BYTE Magazine, March 4, 2002
The Right Stuff
By Jerry Pournelle
Biblical Scholarship
Some years ago I wrote about the Logos Research Systems Bible scholarship software. At the time it was the best thing I knew of. It still is, only now it's vastly improved.
The Logos system comes with a great number of Bible translations; Greek and Hebrew texts; concordances; commentaries; histories such as Josephus; and software for navigating through all this and building your own documents and reports. They say this is all simple and you can just install and use it without training, and on some levels they're right. You can just install it and begin playing about with comparisons, and you can learn a lot from that. If you've ever just wanted to play around, learning what various scholars have thought about particular Biblical texts, this is certainly the best way to do it.
It's also one of the best ways to do serious scholarship, whether in seminary or sermon preparation or secular study of the Bible. There's an incredible wealth of material here. Some of it is locked up — that is, you buy a basic package and they send you a lot more, not all available. If you want those other resources you can buy the keys. I have mixed emotions about this sort of thing, but it sure makes for a painless way to expand your library.
Logos says that there is more than $5,000 worth in equivalent print values, and I have no reason to doubt this. If you do serious Bible scholarship you can't afford to be without this: And they've done a great job of making it easy to use, too. I can't recommend this highly enough.
© 2002 by BYTE Magazine. Used by permission.