Logos Bible Software

From: Randy Leedy (RLEEDY@wpo.bju.edu)
Date: Wed Jul 24 1996 - 09:43:25 EDT


Cleon Rogers III inquired about Logos Bible Software. Logos has just
released version 2.0c, which registered users should be receiving
soon as an automatic upgrade. It has some nice enhancements and bug
fixes.

I have been using Logos and BibleWorks fairly extensively this
calendar year, and a comparative review article is tentatively
scheduled to appear in the fall issue of BIBLICAL VIEWPOINT, the
semi-annual journal of Bob Jones University's School of Religion. I
hope to be able to offer the text in ASCII form on the list once the
article is finished. I am awaiting the arrival of a major upgrade to
BibleWorks in order to polish off the review.

I think Logos is a great program in many respects, but it does have
some very serious shortcomings in areas that would especially
interest most members of this list. The most important thing to know
about Logos is that it is primarily a general environment for an
electronic library, not a program for locating grammatical
constructions in any biblical text. It does allow "morphology
searches" to locate, for example, all optative verbs or all vocative
plural adjectives. Its ability to combine search terms into a complex
construction are very limited, however. Exact phrase searches cannot
include wildcard characters, and there is no agreement operator
(allowing the user to find words in agreement, regardless of the
specific gender, number, or case involved). I have also had trouble
with proximity operators (e.g. word X followed within 5 words by word
Y).

BibleWorks is far more powerful for this kind of work, but it has its
limitations, too. GramCord (for PC and, I understand, AcCordance for
the Mac) is still unmatched for its ability to search constructions.
There are rumblings about Logos someday incorporating GramCord as an
add-on of some sort, but I gather that this will not happen soon.

Another point that should be kept in mind by those reading Logos ads
is that its modern language differentiation is extremely limited. The
claim, for example, that a search for the English word "die" will not
find the German article is a claim that Logos intends to fulfil but
has not yet achieved. The partial implementation of this feature will
be irritating to those who want to search for German and French words
in the Logos library; they will have to do two searches: one in the
given language, and another in English, to pick up the occurrences
not yet tagged correctly. If the search includes wildcards allowing
it to match common English words, the result will be traumatic.

There is a website with helpful (though somewhat dated) review
articles by Harry Hahne on a number of Bible programs, including all
the ones I've mentioned. The latest address I have is
http:\\www.chorus.cycor.ca/hahne/bible.html

----------------------------
In Love to God and Neighbor,
Randy Leedy
Bob Jones University
Greenville, SC
RLeedy@wpo.bju.edu
----------------------------



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