The Greek and Hebrew search capabilities of Logos 2 are substantially improved over earlier versions. Level III and IV allow grammatical searches on morphologically tagged Greek (NT and LXX) and Hebrew Bibles. The Greek text is the excellent Gramcord tagged text and the Hebrew text is the industry-standard Westminster tagged text. Searches can specify any feature of morphology, such as tense, voice, mood, person, number, gender, case, part of speech, etc. Wildcards can be used for any morphological element. Boolean operators and proximity operators can be used to combine multiple grammatical elements.

Morphological characteristics of Greek and Hebrew words are easily entered by selecting items from list boxes in the search dialog. Once the items are picked, a search command line is constructed. Unfortunately, the command line created is not always correct and sometimes incorrectly returns no matches. Although verbs allow 8 elements (including the gender, number and case of participles), a finite verb only uses 5 morphological elements. If you click on the items for a present tense finite verb, Logos will create a search expression with all 8 elements, and wild cards for the unused elements. The resulting search returns no matches because Logos requires that a finite verb only have 5 elements. The extra 3 question marks must be manually removed for the search to succeed. Similarly, to search for a participle, 2 leading question marks must be removed, since a participle has no person and number (the first 2 morphology parameters). This is a confusing procedure that can produce erroneous results. The end result is that the "point and select" searching of Logos 2 is nearly useless for any type of Greek verb.

A search for a dictionary form of a Greek or Hebrew word such as agape will find all forms of the word (e.g. all cases of nouns and all tenses of verbs). However a search for an inflected form of the word will only find that particular form. This is because by default the "search all dialects of each language" option is selected. If this option is unchecked, only the dictionary form of a word will be found if that is the form that is entered in the search. This is non-intuitive, especially since the meaning of "search all dialects" is not clear.

Despite the fine tagged Greek and Hebrew Bible texts, Logos 2 still lacks some search features that would allow more sophisticated grammatical searches. Even though Logos uses the same tagged NT text as Gramcord and Accordance, it does not have the same search flexibility. Logos does not include agreement options or the ability to exclude intervening terms. Specifying word order can be done in an indirect way by specifying that a certain word must occur within a certain number of words prior to another word. This is adequate for simple expressions with 2 search terms, but not for more complex ones with several terms.

When the mouse pointer is placed over a word in the Greek Bible text (LXX and NA26), abbreviated parsing information and a basic translation is shown on the status line. A fuller parsing of a Greek or Hebrew word is available by clicking on the word with the right mouse button and selecting "Information." For Greek words, a window opens with the parsing, lemma (dictionary form) and basic word meaning. More detailed information is available for Greek words by clicking on the lemma and linking to reference books such as Bauer's lexicon, "Little Kittel" theological dictionary, Liddell-Scott intermediate classical lexicon or the Louw-Nida lexicon of semantic domains. The information available on Hebrew words is not as complete. For compound words, only the parsing of the primary morpheme is shown. For example, if a noun includes an inseparable preposition, only the noun is parsed (the preposition is not mentioned). Furthermore, the meaning of Hebrew words is not shown in the parsing window. There are no Hebrew lexicons or word study books available, except for the limited Enhanced Strong's Lexicon, which is an abridgement of BDB. Even advanced laypersons, would benefit from a fuller understanding of the meanings of Hebrew words.

Many online reference books include handy pop-up hypertext glosses on abbreviations and important words. If you click with the mouse on a word marked in green, a small window opens expanding the abbreviation or defining the word. This makes Bauer's lexicon easier to use online than in printed form. For example, clicking on a manuscript abbreviation such as P66, gives information about the manuscript. Clicking on ThZ explains that this refers to Theologische Zeitschrift from the Theological Faculty of the University of Basel, published since 1945. Footnotes and cross references in Bible texts may be accessed by clicking on the reference letter or number in the Bible text.

In general the secondary reference tools are at a suitable level for pastors and seminary students. Many of the tools are the standard works in their class (such as the complete BAGD lexicon). The commentaries and dictionaries are middle level and more suitable for laypersons than scholars or advanced Bible students. The original language reference books for the Greek New Testament are suitable for scholarly study. No Hebrew reference books are included.

The developers of Logos have thought through the needs for displaying diverse types of literature in online form. The system is designed to handle multilingual texts and books that combine text and graphics. It is easy to browse through a book or search for a topic, phrase or Scripture reference.

Unfortunately, the use of hypertext linking in Logos 2 is inconsistent. The glosses and parsing information is very good. However, there are few highlighted words linked to other reference tools or even elsewhere in the same text. Rather, Logos 2 relies on searching to find related materials. Rather than clicking on "Athens" in Acts 17 to jump to a dictionary article on the city, one must highlight the word "Athens" in the Bible text, click with the right mouse button and select "speed search" from the pop-up menu. Then all references to Athens in all books will be listed. It is possible to set up a "keylink" to a single reference book, to automatically search that reference book by double clicking on a word. The Logos approach allows adding additional reference works at any time and does not require the developers to tediously create hypertext links in the documents. However, it is less convenient than navigating predefined hypertext links typically found in CD-ROM encyclopedias and the World Wide Web. The best compromise might be to add more fixed links to the most significant references to important words and still allow the powerful searching options for more thorough research.

Another weakness resulting from the lack of fixed links, is that clicking on a word frequently fails to find any articles on the word. This is because the word search looks for the exact form of the word rather than the lemma (dictionary form). For example, clicking on "idols" will return no articles but searching for "idol" will find many matches. Sometimes using Logos feels like blindly groping to find the right way to express a query to find the treasures that are locked on the CD-ROM. Fixed hypertext links would help. Even better would be to maintain an internal table of related words so clicking on "idols" would transparently search for "idol". There is a workaround for this problem in the original language texts. Right click on a word in the Bible text and select "Information". The parsing window will show the lemma of the word. Now right click on the lemma and select "Keylink". This will bring up a related dictionary article for the word.

It seems unnecessarily awkward to jump to a specific article in a reference book. For example, to find an article on agapetos in Bauer's lexicon, it is necessary to select search, click on keyword search, enter the desired word, click on the "special" books search range, browse to find Bauer's lexicon and add it to a list of books to search, save the special search range list and then click on search. Even once this is done the search takes considerable time. It would be nice if one could click on a "jump to article" menu item (or context menu choice). Then click on the desired item in a list of article titles and the article would appear instantly.

There are some display problems with certain texts. Sometimes a letter "w" would show up between words rather than a space. At times there would be no space after a punctuation mark, running two words together. Word wrap can occur at odd places, such as after a left parenthesis. The amount of text scrolled with is unpredictable, making it difficult to move to a desired position in the text.

One of the flaws with the online book concept (not simply the Logos implementation) is that most users can only use a single CD-ROM at one time. Although Logos has a wide selection of additional electronic books, another CD-ROM must be inserted to access another book. This makes it imperative to select a basic package that includes the best reference tools possible, to minimize CD-ROM swapping. It helps to copy the most used texts to a hard disk, which allows swapping the CD-ROM for less frequently used reference books.

Personal notes can be attached to verses and chapters of Bible versions and articles in reference books. The note editor is unusually powerful for a Bible program. It allows multilingual text with Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, complete with diacritical marks. Letters automatically change shape according to the position in the word (e.g. final sigma and mem). Hebrew and Aramaic are entered right to left and word wrap properly. Even lines with mixed left to right and right to left languages wrap properly!

Bible verses in any language and portions of reference articles can be pasted to a word processor using the Windows clipboard. However, there is no convenient way to select only a subset of the search results to copy to a word processor.

Despite the great power of Logos 2, it still has some rough edges. Some problems are due to design flaws: Searches sometimes produced unexpected results due to the search defaults. The method of setting up grammatical searches should be simplified and there should be a more convenient way to edit grammatical searches. Some aspects of searching are not intuitive, such as the way Shrase Searches are entered, the implications of "search all dialects" and the meaning of "search current book." (This does not refer to a Bible book but to the current text, which might be a Bible version or a reference book.) There are also some bugs: Clicking on a Greek or Hebrew lemma in the gloss window produces inconsistent results. Sometimes this finds a completely unrelated word. Searches frequently highlight the wrong word or only part of a search term in the list of matching verses. Sometimes synchronization between Bible versions gets lost. Bugs are not unusual in a major software redesign. Hopefully they will be fixed in a maintenance version.

Logos 2 is a very flexible Bible-search program and includes the most comprehensive and usable set of online reference tools currently available for the intermediate to advanced study of the Bible. The selection of reference works is uneven. It is particularly weak for study of the Hebrew Bible, but for the Greek New Testament it offers some of the best references available anywhere. Although it is sometimes difficult to search and navigate through the massive online information, Logos 2 is a powerful tool that can greatly enhance biblical research.