What is BibleWorks?

Which Bible Program Should I Use?

Whether you’re preparing a sermon, doing complex morphological analysis, or writing a seminary paper, scholars agree that BibleWorks is the best tool available. For close exegesis of the original text, BibleWorks is indispensable.

You’ll find everything you need in its 190+ Bible translations in nearly 40 languages, 35 original language texts and morphology databases, 29 lexical-grammatical references, plus a wealth of practical reference works! Instead of providing a loose collection of books, BibleWorks tightly integrates its databases with the most powerful morphology and analysis tools.

As you consider buying a high-end Bible research package, you’ll have to weigh cost, database quality, program features, searching capabilities, and customer support. In every one of these areas, we believe BibleWorks is the best. Buy the program, and you can decide for yourself.

We offer a 30-day money-back guarantee for all products purchased directly from BibleWorks.

Our Commitment

Our goal is to further the kingdom of God through the ministry of the Word; our commitment is to pastors, students, scholars, and missionaries. We want BibleWorks to be useful for you. We interact with our users on a daily basis. Many of the features in BibleWorks are the direct result of user requests and suggestions. If you find something is missing, tell us. Our lead programmer spends several hours a week interacting with users-- something unheard of in the software industry. If you find a reproducible program bug or a database error, we will fix it and have an update on the Web in short order.

Is it Hard to Use?

BibleWorks comes with a highly-configurable user interface, designed to work the way you work. When you are researching a particular topic you normally progress from searching, to browsing, and, finally, to analysis of particular words. The interface is laid out in this order with minimal clutter so that your work flow is more natural and intuitive. The tabbed search interface lets you pursue several lines of investigation simultaneously, keeping multiple searches open at the same time. As you move the mouse over the Bible text, a wealth of information about the text is instantly displayed in the Analysis window beside the text.

Don’t worry if this kind of program is new to you. We’ve included task-oriented Study Guides with nearly four hours of accompanying videos to help you get started with BibleWorks. The Study Guides teach by example, showing you how to use basic and advanced features of the program for everyday tasks. In addition, BibleWorks comes with a detailed on-line manual.

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Read through the Bible… in less than a second.

From complex morphological searches through the original text, to simple word and phrase searches through your favorite translations, the BibleWorks search engine zips through the databases and shows you the results. Send eight grad students to their cubicles to find every occurrence of the Granville Sharp construction and you’ll have to wait a week before the results are in. Ask BibleWorks to do it for you and have the results in less than a minute. No program does complex queries faster than BibleWorks; it’s the fastest tool on the market.

Simple Searches

With BibleWorks, you can find it. Here are some examples of simple searches you can do with BibleWorks:

• Find all verses containing the phrase
• Find all verses where the Greek NT uses in the imperative
• Find all verses in which “faith” and “deed” or “deeds” appear within five verses of each other

Greek & Hebrew Texts, Bible Versions, & Lexicons

BibleWorks comes with standard Greek New Testament texts, LXX texts, and the Hebrew Old Testament text. In addition to the texts, most of the Greek New Testaments, the LXX, and the Hebrew OT also have their own morphology versions, where every word is parsed and lemmatized.

BibleWorks also has major Bible versions for nearly 40 modern languages, in addition to Greek, Hebrew, and Latin. Detailed study of the original texts is now possible for those who know English, Spanish, German, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Indonesian, Swedish, Czech, etc. Almost all major English versions are included in BibleWorks: KJV, ASV 1901, NKJV, NASB 1977, NASB 1995, NIV, TNIV, RSV, NRSV, NLT, NJB, NAB, NET, CSB, and the ESV. All of these Bible versions are unlocked. In addition, you can add your own Bible versions to BibleWorks. 

BibleWorks comes with lexicons and dictionaries for Greek (Louw-Nida, Thayer, Friberg, Liddell-Scott, etc.), and Hebrew lexicons (Holladay, unabridged BDB-Gesenius 1905, condensed Pierce-Strong's BDB-Gesenius, Whitaker's abridged BDB, the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament, etc.). In addition to these, you can also purchase the separate BDAG and HALOT modules!

It's important to keep your language skills sharp, so BibleWorks also includes several Greek and Hebrew grammars (Burton, Conybeare, Davis, Joüon-Muraoka, Wallace, Waltke & O'Connor, etc.). Other optional modules (Moulton & Milligan, Weingreen, Zerwick, etc.) can be added. As you move the mouse over the text, you can quickly jump to all relevant sections in the BibleWorks collection of grammatical and lexical references.

Grammatical and morphological searches are a breeze!

If you don’t have much experience with computers, or your Greek and Hebrew are rusty, the BibleWorks Autocomplete Morphology feature makes it simple to build complex grammatical and morphological searches. The Autocomplete Morphology feature lets you click and select any morphology from a list that automatically opens up as you start typing in a morphology. You can specify part of speech, tense, voice, mood, gender, case, number, stem, aspect, etc. The beginning user can easily construct detailed and complex language queries. (Advanced users who have mastered the codes can quickly type in queries using a terse query language.)

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Complex Searches

No artificial limits will impede your study and research when you search with BibleWorks. You can search for words, groups of words, phrases, parts of speech, tenses, etc. With the second-generation search engine, you can graphically construct complex queries. Put wildcards anywhere, search for articles and prepositions, and make the search condition as complex as possible. Look for repeated words in a string, specify agreement, exclude words, all in the same query! You can limit the search to an arbitrary collection of passages or books, or search the entire Bible. There’s no faster way to find these answers. Here are some examples of the more complex searches that are possible with BibleWorks:

• Find within a context of ten words all instances of a dative or accusative participle not immediately preceded by an agreeing article, and followed by an agreeing article and noun, excluding cases where a word from a specified list intervenes.
• Find all verses where the KJV uses “faith” and the Greek NT uses

When you’re done searching, BibleWorks gives you detailed statistics and lets you transfer texts, verses, parallel passages from different versions, entire Bibles, and lexicon entries to your favorite word processor. When you need a break, BibleWorks lets you store your lists of verses for another day.

Break the Language Barrier

Overcome the barrier between you and the original language texts. With the BibleWorks Word Analysis feature, seeing and parsing the underlying Greek or Hebrew words is as simple as waving the mouse pointer. As the mouse moves over any word in a BibleWorks tagged text, the Greek or Hebrew lexicon definition for the original text is shown along with the parsing. When the mouse hovers over a word in a tagged text, a Popup Gloss window gives you a brief definition and morphology for the word. In addition to these helps, the Resource Summary Window automatically lists all relevant entries from the various lexicons and resources for the verse and word under the mouse. As you move over the text, the window automatically shows the opening line for all relevant entries. The following Bible versions are tagged: the Greek NT, the LXX, the Hebrew OT, the KJV, and the NAS, as well as some of the other English, German, French, Dutch, and Russian versions. Additional texts such as Josephus, Philo, and the Apostolic Fathers are tagged also.

Any Parallel Bible

If you like working with parallel columns, simply click on the translations you want to see. The Parallel Versions window puts the Bibles in parallel columns where you can scroll the columns in sync, or independently. BibleWorks lets you save all of your favorite parallel versions configurations in a convenient menu so that you can easily pull up your “NKJV-Greek NT-NRSV” or “NAS-Lutherbibel-BHS Hebrew-LXX” parallel window with just a click of the mouse. You get Word Analysis here, too, as well as tight links to the lexicons and dictionaries.

Line-by-Line

In the Browse Window, the Bible versions you are studying are shown in a single window with the passage from each text. This is the basic work-horse window of BibleWorks.

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Write a Commentary (While Keeping Your Desk Clean)

Get rid of all those lexicons, dictionaries, concordances, and scribbled notes that clutter up your desk when you’re buried deep in textual study. In all of these windows, you can click, or just point to any word and get the information you need (concordance, lexicon, word frequencies, cross-references, etc.). You can also attach notes (with Greek and Hebrew!) to verses and have them automatically display when the verse is opened. BibleWorks works smoothly with other programs, making it simple to transfer texts to your favorite word processor.

Arrange the Furniture

BibleWorks accommodates users who spend significant amounts of time with the program. In response to the variety of user suggestions, window sizes, window placement, output format, abbreviations, and font sizes can all be customized. In addition, many requests for mouse and keyboard short-cuts have been put into the program. Fewer clicks save wrists!

Type in Greek and Hebrew

BibleWorks comes with TrueType and Unicode fonts for accented Greek and pointed Hebrew. The fonts can be used in Windows word processors and print beautifully. With the built-in editor, you can also take notes in English, Greek, and right-to-left Hebrew. The samples below use the BibleWorks Greek and Hebrew fonts.

In addition, BibleWorks supports Unicode fonts, so you can easily export text to the font of your choice.

Is It Expensive?

We’ve done everything we can to offer the best exegetical tools and databases at the lowest cost. We invite you to read, try the program, and compare. You’ll find that the search and analysis capabilities and the large collection of versions and databases in BibleWorks are unmatched. Further, when compared with similar Bible software packages, BibleWorks is the most economically-priced package.

If you find another program at a lower price that has as much and can do as much as BibleWorks, just return the program within 30 days and we’ll refund the purchase price (applies only if you purchased the program directly from us).