Recently, we asked you for your favorite Bible Software. Many answered Logos. Find it here:
[Note, Logos sends a gift to Brigada for every copy that you buy.]
But others came up with other solutions. For example, check out Dave’s favorite. “I’ve been using ‘The Word’ Bible software program for over a year; it is wonderful and free. It is amazing the number of commentaries, dictionaries, books, maps, etc. that are searchable and integrated – I have over 600 of these all free. This is free but not unprofessional; it is very high quality; it is flexible and you can alter it to suit your needs. I use it almost every day for study.” Find Dave’s go-to website at…
I really can’t believe e-Sword didn’t win hands down especially because sites like BibleSupport.com let you have so many additional free modules.
Well, theWord is a better software overall and there are at least 2 sites (twmodules.com and wordmodules.com) with as many if not more additional free modules (not to mention that all eSword modules are a click away from theWord using a conversion tool). By the way, wordmodules.com is run by the same person as biblesupport.com!
Thanks for the mention of my website twmodules.com! E-Sword has a tremendous amount of problems in its interface IMHO. E-Sword is a good program still though, but it is basically stuck in a Borland DBase 1990s type mindset and interface mode. It is definitely not what you can do with modern software packages.
TheWord is a hands down winner over a lot of software packages. It is very versatile, and the interface is extremely useful and modern. There are so many options and different things you can do with theWord that it is amazing. Visit my website thewordtutorial.com for “classes” in how to use theWord, as well as tips, problem resolution, etc. Note that with e-Sword, BibleSupport.com is about the only forum out there that even addresses solving any problems or difficulties you may have. With theWord, the actual software programmer, Costas Stergiou, has his own forum on his site http://www.theword.net, and from what I see, he reads every post in English and Greek (he lives in Greece). The support from the software developer standpoint is non-existent with eSword. Write Rick Meyers, and you will get nothing, not even a URL to someplace to answer your question. I fielded Questions and Answers for Rick for about 8 years (both in Spanish and English), and helped him greatly in that area, and even with his answering my emails, he regularly would not answer half of them. Just doesn’t care.
My site, twmodules.com has over 2000 books for download. I am posting about 100 new works every month (some 20-30 shorter stuff, and the rest regular books). A lot of my stuff is older Public Domain works, but I am trying to include about a third each month that is under copyright modern works that I get permission for. I have permission from Bible.org to format all of their website, and I hit it very hard. WordModules.com has few modules, and I always have problems trying to download anything from there. One in 10 tries gets something to actually download. Yes WordModules and BibleSupport (for e-Sword) are run by Josh Bond, the same guy. BibleSupport has a lot of modules, but not as many as you might think. Probably 70% of their modules (they are only 1 year old) I had on my websites 10 years ago. They duplicate the same module in different places so they may say they have 3000 modules, but if you factor in the duplication, I doubt they have more than about 1500 to 2000, and most of those came from me. I am slowly downloading, converting their Public Domain stuff from their site, and uploading it to mine. But they do have some new works that they are occasionally uploading, and worth a visit every now and then.
If you really examine e-Sword against theWord, you will find that if you have more than 50 modules, e_Sword is extremely cumbersome and awkward at using, finding, searching, actually reading these works. You have a drop down menu for the chapter structure which really is poor when you have a work with more than 10 chapters. You have a drop down menu for selecting the topic modules (Books), and that is likewise an awkward thing to use if you have more than 30-50 books. With theWord, you can literally group your works into smaller specific groups.
Consider if you went to a seminary library, and collected 30 Systematic theology works and put them on a table to review. This is the Module Layout Set concept of theWord. You make a subset of the entire library, to just work with them. You can search only the topics (chapter titles) or only the contents, or both. Your search can be just the current book, the current module layout set, or any module layout set, or you can specifically pick and choose individual books to search on.
With the Bible searches, you can do the same thing. For example, I have a dozen Greek texts (NTs) in theWord. I can make a Greek texts set of Bibles, and search on all of them in one pass. If a particular word is in one but not others, I can search across all of that set of Greek Bibles.
I am a pastor and missionary in Mexico City, so my work is different from the other websites out there with modules. I write my own books also (I have written about 60 in Spanish, and I have written about 10 or so of my own modules in theWord), which is the product of my own ministry. Since I am preaching and teaching every week, and I have the administrator’s position where I find what serves me in preaching to my people. That perspective is not out there with so many e-Sword people, i.e. they upload junk more than not.
The number of modules should not be so much a priority, but rather useful, good quality modules that are chocked full of Scripture verses. BibleSupport.com does has some really good commentaries coming out from time to time on their site which are very useful for the serious Bible student. e-Sword in its interface has great difficulties seeing , identifying, and using “books”. TheWord makes these a pleasure.
Likewise if you compare theWord and e-Sword side by side, you will find that what you can do with theWord is just 20x more types of studies and searches and things than e-Sword.
Here you compare theWord with Logos, and equally, Logos (which is very expensive) comes in a long second. Take the test. Can you Bible software do this? Try searching all your installed Bible verses for “atonement”. How about searching for “atone*” within 5 words from “blood”. “Propitation” within 5 verses from “blood”. How about G2962 (kurios) where it is “NOT” translated “Lord”? Does you Bible software even mention the XOR option (“Jesus” XOR “Christ”, i.e. verses with Jesus but not Christ, or Christ but not Jesus). Forget searching on Strong’s numbers, How about seraching on morphological codes? i.e. -m /V-A??S finds all verbs in Aorist in Singular (any person). This is free software guys! Good grief! How much power do you have to put into a free software program before you realize Logos took your money and gave you an inferior product! TheWord is the winner hands down. With Costas’ constant development, there is no way you shouldn’t have theWord, because it continues to grow every year with new features.
Space is too limited and theWord just has too many features and advantages to list here, but visit thewordtutorial.com and see just a touch of what theWord can do. I continue to upload videos and how-tos to that tutorial site every week. Download theWord, and play with it yourself!