Beginner S Bibleworks FAQ

Beginner’s BibleWorks FAQ:

1 Table of Contents:

Definitions

English Searching

Greek Searching

Exercises

Answers

2 Aims

This document is meant to be a helpful and basic introduction to using the BibleWorks software. In this document I will not go over how to install or fix the programs involved, only give a variety of ways to help you get to know (and hopefully love) how BibleWorks actually works. Following the explanations of terms and some helpful ways to look at searches in English and Greek, there are several exercises. The goal is that by reading this document you can easily do these and other exercises!

3 Definitions:

Command line: This is the fancy term for the line where you type in your searches, limits and other items. It is located in the upper left part of the screen just to the right of the four-box square (usually green). From here you can limit the books to search (Genesis, John, etc.), the version of Bible to look in (Vulgate Bible, NRS, KJV, etc.), and exactly what types of searches you want to do (and, or, phrase, or single word searches).

Search Versions: This is the way in which you can search in certain versions of the Bible. By choosing this option, it can help you pick out wordings, or if you are in Greek, help you to search for Textual or Morphological versions of the Bible (extremely helpful for those that use this program as a crutch, or even wheelchair!). To do this easily in BibleWorks, you can use the green box located next to the command line. Click on the box and it will bring up a small menu. The first option of this menu will allow you to choose the versions under which the following searches will be done. By choosing this option, a larger menu will open in the middle of the screen. From here you can choose any version of the Bible that your software has available. Choose your version and it will close and you will see the three letter abbreviation of the version next to the green box. Now any search you do will be confined to this specific version of the Bible. If you want to be even craftier about it, you can use those same abbreviations in the command line. For instance, if I wanted to look something up in the King James Version of the Bible, I could go to my command line and type in KJV and hit enter. This would change the abbreviation to the KJV and would mean that any search from then on would be in this particular version.

Display Versions: This is the versions of the Bible that you will see listed in the center window of BibleWorks. By choosing these, you can easily compare different versions on how the words and meanings of specific examples. To change this, you can use the green box located next to the command line. Click on the box and it will bring up a small menu. The second option of this menu will allow you to choose the versions shown. Another way to access this menu is by going to the center window and clicking on the checkmark with an open golden book underneath it. Choose the ‘Change Display Version(s)’ option and it will open the same menu. In this menu are all the listed versions. Simply go down the menu clicking on which ones you would like to see displayed. My personal choices are the BGT, NRS, NAU, NET, KJV, NIV, NKJ, NLT, and the Luther Bible (last one is just because I like exercising my German). If you want

4 to change the order of your displayed versions, simply go back to the menu under the checkmark and book and choose the ‘Set Version Display Order’.

Search Limits: This means the parameters under which BibleWorks will conduct searches. By limiting a search, you can narrow the search to specific places. To do this easily in BibleWorks, you can use the green box located next to the command line. Click on the box and it will bring up a small menu. The third option of this menu will allow you to limit the search. If you want to be even craftier about it, you can use the command line itself. If you do want to use the command line to create a limit, you must first type the letter L (note that the capitalization is just for ease of reading, lowercase will work in the program). This will tell the program that the next letters you type will be specifying a limit. For instance if I wanted to limit my search to just the book of Luke, I would enter into the command line: l luk. After typing, hit enter. Notice that after you do this, the upper left box in the green square will change to yellow. This is to remind you that a limit is now active. This command tells the program that any search from now on should be confined to just the book of Luke. To undo this or any limit, just type L and then hit enter and it will un-limit the searches. In order to create limits that search in more than one book, you must utilize the menu accessed by the green box. In the “Choose Search Limits” click on the “Limit the Search Using the Books Checked Below”. In this menu you can choose exactly which books you would like to limit the search to. For instance, by using this, you can look in Romans, Acts, Proverbs, and the Psalms all at once.

5 English Searches

Okay, so now that you have read about the searching options and things, let’s actually get down to the nitty gritty of the searches themselves. First, for ease of user’s sake, let’s make it a little bit easier for you. Go to the command line and click on the right mouse button. One of the options in this menu will be ‘Code Insertion Buttons’. Click on this option, and the menu will close. Under the command line you will now see a variety of buttons. These are all the types of commands you can use in your searches. For ease of this document we will focus on only four of these buttons, the first three which are search parameters, and the fourth is a ‘fudge factor’ button. These buttons are the period, the backslash, the apostrophe, and the asterisk. . / ‘ * It is important to note that for the search parameters (the first three following this paragraph) that all searches must begin without a space after the command. For instance, doing the search “.word” will search for all verses with ‘word’ in them, but “. word” will in fact show as an error.

The period- This search command will do a couple different things. First, if you type in just the period followed by any word it will look up any instance in which that word appears. For instance, if you type .Jesus and hit enter, you would search (within your versions and limits specified in the green box) for any time the word Jesus is used. However, the period search is also used for the AND search. This means that you can look up multiple words at once contained in the same verse. To do an AND search, simple do .word word. That means that if I wanted to look for any verse that contained both the words Jesus and love, I would enter the command thusly, “.Jesus love” and hit enter. You can do more then two words in this search as well, just have a space after the second word and enter another word, “.Jesus love God” and hit enter.

The Backslash- This search command will create a search that is called an OR search. In this search, you can look up any time any of the words in the command line are used. This is helpful when you are looking up a concept that can have multiple wordings. For instance, if I wanted to look up any time the word Spirit or Breath are used in the Bible, the easiest way would be to use the OR search. To perform this search, simply type in “/spirit breath” and hit enter. This will search for both of these words independently and bring up the results of any time either of them are used in window below the command line.

The Apostrophe- This search is one I find most helpful. This search is the PHRASE search, which, surprise surprise, will look for the specific phrase you enter. By this I mean that you can look up a certain word order in the Bible. For instance if I wanted to look up any time the phrase “Jesus Christ the Son of God” is used, I would want to use the PHRASE search. To search for this simply type in the command line, “ ‘Jesus Christ the Son of God” and hit enter.

6 The Asterisk- This is the fudge factor button. Any time you want to put in something you are unsure about, you can use this command. By that I mean that if you are looking up a word like ‘fish’ but want any word that uses the word fish in it (fish, fishers, fisherman, fishermen, etc.), you can use this button. That search would go as follows: “.fish*” and hit enter. This feature becomes even more useful in the Greek searches, which we will begin now.

7 Γρεεκ Σεαρχεσ

The searches are much the same in Greek for the most part. The BGT Version of the Bible functions exactly the same way with these searches. For instance, if I wanted to look up any time the word σωτηρ (Savior) and χριστος (Messiah) were used in the same verse, in those EXACT letterings, I would want to use the period AND search. Likewise for the Backslash and Apostrophe searches, it would look for the instances specified where those exact words were used. The reason I am stressing the exactness of these words is because of the lovely BGM version of the Greek Bible that comes free of charge in BibleWorks. This version of the Bible will allow you to search for the words in their morphological forms. This means you can specify the person, number, tense, mood, voice, etc. The searches themselves will still function the same. If you want to do a search for this OR that word, or this particular phrase, it will still use the same search commands, but the words will change. There is one EXTREMELY important thing to remember. In order to use this search feature in BGM, you must use the dictionary form of the word. For example, you can look up the word πονηρου in BGT, but since the dictionary form of the word is πονηρος the BGM version would not be able to look up πονηρου unless you created the search such as this: .πονηρος@ang*

Let’s take the bonus question from VH1’s quiz on Lesson 26. The question was ‘How many times is μη followed immediately by a present imperative in Luke?” This touches on a lot of our basics we’ve learned in this document so far. First let’s begin by choosing our search version. Since the question is asking for something in Greek we know immediately that it must be either of the two Greek versions we work with so often. So how to know whether it is BGT or BGM… well, this is where you must understand the Text version from the Morphological version. The text version, as I said, is juuuust like the other versions of the Bible, it just happens to be in Greek. So to look up an imperative or any of that stuff wouldn’t be possible. So let’s go to the command line and type in BGM and hit enter. Now the morphological version is set. The next thing to do is narrow down the search more. It asks for any time in the book of Luke, so let’s go to the command line again and type in l luk and hit enter. That will limit any search to Luke only. Now, the question asks for “μη followed immediately by a present imperative”. That seems like it is asking for a phrase, so we will use a PHRASE search, which is the ‘ search command. So we begin by typing into the command line “ ‘μη “. Now the tricky part here is what to do next. The question asks for any word, as long as it is a present imperative… so what to do!!! Guess what? You get to use your friendly Fudge button! So after a space, put in your * (at this point the search should look like ‘μη *). Here comes the reaaally fun part!! Since we are in the BGM version, we can look up for all the fun cases, voices, moods, etc. In order to do that, we want to tell the command line that we want to search for a word under the following circumstances. The way to do that for BGM is by using the @ symbol. So following the * put in the @ without a space in between the two ( ‘μη *@ ). Once you input the @ a command prompt will drop down from the line. From here you are given a slew of options. Since we are looking up

8 anything that is present and imperative, we know that we are searching for a verb. So the first menu lists the verb option as v, so hit v. The second prompt now shows a listing for the moods, which happens to be one of the things we are looking for. Choose the imperative option, d, and the next prompt will show up. This is the tense prompt, the second of the options we’re looking for. Choose the present tense option by typing p. Another prompt will show up, but since we have fulfilled our parameters in the question we don’t care about the other stuff. So simply put in another * as the next option. This ‘μη *@vdp* will complete our search command. Hit enter and the program will find the answer for you!

It is important to note a few things. Since we were doing a phrase search that included a word followed directly by another word, we were fine, μη and then any present imperative. If the case was that we didn’t care if there was another word in between the two, I could do the same search, but with a few things in between the μη and the *@vdp*. For instance, if I wanted to allow for three words in between then I would want to type in ‘μη *3 *@vdp* and hit enter. The command line addition of *3 tells the program that up to 3 words of any type in between the μη and the present imperative are allowed. Thus, if I took off the limit to Luke from the previous search and looked in the whole Bible, I would find that in Exodus 4:23 there is a line that has μη with three words in between the imperative ορα. These are just basic features of BibleWorks that are meant to help you get started on the actions that we will run across multiple times in class.

Two final things before we get to the exercises, 1) Don’t be afraid to screw up! BibleWorks will tell you if something isn’t right. Just because you didn’t find anything doesn’t mean it isn’t there, so check what you’ve looked up and double check everything is correct. If you can’t find the right letter in Greek, go to Tools/BibleWorks Keyboards and select the Greek version. You can find where it is there! 2) Explore! BibleWorks gets more fun to use the more you use it, and every search becomes easier then the last. Just be patient and you’ll persevere!

9 Exercises

1) How many times in the NRSV is the word Light used in the book of Genesis, and in how many verses?

2) The Greek version of the Lord’s Prayer we pray in class uses the word πονηρου. How many times is this exact word used in the Bible?

3) How many times is the Greek word for Savior used in the dative case? How often is it used in dative versus total times used (i.e. express it as a fraction)?

4) Mark (Gospel-writer not our professor!) is famous for his abruptness and headlong rushing. How many times is the phrase και ευθυς used in his Gospel?

Final Question!! Get this right, and you are well on your way to mastering BibleWorks Basics!!!

5) In Mark, his herky jerky style is commonly in the style of ‘And then he did this over there’ or some such verbage. In the same examples found in question 4 how many times after και ευθυς do a verb and a preposition follow? Allow up to three words between the ‘and then’ and the verb, and the verb and the preposition.

10 AnswersAnswers

1) 11 times in 8 verses (bottom left portion of the screen will show you the number of hits/times and in how many verses) 2) 27 times 3) 8 times and 8/65 (in BGM σωτηρ@nd* will yield the dative and replacing the d* with just * will yield the total results) 4) Can try in either version and will yield the same result of 25! 5) 19 hits in 14 verses. It is an oddly worded question, I know, but the search isn’t too terribly difficult. It is a phrase search starting with the ‘και ευθυς and then adding on the following commands: for the three words between the ‘and then’ and the verb we add a *3, followed by any verb, *@v*, followed by up to another 3 words, *3, then finally the *@p*. The command line should look as follows: ‘και ευθυς *3 *@v* *3 *@p* . If you got the answer right, congrats!! If you didn’t, don’t give up!! There are plenty more you can come with and learn from!

11 Upon talking with some more of my classmates, I thought that I would create some more intermediate exercises that you can do at home and figure out exactly what the answers are!

1) In the Greek version of the Bible, how many times is the passive voice used in the first person singular in the entire New Testament?

2) In the NET Bible how many times, and where, are the words supreme or ultimate used?

3) In the Greek Bible, under which books do you find the words for priest in the nominative and the word king in the dative?

4) In the NAU Pentateuch, which word is used the LEAST: person, human, being, man, or woman? *Hint, try not to do it in one search!*

5) Using the previous data, how many times is the phrase ‘human being’ found?

6) In the New Testament, how many times do you find an imperative aorist followed by an infinitive in the present?

12 1) 26 times, answer can be found by searching in BGM with a .*@vipps1s* search.

2) 3 times, ultimate is found once in Psalm 51:8, supreme twice, in Proverbs 4:7 and 1 Peter 2:13.

3) Depending on certain things you have selected, you may or may not have the 5 answers I have. The answers are 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, 2 Maccabees, and twice in Bel.

4) Person is located 70 times, Human a scant 7, Being is used 16, Man 385 times, and Woman 95 times. Answer is easiest to find by searching for each word separately. The answer is human.

5) Oddly enough, this term is only found once, in Leviticus 24:17!

6) Again, there is only one time this occurs, in Matthew 13:30.