How to study

Software for Study

Nathan

In articles on the Adventist Pioneers and Miller’s Rules we feature the contribution that Adventist and Millerite students made to the doctrinal development of Seventh-day Adventists.

Today, students of the Bible who want to follow the study methods of these writers (line upon line, weight of evidence, etc) can make use of good software tools to search “every word of God.”

I decided to make this page because I use mostly open-source or free software and some of these notes might be useful for people in situations like mine who are searching the internet for solutions.

I have found the following tools useful in pursuing my own study and for my students in Bible Research Method classes.

theWord Bible Software

A decent and mature Bible software. Has good keyboard shortcuts for searching and working with Bible text. With some tweaking of settings you can also get a nice copy and paste of Bible passages.

There is a clipboard monitoring feature that will present a popup any time it detects a Bible reference copied to the clipboard. I don’t use this much but some friends have found it useful.

theWord is available for download from theWord Bible Software web site, for Windows. I run it on Linux with Wine.

OliveTree Bible

OliveTree Bible is a good cross-platform app for Bible reading, and has a surprisingly-good search feature that works well for research. This is worth commenting on because modern software apps such as Windows UWP apps have tended to have worse rather than better search features.

OliveTree Bible is available on Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, and Android phone. When logged in, it can synce across all of these platforms. OliveTree isn’t available on Linux.

EGW Writings and Pioneer Library Apps

The White Estate has done a good job of making the EGW Writings and Adventist Pioneer Library available on the web and multiple device platforms.

See the Resource Links page for links to all the options.

The platform that is missing out on new development is Linux. I am running the EGW Comprehensive Edition software on Linux under Wine. This is my favorite app for EGW and Pioneers writings access even on Windows. It offers superior searching and is much faster than any of the modern style apps.