You should get the brand new BibleWorks 9. Let me give a count-down of the reasons:
5. Barry Beitzel’s Moody Atlas of the Bible. This is a quality resource.
4. The Use tab. BW9 automatically looks up all the occurrences of any word you have highlighted. Handy, because that’s something I do all the time.
3. CNTTS NT Critical Apparatus. I have not used this particular apparatus, and I wasn’t even familiar with the CNTTS (not to be confused with Daniel B. Wallace’s partner organization, the CSNTM, which I did know about), but I’ve often wanted to have an electronic apparatus that was more up-to-date than Tischendorf.
2. The BibleWorks Manuscript Project. Morphological searches of Sinaiticus, Vaticanus, Alexandrinus, etc.? This looks really cool. (If there’s one idea that tempts me away from critical-text orthodoxy it’s one I read from Stanley Porter that the critical text doesn’t exist fully anywhere in any manuscript and we might as well just use Sinaiticus. But I haven’t explored that idea.)
1. And the most important reason? BibleWorks needs the money. They’re worth your support. They’re the scrappy perennial underdogs who have a different approach from Logos and whose product continues to carry value that Logos doesn’t have. I love Logos, and Logos 4 had made me up my usage of that program considerably. It’s always running on my Mac and my PC. But so is BibleWorks. I have to be able to do quick searches in English, Greek, and Hebrew, and I have to be able to compare translations quickly. For close, text-level work, BibleWorks is my go-to tool.
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