MARBLE: Modular Aggregation of Resources on the Bible

 

I just came across this MARBLE site, but it appears to be the successor of SemanticDictionary.org, a project by the United Bible Societies headed by Reinier DeBlois. When I first reported on this back in 2008 (!), it was a new resource for Old Testament study linked to the Semantic Dictionary of the Hebrew Bible. It has now been greatly enhanced and has New Testament Greek resources as well. From the website:

 MARBLE stands for Modular Aggregation of Resources on the Bible 

This website, published by the United Bible Societies (UBS), gives free access to a number of important Bible background resources, including: 

• The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) 
• The UBS Greek New Testament (5th edition, UBSGNT5) 
• The Semantic Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew (SDBH, edited by Reinier de Blois) 
• The Semantic Dictionary of the Greek New Testament (SDGNT, based on Louw and Nida's lexicon) 
• Thousands of Bible images and video clips linked to Bible passages 

Along with the Hebrew and Greek texts, it is cross-linked and has cross-highlighting with the 1952 RSV. (I.e., when working with a biblical text, clicking on either the Hebrew/Greek or English word, it will bring up the original language dictionary entry.)

The inclusion of images and videos (which can be accessed either through an image / video search or when working on the Bible text and clicking on a link bringing up images / videos associated with that chapter of the Bible.

Probably the most helpful aspects of this site that integrates information that takes a bit more work to access even in Accordance or Logos are the Semantic Dictionaries. I'm guessing that its initial roots in the Hebrew, there is more information provided for Hebrew lexemes, but for both Hebrew and Greek, not only is lexical meaning provided, but there is also information on the lexical domain. (For the Hebrew, there is also information on Contextual Domain and Collocations.) If you have used Louw-Nida, you will be familiar with what is being done here, but the MARBLE site makes it very easy to use, see lexical relationships, and navigate around.

E.g., here is just a portion of the kind of information provided for a word like אב.

 And here is just a portion of the information for χάρις.

It's definitely worth checking out this site, and it serves as a great supplement to something like the STEP Bible site if you don't have Accordance or Logos.

(HT: I learned about MARBLE through a DataDrivenBiblicalStudies video on YouTube. I think it's by Dirk Roorda, and he also uses a Text-Fabric web app that is quite impressive.)