Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Accordance

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Developer(s)
  
OakTree Software, Inc.

License
  
Proprietary

Stable release
  
11.x / November 2014

Operating system
  
System 7 to Mac OS X, iOS, Windows

Type
  
Digital library, Bible study

Website
  
www.accordancebible.com

Accordance is a Bible study program for Apple Macintosh and iPhone, and now Windows developed by OakTree Software, Inc. Reviewers consider it a premium program.

Contents

Although originally written exclusively for the Mac OS (and then iOS), Accordance has now been released (October 1, 2013) in a Windows-native version, although it was available prior to this by using the Basilisk II emulator.

The program is used for both private and academic study. The translators of the Holman Christian Standard Bible, completed in 2004, used it for word studies, comparisons and instant searches. Commenting on the use of Accordance, the HCSB's editor Ed Blum said, "This project used far more computerization than anyone else has ever been able to do."

OakTree Software

OakTree Software, Inc. is based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, USA. The company has focused on areas of special interest, particularly the study of Biblical texts.

OakTree Software claims three specific goals:

  • Offering innovative and powerful features which cannot be found anywhere else
  • Providing the most intuitive, elegant, and easy-to-use interface possible
  • Providing a wide range of useful resources like texts, dictionaries, & commentaries, for Bible study.

    • Program history

    Roy Brown, OakTree Software's president and application developer, created one of the first Bible programs available for the Macintosh, known as ThePerfectWord, in 1988. ThePerfectWord was later bought by another company and renamed MacBible. By the early 1990s there were a number of good general Bible study programs for the Mac. However, Brown saw the need for a new program which would make it easy to engage in more sophisticated kinds of Bible study, enabling scholars and pastors to do in-depth analysis of the original Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible. Accordance 1.0 was released in February 1994, and welcomed for its power and ease of use.

    A version of Accordance 5.0 rewritten to run natively under Mac OS X was released at the start of 2002. The company has continued to add and improve features, such as the native Quartz rendering system. Version 8 was released in May 2008 and introduced a universal binary for Intel-based Macs. Version 9 was released in September 2010, version 10 in 2012, and version 11 in 2014.

    Accordance for iOS was released on December 30, 2010 as a free app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

    Modules available

    The program is centered on the Biblical text, but has many additional texts. There are many optional modules, detailed study tools for the original Hebrew and Greek, commentaries and reference dictionaries, with a unique cross reference system to interconnect the Biblical text with entire libraries of ancient extra-biblical material [1].

    Some modules available include:

  • Mishnah, Targums, Pseudepigrapha, Josephus and early Christian writings such as the Didache [2]
  • Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with the Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology [3]
  • Louw & Nida Semantic Domain Lexicon [4]
  • GNT Robinson Byzantine
  • Dead Sea Scrolls [5]
  • Bible Atlas and Bible Lands Photo Guide [6]
  • Comprehensive Cross Reference interactive module for Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, Philo, Nag Hammadi Library, Pseudepigrapha, Old Testament Apocrypha, New Testament Apocrypha, Plato, Pythagoras, Dhammapada, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tacitus, Talmud, New and Old Testaments, Apostolic and Early Church Fathers [7]

    • Although the product has many modules, purchasing is simplified by packaging these into "Collections" (which have replaced all of the earlier "bundles" and "libraries").

    Reviews

    It is one of About.com's top 10 Bible programs.

  • Premier Bible Software – A Comparative Overview at Bible Software Review, December 29, 2006
  • Accordance 8 - The Best just got Better, August 6, 2009
  • Review of Accordance 6 by the Society of Biblical Literature
  • Accordance 5.5c review in Macworld
  • Independent reviews listed on Accordance site

    • References

    Accordance Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA