually write my own translation before comparison with an existing one. It is not the same as looking up manually in resources I grant, and I believe that effort has a correlation in absorption so unfortunately SW can tend to work against that. People using software need to be aware of this and be disciplined in their use. One can of course cheat with printed materials as well - get an interlinear or read English beside the Greek/Hebrew/Ugaritic etc. without making sufficient effort on ones own.

 

Oh to have 8 hours a day to read ! Nice job you have there Peter.

 

Thx

D

As to the crutchophobia, I was taught in my first Greek class that you should not use things like interlinears & analytical lexicons. But that was awful advice, IMHO. I remember my bitter frustration in feeling conscience bound to obey the teacher on this. One day I came across a strange Greek word in 1 John, it was the word ἕν.

 

I ransacked Bauer's Lexicon (no Danker yet) trying to find ἕν. But you can look all day in Bauer & never find that word. After about an hour of wasted time, I took my NT to a professor like in the hall & asked him what it meant. It turned out to be the neuter of εἷς. Later when I found myself teaching Greek in seminary I told the students to use any help they wanted to use. The way it was put on me, I had to already know the word before I looked it up; but if I already knew the word, I wouldn't need to look it up. Excessive pedantry wastes students' time and inhibits their learning Greek -- IMHO.

Edited January 11, 2015 by Enoch

[Peter Brylov Christensen]

As to the crutchophobia, I was taught in my first Greek class that you should not use things like interlinears & analytical lexicons. But that was awful advice, IMHO. I remember my bitter frustration in feeling conscience bound to obey the teacher on this. One day I came across a strange Greek word in 1 John, it was the word ἕν.

 

I ransacked Bauer's Lexicon (no Danker yet) trying to find ἕν. But you can look all day in Bauer & never find that word. After about an hour of wasted time, I took my NT to a professor like in the hall & asked him what it meant. It turned out to be the neuter of εἷς. Later when I found myself teaching Greek in seminary I told the students to use any help they wanted to use. The way it was put on me, I had to already know the word before I looked it up; but if I already knew the word, I wouldn't need to look it up. Excessive pedantry wastes students' time and inhibits their learning Greek -- IMHO.

 

 

But that is exactly my point - to this day you still remember the sweat and toil of figuring out what in the world ἕν was, and I'm sure that you'll never forget it either. From that day I'm certain that you never mistook ἕν for ἐν and vice versa. Efficiency is for when you already have mastered the language. Until that point you're better off struggling as it will make sure that the words causing you trouble are literally hewn into your mind after hours of reasoning and searching through grammars and lexica - no matter if you actually managed to figure it out by yourself in the end or if you had to give up and ask the teacher, although I'll admit that the former is much more satisfactory on a personal level.

 

I remember having a similar problem when I was learning Hebrew five years ago - I was doing fine most of the time, but one day I ran into a certain word in Job 1:20 - וַיִּשְׁתָּֽחוּ, "he worshipped". No matter how long I searched and looked that day, I was unable to figure out what the root was. After three, maybe four hours of intense yet absolutely fruitless searching, I reluctantly gave up and asked my teacher the next day what it was. When she told me that not only there were two possible choices (חוה or שׁחה), but that the word literally is a rule-breaker no matter how you look at it, I was both relieved and immensely annoyed at the same time. I hadn't been introduced to Ugaritic or Akkadian at that time, so it didn't occur to me to see the verb as a Št-stem of חוה or as a hitpalel of שׁחה with metathesis.

 

With kind regards

 

Peter Christensen

Edited January 11, 2015 by Pchris

[mwdiers]

I too have come from Logos, and before that was a Blbleworks user. I haven't "jumped ship" from Logos exactly, as I have a fairly vast library over there that I use regularly, but I did take advantage of a few competitive crossgrades on the resources that I regularly use (Got me up and running on BDAG, BDB Complete, HALOT and TDNT). For textual studies, I have almost entirely switched to Accordance. I still need to refer to the SESB texts and various apparati over there on occasion (also wish I had the Vulgate in Accordance), but for the most part, what I got in Accordance Essential is more than sufficient.

 

It took some adjustment. Accordance has a very different methodology. I miss the extensive tagging, for example, that lets me hover over a word in an English text and instantly see its corresponding Greek or Hebrew word (the actual word, not just the corresponging Strong's number lema), and it's morphology, without having to reverse-engineer it from a parallel Greek or Hebrew text. I don't miss how almost everything else is slower, and the ridiculous way they do indexing.

Edited January 18, 2015 by mwdiers

[Helen Brown]

The Instant Details display depends on your preferences. You can include the original word and the parsing, it's all about choice.

[Scott Saunders]

As to the crutchophobia, I was taught in my first Greek class that you should not use things like interlinears & analytical lexicons. But that was awful advice, IMHO. I remember my bitter frustration in feeling conscience bound to obey the teacher on this. One day I came across a strange Greek word in 1 John, it was the word ἕν.

Enoch, very well said. Fortunately, I had profs that said it was okay and showed ways to make them work like a type of instant details.

 

My experience has been; it’s not one method over all others, but whichever is wisest for the situation. The right tool for the job kind of thinking.

If the job is to memorize glosses for a list of foreign words by next class, it might not be wise to employ the method for exegeting a key word’s context-sensitive nuance in time for Sunday.

These are only two goals. And who has only two goals or one job—to memorize glosses or exegete a nuance?

Methods were made for man; not man for methods. If you’re not able to get the job done class after class or Sunday after Sunday or whatever after whatever; then don’t keep using the same method and expect different results. JMHO. The proof of the method is in the eating.

“Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”

 

“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

 

“Maintaining the useless becomes a ritual of organized despair [paraphrase].”

(Bruce Lee)

I’ll end on time. Time gets spent and each time adds up. Perseverance is a path you take time after time by a caravan of methods to arrive at knowing the vocabulary. Some people have already arrived and set up castles. The rest of us, let’s keep persevering. I'm right behind you.