Check Out Biblia.com!

Biblia.com from Logos is the best online Bible study site I’ve used. Yesterday’s post at the Logos blog highlighted some of the great features.

Introducing the Biblia.com beta release: a super-simple Bible for the web that’s backed up by the incredible technology (and massive library!) of Logos Bible Software. What makes Biblia.com so cool?

Read the rest of the post to find out . . .

Of course, the best part for a Logos user like me is the online access to my Logos library. I have no idea what the basic resources available on the site are since when I’m logged in to my Logos account it shows the hundreds of Bibles and books in my digital library. That’s cool.

Here’s more information from the site’s “About Biblia.com” section:

Biblia.com is your place for Bible study online. Part of a family of services from Logos Bible Software, it offers free access to a collection of Bibles and Bible reference works, with an easy user interface and powerful search engine.

More Content

Everyone gets free access to a number of Bibles and a few other resources. Log into Biblia.com (with your Logos.com account, or by making a free account here) for access to dozens of free Bible study resources.

Biblia.com uses exactly the same e-books and account management as Logos Bible Software, whether you download software or not. That means that Biblia.com already offers thousands of high quality resources for Bible study. You can purchase content for use with Logos Bible Software for Windows or Macintosh, or simply unlock it online at Logos.com, and you’ll have access to it online at Biblia.com.*

Anywhere Access

Logos Bible Software works on the Macintosh, for Windows, on the iPhone, iPad, and even supports mobile web browsers athttp://library.logos.com. Your single user account works with all of these platforms, as well as here at Biblia.com. Purchase an e-book in one place and you can use it everywhere!* Future releases will even synchronize your notes across all the platforms.

Powerful Platform

Biblia.com is designed to make it easy to use a Bible side-by-side with helps and reference books. But underneath it is built on the same powerful platform as Logos Bible Software 4, the world’s leading Bible software. Logos has been developing Bible software for nearly two decades. Today it is a team of more than 170 people offering more than 10,000 titles for Bible study; Biblia.com is our way of delivering all that experience and content to users who prefer a web interface. 

*Not all resources are licensed for online use.

Even if you aren’t a Logos user, I recommend checking it out. It looks like without logging in you can access 41 Bible versions and 2 Bible study helps. Registering for a free account promises 37 more resources. Using it might inspire you to start using Logos! It’s a great program for Bible study resources.

TanakhML: Read the Hebrew Bible Online

TanakhML is an online tool for reading the Hebrew Bible. I didn’t know it existed until Tim mentioned it a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve used it a few times and found it very useful. I don’t know how long it’s been around, but I wish I’d known about it years ago. It would have saved me some time and helped me have a chance to read more unpointed Hebrew since you can turn the pointing and accents on and off. Here are some screen shots of what I’ve been reading.



As long as you have a unicode font that will display Hebrew, you should be able to view the text just fine. If you need a unicode font, I recommend SBL Hebrew or the Tyndale Unicode Font Kit.



The feature I like the best is the ability to turn the accents and pointing on and off. One is also able to view the text in transliteration.

 


Another useful feature is the parallel text. While the KJV is probably not the best text to read side by side with BHS, it’s better than nothing (and it’s public domain). It can be useful when one is trying to read a lot of text quickly to have a translation in parallel.



Finally, unless you’re reading Psalms, Job, or Proverbs, the web site has a verse analyzer that charts the structure of the verse based on the Masoretic accents. This would be very useful if one were attempting to learn how to subdivide verses according to the accents.



I’ll definitely be making regular use of this site as I read through several hundred chapters this summer and practice reading unpointed text. It has one great advantage over using Bibleworks – no lexical and morphological pop-ups = less of a crutch. Happy reading!

Free ESV iPhone App!

A few days ago I learned that Crossway has released an ESV app for the iPhone. We’d put Olive Tree’s Bible Reader on my wife’s iPhone, but I didn’t really want to pay for additional translations, so it only had ASV, KJV, and NET. More than that, I found it difficult to actually use because of the continuous text layout. So I was pleasantly surprised to see the ESV app has a very easy-to-read elegant text layout and easy-to-use navigation features for quickly flipping to a new passage.


If I had an iPhone or an iPod touch with this app, I would probably stop carrying a Bible to church. If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, you should check it out!

HT: ESV Blog, Bible Design and Binding, and Art Boulet via Twitter on Mar 16th.

Why I Need a Kindle

The list of books from my wish list now available for Kindle is growing steadily. An earlier listing I made of biblical studies books available on Kindle is here.

1. John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament
2. The ESV Study Bible
3. Mark S. Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism
4. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Theological Interpretation of the Old Testament

Now it would be really cool if the IVP Bible Dictionary series was available for Kindle. For now they're not, but I saw an update from IVpress on Twitter that said IVP is in the process of making their publications available on Kindle. I don't know if that included the dictionary series. The volumes I want the most are Pentateuch and Wisdom Literature.

My 15 Minutes . . .

A reader was kind enough to point out that my name came up in passing in a NY Times Op-Ed column yesterday.  The column deals with the subtle way that Google is taking over the world and taking revenue and relevance away from traditional journalism.

Quite coincidentally, my name happened to crawl across Google's ticker at just the time when Ms. Dowd was waiting in the lobby at Google HQ.

But there is a vaguely ominous Big Brother wall in the lobby of the
headquarters here that scrolls real-time Google searches — porn queries
are edited out — from people around the world. You could probably see
your own name if you stayed long enough. In one minute of watching, I
saw the Washington association where my sister works, the Delaware
beach town where my brother vacations, some Dave Matthews lyrics,
calories Panera, females feet, soaps in depth and Douglas Mangum,
whoever he is.

I hope she googled me herself, so she now knows who I am.  Of course, I'm sure there are others with the same name.  I just don't know any of them.

HT: Christopher Hays

Kindle 2: More Biblical Studies

Way back in July I posted about Amazon's Kindle device.  My main complaint back then about having a digital library for Kindle was that most of what I read is not available in Kindle format.  I also wondered why there weren't more available what with all the digital versions of biblical studies resources created for Bibleworks and Logos.

I have since discovered that more of the books I'm interested in reading have appeared in Kindle format over the last several months.  Back in July, I think I found 3 or 4.  The prices have also dropped.  David Carr's book was $28 in July but it's $19.25 now.

Here's a list of what I've found for biblical studies (especially Hebrew Bible, Judaism, and religious studies) now available for Kindle (listed alphabetically).  The asterisk * indicates its on one of our reading lists at UW-Madison.

Robert Alter - The Book of Psalms

*Robert Alter - The Art of Biblical Narrative

David Carr - Writing on the Tablet of the Heart

Shai Cherry - Torah Through Time

Brevard Childs - Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture

John Collins - Introduction to the Hebrew Bible

James Crenshaw - Defending God

*William Dever - Who Were the Early Israelites and Where did They Come From?

William Dever - Did God Have a Wife?

*William Dever - What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It?

Peter Enns - Inspiration and Incarnation

Hanan Eshel - The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Hasmonean State

Craig Evans and Emanuel Tov - Exploring the Origins of the Bible

*Israel Finkelstein - The Bible Unearthed

Richard Hess - Israelite Religions

*Barry Holtz - Back to the Sources

Jodi Magness - The Archaeology of Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Roland Murphy - The Tree of Life

George Nickelsburg - Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah

Susan Niditch - War in the Hebrew Bible

Peter Schaefer - Jesus in the Talmud

William Schniedewind - Primer on Ugaritic

Rodney Stark - Discovering God

Benjamin Wright, ed. - A New English Translation of the Septuagint

There are even more if your interests run more towards NT or theology or Christian history materials.  I think it's quite an impressive increase for the last 7 months. 

Now these books require purchase, but you can get the whole text of the Bible for free in the English Standard Version.  That alone makes it worth it, right?

Kindle Follow-up - A Logos and Amazon Team-up

I thought of a solution to my lament over the lack of biblical studies resources available for Kindle. It's so obvious that I don't know why I didn't think of it before. Logos and Bibleworks have a large number of relevant books available in digital format. Kindle is a device for reading digital books. If Logos and Bibleworks teamed up with Amazon to make their digital library formats readable on Kindle, we'd instantly have a large number of useful reference books and relevant biblical studies books available for Kindle. That doesn't solve the problem of how expensive the Logos modules tend to be but it might be worth it to have reference grammars like Jouon-Muraoka or the whole text of BHS available on this device, saving me the trouble of either firing up my laptop or carrying numerous books around.

Amazon Kindle

Yes, I said on Friday that I prefer real books to e-books and having a digital library on Logos, but for some reason, Amazon's Kindle device has caught my interest.

It would be more interesting to me if more of the books from my biblical studies top "To-Read" list were available in Kindle format. So far, I've only found David Carr's Writing on the Tablet of the Heart. There are others, but many are from that gray area of religion writing in between serious scholarly work and popular conspiracy theories. If I read Bart Ehrman, for example, I could get 5 of his books for Kindle. Unfortunately, my reading list is full of non-Kindled books like van der Mieroop's History of the Ancient Near East and John Collins's The Apocalyptic Imagination.

So, I'll save my money first. After all, the Kindle costs $360 and I'm sure they'll come out with a second-generation model before too long. Maybe by then more of the books I have to read will be available. This doesn't change my mind about Logos digital libraries, however. I could carry the Kindle everywhere. Logos would be stuck on my computer.

Logos Offering JNWS

A reader brought to my attention that Logos is offering an electronic edition of the Journal of Northwest Semitic Languages at a pre-order discount. For those of you amassing a huge digital library with Logos software, pre-ordering will bring the electronic version of the journal one step closer to reality. I personally prefer to use Bibleworks for original languages work. Logos is more expensive and I've found it less user-friendly. Of course, Bibleworks can't compete with the sheer number of books now available from Logos, but I prefer to have a real book in my hand over a digital library or e-book anyway. The pre-order price is only $129 for 26 issues. Or you can just go down to the library and read JNWS for free.