by Harry Hahne

Search Capabilities

The easiest way to conduct a search is to double click with the mouse on a word in the Bible text. All verses containing this word will be shown in the verse-list box. More powerful searches, however, are conducted from the command line. Enter a biblical reference and the passage will be shown in the Results Window. One can also enter a Englishman's-Strong's number (KJV only) or a word. As the word is typed, all words that begin with the specified letters are listed in a pick list. One can select a word from the list with the mouse. Because there is no horizontal scroll bar on this list, one must change the font size or resize the window to view long entries. Multiple words can be selected by holding down the Shift key using the mouse. A search can be repeated by selecting it from a history list, which can store hundreds of search expressions. A miniature on-screen keyboard shows the positions of Greek and Hebrew keys, which simplifies entering Greek or Hebrew search expressions.

One of the most non-intuitive aspects of the command line is that most search expressions must begin with a period. The period indicates that the word(s) which follow must be in the verse. Thus it functions as a logical AND even though it starts the expression. Similarly, to indicate a Boolean OR search, the command line must start with a "/". A more conventional command syntax would be easier to learn, i.e., one in which "AND" or "&" were used between terms.

One can conduct searches with the Boolean operators (AND, OR and NOT) and use parentheses to group search criteria. For example, "(.God) (/man woman)" will find verses which include "God" and either "man" or "woman." Searches can include the "*" and "?" wild cards anywhere in a word. Searches can also specify an exact phrase. By default, the search context is one verse, but this can be changed to any number of verses for thematic analysis. For grammatical searches, it would also be useful to allow restricting context to a certain number of words or sentences. There is no provision to require a particular word order, so the search for "dé dé" failed to find verses in which dé appears twice. There is no provision for forced grammatical agreement between words or the ability to exclude a lemma or grammatical form between search terms. Therefore, a search for genitive absolutes is not practical.

BWorks allows very powerful Greek and Hebrew grammatical searches using either a command line or a dialog box. The most flexible grammatical searches are entered on the command line using terse, encoded commands. For example, ".ginomai@v-a?p???" searches for the aorist participle of gínomai. The symbols * and ? are wild cards for grammatical elements. One can search for a specific word or use any combination of words with wild cards. When combined with Boolean operators and restricted search-context, extremely powerful searches are possible. Version 2.2 adds an optional pop-up dialog box that simplifies entering grammatical search expressions. Click on radio buttons to select the part of speech, tense, case, and other grammatical elements. The search criteria is automatically entered in the command line so it can be edited or combined with other grammatical elements. Unfortunately, searches with more than one grammatical element still require learning the command line syntax.

This grammatical search system is valuable for exploring how words are used in context and the various forms that occur. Entering a word on the command line brings up a list of all related forms with frequency statistics. To view all the verses with a particular form, simply click on the form in the list. One inconsistency is that Greek and Hebrew in grammatical searches must be transliterated, while they are entered in the original-language font for simple word searches. Words are displayed in Greek and Hebrew in the word list, but without Greek accents and breathing marks or Hebrew vowel points. Thus it is impossible to distinguish between similar words until one sifts through the search results.

Double clicking with the right mouse button on a word in an original-language text displays its parsing, usage frequencies, the lemma and all forms that appear in the Bible. For Greek words, the UBS dictionary definition is also shown. However, the dictionary only includes words that occur in the New Testament, so many words in the LXX have no dictionary entry. Hebrew and LXX Greek lexicons are planned for the future. If a word can have more than one parsing, the one appropriate to the current context is not identified, though this information can be determined from the morphologically-tagged text. If a morphology window lists more than one parsing, one can click on a parsing to see a list of other verses that use the word in this way. In Hebrew one can select part of the word, such as an inseparable preposition.

One of the great strengths of BWorks is its search speed. Most searches take less than a second and even complex searches with multiple wild cards and grammatical constructions take only a few seconds. For example, searching for the Hebrew inseparable preposition -b revealed a list of 10153 verses (and 15609 matches) in just three seconds!

In word searches all matching search terms are highlighted in the Bible text. However, words are not highlighted in grammatical Greek and Hebrew searches. This is a serious limitation since tags can be hard to find by scanning a verse.

Concluding Observations

An extensive icon bar provides access to most commands. While most ommands are also available from the menus, many frequently used commands are deeply hidden in sub-menus. This makes the program harder to learn because the meaning of some icons are not intuitive (e.g., a hand limits a range of books to search). Fortunately, if the mouse is passed over an icon, a message indicates the function of the button.

BWorks's includes a note editor that handles Greek, Hebrew and Roman fonts. While Hebrew can wrap from right to left, this is not automatically invoked when the Hebrew font is used. One can paste Bible verses in English and original languages, dictionary articles, word statistics or parsing information with the click of the mouse. Each note can be up to 32,000 lines long and over 1MB in size! Notes can be attached to chapters and verses or saved as separate files. Cut-and-paste from the editor or DDE can transfer multilingual notes, verses and grammatical notes to a word processor. Printing in BWorks is unusually flexible, since the page layout is controlled through this built-in editor.

BWorks 2.2 is generally reliable, but occasionally the program had to be restarted due to a Windows General Protection Fault. The manual is fairly complete, but the explanations would be made clearer with more examples. The context-sensitive online help is excellent. It uses a hypertext system that displays a simulation of the program screen. You simply need to click with the mouse on the desired area and a window will display help on that topic.