Biblespade: New Bible Program

I love Bibleworks. Besides Firefox and Word, it is the most used program on my computer. I have used it since version 3 and followed it through all its upgrades. But now, I am wondering if perhaps I should switch my allegiance. I recently discovered  a brand new Bible program: Biblespade (the name refers to doing spade work in the text). It is trying to be a combination of Logos (with lots of extra books integrated into the program) and Bibleworks (a focus on the biblical text) and is trying to keep the price reasonable. The main draw for Biblespade is its tagging. Most Bible programs are tagged for such items as noun case and verb tense. Biblespade has this but also much more. On a lower level, it has tagged the text following Mounce's Morphology of Biblical Greek. This way, if you want to know all the nouns that behave morphologically like a certain noun, you can instantly see it. If you want to see all the verbs that had an original digamma, it is not a problem. There is no equivalent work in the OT yet, but Biblespade says they are working on designing something. On a higher level, more syntax options are tagged, this time using Wallace's grammar. If you want to know where all of the genitive of material's are in the NT, you can find out instantly. Naturally, this tagging is not perfect, as different exegetes will have different ideas about how to classify each word. But this is at least a start. Some words are tagged two ways (such as "the love of Christ constrains us," which is tagged both subjective and objective genititve). In the OT the text is tagged according to Waltke and O'Conner's grammar. But this is not all: it is also tagged on a higher level. Word order is very important but not very well studied. So they have tagged all VSO (verb, subject, object), plus a few other letters (time words, etc.) so that one can easily see the word order and compile stats. Finally, there is also discourse tagging. The text is tagged according to Longacre's charts: all texts are placed into one of Longacre's text-types (narrative, predictive, instructional, etc.). Then each clause is placed into its particular band: mainline, background, etc. If you want to find all the background clauses in a predictive text type, then it is done easily. The text is also tagged according to Randall Buth's view: topic and focus for forefronted items, as well categorization for verbs forms for continuity and discontinuity. While much of this still has problems that need to be worked out, the potential to surpass Bibleworks is tremendous. 

On the other side, it also offers lots of options. One of the most important is text critical data: one can simply scroll over a verse and all the data from NA27 and BHS appear. Another exciting option is the Ancient Near East module. They hope to start putting out original language texts from the ANE, such as Akkadian, Egyptian, Aramaic, and Hittite texts. These texts would be tagged and would make learning and using these languages much easier. But that is still for the future. A variety of other helpful books can be bought for a reasonable price: TDOT, TDNT, NIDOTT, NIDNTT, the Word commentary series, NICNT, NICOT, Pillar commentary series, etc. This offers tremendous flexibility. While it is not cheap if one adds a lot of these books, they can be bought over time. A variety of other interests are also served. A map system based on Google maps is included, tied into the biblical text, so that one can just click on a place name and see where it is on the map. There are a variety of pre-loaded maps (such as the Conquest of Canaan).  Some sermons are included when one needs to be encouraged. One new technology included here is access to tagged mp3 sermons: as the preacher goes to a text, it automatically comes up on the screen as you are listening. But enough about the potential of this new program: go check it out and buy one for yourself! 

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