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On June 16-18, I attended the conference “The Bible and Computers: Present and Future of a Discipline” in the suburbs of Madrid, Spain. At this conference, a group of people from many different nations interested in the intersection between Biblical studies and computer technology gathered together to hear presentations on current research. Most of those present were university professors.

There were three types of talks presented. The first group involved research that academics are doing that produce databases that will eventually be—if they have not already been—incorporated into Bible software packages. It was exciting for me to hear some of what is on the horizon. For example, I am interested in Hebrew syntax, so I enjoyed listening to presentations by representatives of two different groups that have been working on syntactically tagging the entire Old Testament. The second group of talks revolved around the progress and state of existing Bible software packages. I got to hear about the latest bells and whistles on a variety of Bible software programs. Finally, the third group focused on the results of using Bible software packages, from successful strategies for teaching Hebrew and Greek more effectively with the use of Bible software to the results of research enabled by Bible software. It was gratifying to hear how Bible software is helping professors in their teaching and research of the Bible.

I presented a talk at the conference entitled “Displaying Hebrew and Aramaic on Handheld Devices That Lack Proper Complex Script Support.” In my talk, I set the stage by discussing the way in which complex script technology has improved on personal computers in recent years, but these improvements have not yet been extended to mobile devices. I then discussed some possible strategies for overcoming these limitations on mobile devices, giving the positives and negatives of each approach. Finally, I discussed the approach we at Olive Tree took in successfully overcoming these obstacles—to my knowledge producing the first aesthetically pleasing Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all the desired vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols on mobile devices. My talk was warmly received by the audience of scholars. I supplemented my presentation’s screenshots by showing off BibleReader’s Hebrew and Aramaic display to many of the conference’s participants on an actual Windows Mobile device.

Here is a list of our products that use this innovative display technology: BHS, BHS Add-On - Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology, and Qumran (non-biblical texts). You can see my previous blog posts about it here, here, and here.

~Drayton B.

We at Olive Tree are excited about new developments in our handling of Hebrew and Aramaic texts. Over the past several months, we have moved to UNICODE!

In recent years, there have been impressive technological advances made for displaying languages like Hebrew and Aramaic with complex scripts, from the establishment and expansion of the UNICODE standard to the development of “smart fonts,” which position the glyphs in a context-sensitive manner. These developments have paved the way for some strikingly beautiful Hebrew and Aramaic fonts, most notably EzraSIL and SBL Hebrew. Handheld devices, however, have sought to meet their tight constraints on speed and storage by excising anything in the operating system that might be extraneous. As such, handheld devices generally do not include complex script support, with some not even supporting UNICODE at all. Thus, in general, Hebrew and Aramaic texts have not been able to be displayed in a manner that takes advantage of these recent breakthroughs in typography.

We are delighted to announce that we have overcome the limitations of the Palm and Windows Mobile operating systems with regard to complex script support! On these platforms, we are able to display Hebrew and Aramaic texts with all the beauty that recent UNICODE-based smart fonts have allowed. This includes our BHS (HMT) module with all of the vowels, cantillation marks, and symbols to which you are accustomed in the print edition of BHS. (Of course, this does not include the critical apparatus, the massora magnum, or the massora parva.) It also includes our BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology module, which allows you to click on a Hebrew or Aramaic word, see the lexeme, morphological information, a gloss, and a link to the appropriate entry in an abridged version of the BDB dictionary, one of the finest dictionaries available for Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic. We also give independent access to BDB, so you can see the entry for any particular lexeme you would like, or you can browse through entries in BDB.

This new way of representing and displaying Hebrew and Aramaic also applies to our new Qumran (non-biblical texts) module, complete with editorial symbols, lexical and morphological information, a gloss, and a link to the appropriate entry in BDB (provided that you have the BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology module). If you missed my blog article on the Qumran texts, you can find it here.

On Palm and Windows Mobile, you can view these Hebrew and Aramaic texts using the EzraSIL font, which looks virtually identical to the printed edition of BHS except that EzraSIL is easier to read when there are multiple marks around one consonant than the print edition is. On Windows Mobile, you have the additional option of downloading the freely available and aesthetically-pleasing SBL Hebrew font and using it as well.

I think that the results of this new way of displaying the texts are really quite stunning, but you do not have to take my word for it. Here are two screenshots for you. The first is a screenshot of our our BHS (HMT) module at Psalm 23, and the second is a screenshot of our Qumran (non-biblical texts) module at column 1, line 11 of 1QS (The Community Rule).

~Drayton B.

We at Olive Tree are announcing the release of a new Qumran (non-biblical scrolls) module. The discovery of thousands of documents and fragments thereof, known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, at Khirbet Qumran beginning in 1947 is the greatest archaeological discovery related to the Bible in modern times. Dating from 250BC to 70AD, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been of inestimable importance to scholars and students in a variety of fields, most especially Old Testament studies, New Testament studies, and Second Temple Judaism. They have cast light on myriads of historical, theological, literary, sociological, and philological matters.

The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a variety of types of documents. Well-known among them are our oldest copies of the Hebrew and Aramaic Old Testament books (by approximately one thousand years), but they also contain commentaries on Old Testament books, fascinating theological treatises, documents on community living, and more. This new module contains virtually all of the scrolls with the exception of the copies of Old Testament books.

The electronic database of Qumran texts was prepared by Marty Abegg, Jr., the Ben Zion Wacholder Professor of Dead Sea Scroll Studies at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC, Canada. Dr. Abegg is one of the world’s leading Qumran scholars, so his work is of the finest quality. Moreover, Dr. Abegg has tagged the database for morphology. Thus, you can click on a word to see its lexical and parsing information in the same way that you can for the Hebrew Old Testament (BHS) if you have our BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology module. You can also get a quick sense of the meaning of the lexeme from a gloss, also provided courtesy of Dr. Abegg. If you have the BHS Add-On module, then you can even click on a link to the appropriate Hebrew or Aramaic entry in the well-respected BDB dictionary if there is an entry in BDB for that lexeme.

Our Qumran module takes advantage of our recent work in shifting to Unicode encoding for Hebrew and Aramaic in our BHS (HMT) and BHS Add-On—Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology modules. That means that you will see our Qumran texts with stunningly sharp, aesthetically-pleasing Unicode “smart-fonts” that are geared toward maximum readability. Our Qumran module also contains scholarly editorial marks, almost always the same editorial marks with which you may be familiar from the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert (DJD) series. Finally, searching capabilities are provided via our familiar search screen.

We at Olive Tree are excited about this new module! We hope you will check out the product description here.

~Drayton B.

In this article, we want to let author E. M. Bounds tell you in his own words about the importance of prayer to God, to the Church, to the world, and to you. Thus, we will quote a little from five new classic eBooks by this author available from Olive Tree. First, however, let’s talk a little about the author and his work.

Few have written about prayer with the experience, authority, conviction, and eloquence of this simple man of God from nineteentn-century America. Toughened by the loss of his father at a young age, by lonely years spent in the mining camps of California’s gold rush, by incarceration in Union prison camps during the American Civil War, and by his gritty experiences as a Confederate chaplain on the front lines of that war - praying on his knees within sight of the troops under his charge, E. M. Bounds embodied a blend of firmness and gentleness rarely seen in a man, inwrought by the Christ he loved as he was passing “through it all.” One might say that Bounds’ famous books on prayer read like Emerson’s essays, in the sense that almost every sentence could be framed and hung on the wall, so clear and incisive and perfectly fitting are the words. Unlike Emerson, however, this man would never choose to write an essay on self-reliance; rather, he had learned the secret of whole-heartedly casting EVERYTHING on the Savior through persevering prayer and constant communion with the One for whom nothing is impossible. And he had experienced first-hand the power of prayer and supplication to change the world.

Currently, Olive Tree offers five classic eBooks on prayer by E. M. Bounds, with three more to come. Hyperlinked Scripture references, verse indexes, book marks, and other features of the electronic versions, make reading these eBooks with Olive Tree’s BibleReader software a great experience. Let’s take a brief look at each book.

In The Essentials of Prayer, the author explores prayer as it relates to the whole person, to humility, to devotion, to praise, to thanksgiving, and to other essential elements of prayer. Says Bounds, “Prayer has to do with the entire man. It takes the whole man to pray, and prayer affects the entire man in its gracious results. The largest results in praying come to him who gives himself, all of himself, all that belongs to himself, to God.”

In The Necessity of Prayer, Bounds elaborates on the relationships between prayer and faith, trust, desire, fervency, importunity, character, conduct, obedience, vigilance, and the word of God. Writing about prayer and faith, the author says, “Prayer projects faith on God and God on the world. Only God can move mountains, but prayer and faith move God.” As with all of the author’s books, this one leaves readers greatly impressed with the necessity of prayer in giving God a way to accomplishes His gracious will.

As the title suggests, The Possibilities of Prayer considers prayer in relation to the promises of God and to the phenomenal answers God grants to believing prayer. “How vast are the possibilities of prayer! What great things are accomplished by this divinely appointed means of grace! It lays its hand on Almighty God and moves Him to do what He would not otherwise do if prayer was not offered. It brings things to pass which would never otherwise occur. The story of prayer is the story of great achievements.”

Power through Prayer exposes the folly of God’s people if they try to use any means other than prayer to achieve the fruit God requires. While the church and its leaders look for better methods to bring about the increase of Christ on the earth, God is intending to do a work in the vessels themselves, fitting them for something greater than they can imagine. Bounds asserts, “Men are God’s method. The Church is looking for better methods; God is looking for better men. The glory and efficiency of the gospel is staked on the men who proclaim it.”

Finally, in The Weapon of Prayer, E. M. Bounds sounds again the call to all Christians to exercise their God-given birthright for the sake of God and His kingdom, the success of which He has placed under the law of prayer. “He rules the world just as He rules the Church by prayer. This lesson needs to be emphasized, iterated and reiterated in the ears of men of modern times and brought to bear with cumulative force on the consciences of this generation whose eyes have no vision for the eternal things, whose ears are deaf toward God. Nothing is more important to God than prayer in dealing with mankind. But it is likewise all-important to man to pray. Failure to pray is failure along the whole line of life. Man must pray to God if love for God is to exist.”

As you can see, E. M. Bounds speaks very well for himself and hardly needs anyone to advocate for his books. Readers can open to any page and taste the same indomitable spirit. May God find many who will let the Lord speak to them through the writings of this forthright and devoted man of God!

Olive Tree offers a number of different software bundle options that provide users an excellent way to purchase software at a discounted price. Among the pre-selected collections and CD packages, there is also a Build Your Own Collection option, which offers the most flexibility. You can choose the resources you want to add to include in the collection, and you will receive a bundle discount based on the number of items in your cart and your order total. The corresponding discount will be applied automatically as you add items to your cart. Below is a table with the different discounts available if you build your own bundle:

Ready to start building your own collection? Start browsing our product list now!

~ Kristi

This January Olive Tree will be giving two talks at BibleTech 2008. According to the BibleTech website, BibleTech is a conference that explores the intersection of Bible study and technology. This two-day conference is designed for publishers, programmers, webmasters, educators, bloggers and anyone interested in using technology to improve Bible study. BibleTech 2008 is an opportunity to meet others who share your interests and hear from industry leaders.

Drew Haninger (President, CEO, of Olive Tree) will be talking about “Electronic Publishing and Bible Software in a Fast-Moving Mobile Landscape.” I will be talking about “The Challenges and Future of Bible Software in a Mobile World”.

There will be a number of other very interesting talks given at BibleTech 2008. If you are passionate about the intersection of Bible study and technology I would recommend attechend BibleTech 2008 in Seattle, WA on January 25th and 26th.

Stephen

We recently put up a new beta Smartphone BibleReader. This is one of the most exciting betas we have ever posted for any platform! The list of cool new features added to the Smartphone BibleReader is simply amazing.

For starters we added support for selecting hyperlinks on Smartphone using the 5-way arrow button. This opens a lot of new resources on Smartphone that were not usable before. With hyperlink support you can use the KJV and NASB strongs Bibles and see the Strong’s definition for each word in the Bible. You can also use the Complete Word Study Bible, Treasury of Scripture Knowledge, and many other Bibles and Bible study tools from Olive Tree.

We also added support for Greek and Hebrew. You can now use Gramcord, HMT, and any other resource that has Greek and Hebrew in it on your Smartphone.

As if that wasn’t enough, we also added support for dictionaries. So now you can use Easton’s Bible Dictionary, Unger’s Bible Dictionary, EDNT, TWOT, and all the other Olive Tree dictionaries on Smartphone.

We didn’t stop there. We then went on to change the shortcut options to support more keys, reorganize the menu, add more options, add support for displaying images in Olive Tree resources, and add support for MacArthur New Testament Commentary.

Since this version of the Smartphone BibleReader is still in beta not all of the products that work on it will be visible on Olive Tree’s web site when you have selected Smartphone as your device. If you want to see the complete list of products that work with this new Smartphone beta BibleReader change your device to Windows Mobile Pocket PC on the Olive Tree web site. All of the products, with the exception of Bible Atlas, multimedia in iLumina, Chinese, Arabic, and The Message audio will work with this Smartphone beta BibleReader.

You can download the Smartphone beta BibleReader here.

Enjoy!

Stephen

Exciting changes are happening here at Olive Tree Bible Software with regard to the handling and display of Hebrew and Aramaic text! A variety of new technologies related to the representation and rendering of complex scripts have been developed over the past few years, and we are looking to take advantage of them as much as possible. These changes will allow us to give a clearer presentation of Hebrew and Aramaic characters. We are moving to Unicode, beginning with the mobile devices that support it, namely Pocket PCs. We are making this switch first for our Hebrew Masoretic Text Old Testament, and we envision switching to Unicode soon for our Hebrew Masoretic Text with Parsing and BDB Dictionary as well. Unicode allows for a more consistent and font-independent representation of Hebrew and Aramaic texts than has been possible in the past, and its adoption is spreading across platforms and applications. Switching to Unicode now will allow us to take advantage of its implementation on the Pocket PC and position us well for the coming day in which more handheld devices will support Unicode. This switch to Unicode allows for better Hebrew and Aramaic font rendering. Now the consonants, vowels, dageshes, cantillation marks (accents), and other Masoretic symbols can all be shown. Moreover, recent developments in font technologies allow the vowels, cantillation marks, and other symbols to be placed appropriately around the consonants in order to promote maximum readability. The results can be quite stunning.

There are currently a variety of obstacles at the level of operating system support for the use of the most advanced Hebrew fonts on handheld devices, but we at Olive Tree are dreaming big. We have set our sights high, dreaming of a presentation that will provide you with an electronic version of the Masoretic text with all of the information in the main body of Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS) as well as kethib/qere information. Not only will the standard consonants, vowels, dageshes, and cantillation marks be present, but so will be other symbols like maqqephs, soph pasuqs, paseqs, raphes (when BHS prints them), pethuhas, and sethumas. Moreover, we are seeking to make the display aesthetically pleasing and geared toward maximum readability. We are hoping that it can equal the quality we achieved with this screenshot, which begins at Genesis 1:1:

A beta version of the Hebrew Masoretic Text Old Testament for Pocket PC will soon be available from our website for trial. We will look forward to your feedback. If you know Hebrew and/or Aramaic and would like to be notified when the beta appears, let us know at beta02@olivetree.com.

For those of you who are biblical scholars or others educated in Hebrew and/or Aramaic, this is a major step forward in your being able to gain all the information you need about the Hebrew and Aramaic text on your mobile device wherever you are. For those of you who leave intense language study to others but still want to compare your Bible translations to the Hebrew or Aramaic original to gain a better understanding of a particular word or verse, this will make your decipherment of the original Hebrew or Aramaic an easier and more enjoyable experience.

Those of you who read this blog regularly may not recognize my name. I am a new addition to the Olive Tree team, specializing in those areas of Olive Tree’s software that deal with Hebrew and Aramaic. After studying computer science and mathematics at the University of Virginia and working in software development for a few years, I shifted my primary attention to the Old Testament. I picked up a Master’s degree in Old Testament at Regent College in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and I am currently working on a PhD at the University of Chicago in Northwest Semitic Philology in the Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Department, the department to which the Oriental Institute is attached. (Hebrew and Aramaic are Northwest Semitic languages.) I am excited about improving the quality of the representation and rendering of the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Old Testament as well as advancing searching capabilities. I am also excited about bringing additional ancient texts to your handheld device as well; look out for a release of a module containing non-biblical texts from Qumran later this summer or fall! Let us know (beta02@olivetree.com) if you would like to be notified when these texts, which are important both for the study of the Old Testament and the New Testament, become available.

For five days at the International Christian Retail Show (ICRS)—Sunday, July 8 through Thursday, July 12—attendees were surrounded by a wealth of opportunities for learning, networking, discovery, joy, and prayer. Olive Tree was one of the many companies from around the world represented there. We met with national and international publishers and distrubutors, working to bring in more content for our users, and more distribution channels to make our software available. 

Here’s a quick summary for you on how electronic publishing works, and why Olive Tree’s relationships with different publishers are so important:  As an electronic publisher, we work with other publishing companies to acheive permissions for Bibles, study tools, devotionals, and Christian eBooks. We then get eText for those books, convert it to the Olive Tree format, and post the final products on our website for you to download! So that’s how things work in the realm of electronic publishing.

We made great progress in opening up more channels for resources, and if you know Olive Tree, you know more products will be coming soon!

 ~ K

Having done a number of conversion projects for Olive Tree Bible Software in the past year, perhaps none have been as satisfying as finally being able to offer our users the NIV Study Bible Notes. What I like so much about this resource is its versatility. The casual reader can take advantage of these notes simply by looking up a verse and reading the commentary. Those looking for more in-depth study will appreciate the numerous links both directly to cross references as well as links to similar commentary on another verse. Users can find a verse that talks about “God’s grace and peace,” like Romans 1:7, and appreciate the value of God’s unmerited favor toward us and the abiding peace He provides. If I want more verses on “God’s peace”, I can quickly navigate to Romans 5:7, Philippians 4:7, Galatians 1:3, or Ephesians 1:2, and if I want to read more commentary about “God’s peace,” the NIV Study Bible Notes provides links to notes on Philippians 4:7 and John 20:19. The presence of links within the text to other commentary AND links to related Bible verses makes studying the Bible with the NIV Study Bible Notes an enjoyable, easy and meaningful exercise.

I truly believe that this is the most user friendly, useful resource I have had the pleasure of working on, and it takes full advantage of the powerful, customizable capabilities of the Olive Tree BibleReader. Using both the Verse Chooser and the Table of Contents (TOC) Chooser, users are afforded several navigation options. The Verse Chooser allows for speedy navigation to commentary on a specific verse, while the more detailed TOC Chooser provides a more in-depth navigation system that includes detailed navigation to elements of the introductions to each Bible book, 5 short essays, useful indexes and all the notes as well.

One last feature of the NIV Study Bible Notes that I would like to mention is the index system. This resource has two indexes, an Index of Subjects and an Index of Notes. The Index of Subjects has links to Bible verses on a particular subject, and the Index of Notes has links to commentary on a particular subject. Both indexes are topical in nature, and you can navigate to them using the TOC Chooser. Navigating to a topic like “Peace” simply requires going to TOC mode by unchecking the box at the bottom of the Verse Chooser that says “verse mode.” I select Study Helps, choose Index to Subjects or Index to Notes, click on the letter P, and lastly select Peace. Then I have a helpful list of Bible verses or commentary on the topic of peace, and I can continue my Bible study on that topic.

The NIV Study Bible Notes is a powerful resource that I can happily recommend for all readers of the Bible!