Wednesday, March 17, 2010

BibleWorks Search Exercise

I am trying to construct some exercises for BibleWorks to help my students get experience answering some typical questions one can use BW to answer. Here is the first of what may be a series... 

In this exercise we will try to find the Greek words used to express a concept in English. We will learn a variety of different ways to get the desired results in BibleWorks. Specifically, we will learn to use:
•    OR and AND searches, nested searches, and search limits
•    The Graphical Search Engine to construct a complicated search
•    The Search Limits Filter to conduct two-stage searches
•    The Verse List Manager to collect verses and then use them to set search limits
•    The Louw-Nida Lexicon to look for English words and their Greek counterparts
While we will be addressing a specific question here, the skills you will learn will be applicable in many other situations.
>Here's the question I'm using in this exercise:

What happened to Jesus after he was crucified and buried? He ______ from the dead! What words might you put in that blank? Rose? Was raised? Is risen? What Greek word(s) are behind our English wordings? How will you determine this? There are a number of possible ways to do so...
How would you go about answering that question? Open or download this PDF to see six ways you can do this in BibleWorks.

BTW, I'd love to think I would have the time to produce a similar guide for Logos and Accordance, but I know it's not going to happen... If someone else wants to pull it together, I would be pleased to post it on this blog or link to your own.


UPDATE: 2010.03.19: David Lang has posted steps for solving this question in Accordance over on the Accordance blog. Especially note that Accordance has a "Details" > "Analysis" option that nicely consolidates the information to make visible the underlying Greek words. Thanks!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the PDF. I never could remember the shortcuts for setting limits etc.

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