Stephen Barkley
There’s nothing like a good word study to drill down to the underlying meaning of a text. BibleWorks 9 facilitates these studies in predictable and unusual ways.
First, the predictable. There are 3 Hebrew (including my go-to, TWOT) and 6 Greek lexicons (including Friberg and Thayer) built in to BW9. To look up a Hebrew or Greek word, just right-click on it and choose “Lookup Lemma in Lexicon Browser”. It’s that easy. (Of course, if the word is a Hebrew compound word, BW9 lets you select which lemma you want to search for.) You can quickly switch between lexicons in the lexicon browser by using the drop-down list at the top.
Many times while studying I pass over a common word to save time. If you don’t want the depth of the Lexicon Browser, you can hover over the word and see the lexicon entry immediately in the analysis tab. Seriously, you can look up every word of a verse in seconds using this method. I’ve found this to be a great way to give your teaching creativity a boost.
Now for a word study help that’s a bit more unusual: searching semantic domains. Say you want to do a word study on “truth” in the Gospel of John. You can quickly set the limits to search only the Gospel of John, then enter the Louw-Nida domain code dialogue box. Enter alētheia and you’re presented with a semantic range of words that include truth as well as words like amēn. In an flash you can search for all the words within that semantic range so you don’t miss out on any important data.
Let’s move a little further from the common. Cross version search mode allows you to search beyond the Bible. Once this mode is selected, your search will cover all the other resources included in BW9 like the works of Josephus and the Early Church Fathers. This is one handy feature! Last week at prayer meeting we were studying Daniel where the author mentioned the heavenly watcher that visited Nebuchadnezzar. One quick search and I can find all the references to these watchers in the book of 1 Enoch. Brilliant.
Finally, there are a multitude of ways to check out graphs of the statistical frequency of the word being searched. Are you curious which chapter of the Bible has the most references to the word agapē? No problem—it’s Psalm 136. (Look it up and you’ll quickly see why.)
In sum, BibleWorks 9 makes word studies simple. And, when they’re easy to do, you’re more apt to dig deeper.
Part 4 >
