Here's Why I Believe in Logos Bible Software

There are many good reasons why any serious Bible student should invest in, learn, and use Logos Bible Software. But here's the best reason I can think of: the company is dedicated to getting it right. This is a Bible study software that I am confident will always be on the cutting edge of research and analysis without compromising quality, even down to chapter and verse divisions.

An excerpt from this Logos blog post explains the difficulty with chapter and verse divisions in the Bible:

The LXX has a book called 2 Esdras (or Esdras B) that is a combination of Ezra and Nehemiah. The English bibles have a book called 2 Esdras that is not at all related to Ezra or Nehemiah, but is a non-canonical book not found in the Greek tradition at all - it is found in the Latin Bibles, where it is called 4 Esdras (or Esdrae or Ezrae) – 2 Esdras in the Vulgate refers to Nehemiah. But modern editions separate the core Jewish material of 4 Esdras from the Christian additions, and break 4 Esdras into EITHER 2, 4 and 5 Esdras OR 4, 5 and 6 Esdras. And to really add insult to injury, in the Slavonic and Russian bibles, 2 Esdras is the name for the English and Greek 1 Esdras, which is called 3 Esdras in the Latin because 1 Esdras in Latin is the book of Ezra. Except when it isn’t. So when a reference book, or a user of Bible software, writes ‘2 Esdras’ there are a great many places that reference could refer to.

So what has Logos done about this dilemma?

We’ve just finished a massive data project that defines the various structures of the different Bibles in all their glorious, gory detail, and allows for effortless transformations from one versification system to another. As it stands now, the project consists of 56.6 megabytes of xml files that look a lot like the snip pasted above. The new Bible data type generated from this data will be available to you, our dear customers, in the next major version of the software, which means the next version will have a higher degree of precision when it comes to Bible navigation, comparing Bible versions and viewing them in parallel, and Bible reference tagging.

Bible software that dares to be that precise will surely benefit anyone who uses it to study the Scriptures. Thank you Logos Bible Software!