The future of Academic and Original Language Research resources in Logos
Hi, I'm a master's student in Biblical languages and Linguistics at a major global university for the study of Biblical languages. I'm a (financially) committed Logos user. A heavy daily user. And I've been helped greatly by the product and I am greatly appreciative to the Team at Logos for putting all this together. So if you're reading this Logos staff: Thank you.
Yesterday I had a familiar conversation with my classmates here at the university: Logos vs Accordance. As a heavy user I'm usually the one whose opinion is sought after in this respect, and I keep a mental catalogue of the features that I know that one has over the other. Some days I feel good about that conversation, but others it feels like the writing is on the wall with respect to the priority of Academic usage in the entire Logos offering. Recently I feel that the list of positives on the Logos side is dwindling and begin to feel that my use-case is really just too small to be a priority for Logos. I would love for someone to demonstrate to me that the contrary position is in fact true.
Major Benefits of Logos vs XXX
- As best I can tell, Accordance has no product that can compare with the precision of the Andersen-Forbes database for syntactic search queries. Accordance uses the ETCBC database which is far less elegantly-tagged. We will forget for the moment that the documentation on how to query the Andersen-Forbes database is impossible to find, if it exists (yes, there is a manual with definitions, but very few examples, and no information on how comprehensive or reliable I can expect the searches to be, and no examples, and if you ask a question on the forum nobody answers because apparently nobody really knows how to use it?? Maybe I exaggerate slightly, but I'm a linguistics major with at least 20-30 hours invested in trying to figure it out and I'm still struggling often with rather basic searches). While less powerful, the Accordance system is more intuitive to access and use.
- Logos has the Hebrew and Canaanite inscriptions packages, tagged to a significant extent. This is a GREAT offering and superior to the competition.
- Logos has a sleeker interface. It's prettier.
- Logos has a larger book offering overall, including those relevant to academic study.
Major Drawbacks of Logos
- Logos has major implementation issues with really cool scholarly products which are implemented in a much more user-friendly way by the competition:
- Immanuel Tov's Parallel Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Texts of Jewish Scripture is poorly implemented. I cannot even find the Aramaic text that is supposed to be there. The contrast with the implementation by the competition is stark.
- What's amazing to me is that it's been in Logos for this long missing core functionality and nothing has been done to improve it. That sure tells you something about how many people are actually using it! For myself I purchased it unwittingly as part of a package, but was overjoyed to learn that I owned it… at least until I started to use it and realized how half-baked it is.
- Text comparison with the DSS manuscripts… the implementation is 90% there in Logos, but that missing 10% makes the feature cumbersome. You should be able just to open a parallel resources and view the available variants. Instead the actual function is quite buggy (I attempted to paste-in a screenshot here, but the page hung every time).
- Even more importantly with respect to Dead Sea Scrolls studies, the competition has high resolution images of almost all DSS fragments, and those they don't have they provide external links to. Logos has nothing like this (except for the exceptional work of that one guy on this forum whose name escapes me who pulled all the links together in a document where it quite easy to click the link and find the online image).
- Immanuel Tov's Parallel Aligned Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Texts of Jewish Scripture is poorly implemented. I cannot even find the Aramaic text that is supposed to be there. The contrast with the implementation by the competition is stark.
- Logos has no original language Mishna or Talmud. I we have all kinds of Ugaritic resources and I'm thankful for those. But the Hebrew of the Mishna is far more fundamental for understanding Biblical Hebrew, and what we learn about first century Judaism from both of these resources is hard to overstate (I was going to say "cannot be overstated" but clearly it can).
- Logos has a good offering in terms of Targum, but there is no English translation available. The competition has one.
- Logos is has a fully-tagged Syriac New Testament. The competition has a fully-tagged Syriac Bible.
- The competition offers a resource which includes high resolution imagery of every page of the Aleppo Codex which displays beautifully right there in the software. Logos offers none of this.
I'm sure anyone reading this is getting a sense of the type of resources that I value. I still fantasize about a Logos offering in Akkadian someday, though maybe that's a bridge further than Logos is likely to go. I understand that the resources I'm interested in don't have the kind broad consumer appeal that other types of resources do.
You know the proverb: "The buyer says 'It's no good, it's no good' and then goes away and boasts about his purchase." I would like to be able to go away and boast about my purchase. I would like to be able to sell Logos to my classmates at school, and to look at my teachers using Accordance and know in my heart that my investment was better-made because I did my research better. Anyone who wants to convince me that Logos is the way to go for study both of the Bible and the world of the Bible, I'm all ears.
Mostly I find myself wondering these days if Logos and I are simply headed in different directions.
Comments
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Reason 1a on the negative side is bogus. The Logos implementation is fine. I misunderstood because I had not read the description carefully enough. I have tried to edit the post and remove that section, but the page keeps throwing an error when I resubmit.
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No help here. I use both.
- I pulled up Tov in Logos for Dan 3:15. What a mess. Sorry.
- English Targums: Logos has Aramaic Bible
- Agree on Mishnah/Talmud OL
- Agree on Text Comparison (quite buggy for years)
- Agree on Akkadian (at least the hebrew/akkadian book is needed). I ended up just buying CAD.
- AFAT used to have a manual in Libronix. Can't remember; don't see it now. [ok; it was a pdf]
All that said, my primary is Logos, mainly for the wide offering (eg monographs) and ability to export data to my own Bible software. I use Accordance to supplement holes in Logos.
And all that said again, I suspect the OL game is finishing up (for both). Future development will likely be external specialty apps (eg mss tracing, etc). Accordance will atrophy. Logos will generalize.
But the period 2000-2018 was fun to buy.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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And all that said again, I suspect the OL game is finishing up (for both). Future development will likely be external specialty apps (eg mss tracing, etc). Accordance will atrophy. Logos will generalize.
That's a depressing prospect (not that I can refute it).
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There are some other OL threads in the last six months that are very similar to this. I plan to go to one of Mark Barnes webcasts to ask about the future of OL and textual studies in Logos. (For example, the text comparison tool is beyond long in the tooth.) I don’t know what else to say, except it has been a loooong time since I was excited about new OL developments in Logos.
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Now that I know I can run Bibleworks 10 on macOS without virtualization (WineHQ works, even on Apple Silicon), Logos will always be just for books in a library for me. So glad to have it, and be able to utilize it well into the future. Those who are legal owners of BW, go to the website to get your permanent installation files for BW 8,9 or 10.
Logos as a reference Library. I have tons of resources available. That's what Logos was always best for anyway. Someday when I have time I will try to link BW and Logos together. Not sure if that will work on a mac, but I will find out …
As for comparing programs … now that BW cannot be purchased, I guess Acc is now the best OL desktop program that money can buy … since Logos cannot be bought, but must be rented indefinitely.
Kinda sad because Acc development seems to have stalled a couple years back and never recovered. They are still discussing the "new" sync feature that is still coming along well but not quite ready yet. In other words, buying heavily into the platform is taking a risk.
On mobile I believe Logos is as good as anything out there. And these days mobile is very important. Unfortunately Logos mobile is still not complete. Audiobooks are hit or miss. There are hundreds of things the desktop platform does that mobile does not. People are still reporting problems when trying to permanently download a large library of books. I have not personally had this problem.
Acc has an iOS app but development is dead. The Android app cannot even be installed any longer to my knowledge. Even so, many people love the OL features of Acc iOS app.
Probably the best thing to do is to use both programs. In my case, I have all three. I still believe BW is the best for working with the Biblical text.
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My impression is that Accordance is better at original languages (everything has Strongs tagging, root function, etc), and things like looking at more than one verse at a time is super simple in Accordance and a bit of a commotion in Logos. Really everything about the original languages is smoother in Accordance.
That said, I have found extrabiblical material to be far easier with Logos, and it is huge that the notes and other user data is able to be exported without a problem. While I do appreciate that Accordance's notes are biblical order by default and scroll in parallel with the text, the export function is huge.
So I find myself translating with Accordance and importing notes into Logos, and I pretty much have them both open all the time now.
On a side note, regarding your comments about students, one concern I have with Logos is the Factbook tags. In Accordance I would personally study the text and determine antecedents etc, so when I came to a conclusion I not only felt confident but I could document my train of thought and could defend it. By contrast, hovering over a word teaches nothing, and sometimes (rarely, but sometimes), I don't agree with the tagged antecedent. While I don't have a concern with this for people who already know the text, I do have concerns regarding students. While I know you can turn the Factbook tags off, how many students will do that voluntarily?When I first got Logos I found it pretty frustrating, in part since simple translation exercises which would take 5 minutes in Accordance take 30 minutes in Logos, but if I forget about translation and use it for notes and extrabiblical research, I genuinely like it.
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I share a lot of your frustration; Logos, to me, seems to be very focused on getting in as many popular evangelical books as popular, while leaving behind 1) improved functionality and 2) scholarly interest, which overlap for those of us who do not treat Logos as an slightly advanced Kindle.
On #1, I would add the fact that the iOS app still has NO widgets at all. Or the fact that numerous people who have acquired the $1000 Aramaic Bible (which is on my list) have complained about the poor implementation… which discourages me from buying it. (See the reviews at the bottom of ) Or the fact that the JPS Tanakh still has no tagging at all.I came to Logos from Bibleworks, which was so easy to do original language searching. Because of the nature of the program and encoding, I could go from conceiving of a complex search, to setting text limits, language, and running the search ALL in under a second with keyboard shortcuts. I ran dozens of such searches every day. In spite of my years of training in the languages, I almost never do such searches in Logos because it's so slow and cumbersome to put them together. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."- G.K. Chesterton
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I'll try BW on my Mac
Instructions for installing WineHQ on the mac are here.
I installed using Homebrew which is how they also recommend. If your mac does not already have Homebrew installed, you will have to install it first.
If your mac has high resolution display, older versions of BW will be very small on the screen. BW 10 had built-in full program scaling and scales up beautifully.
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Returning to OP, I wonder what the academic Logosians want (broad-brush). There's bunches of this and that suggestions.
Not for me, but it seems high-speed search formation is at the top? Just my impression. Both BW and Accord excelled.
Tool-fixing? Several bugs impact OL significantly.
Multiple layouts seem a major stretch, design-wise.
For me, latin and syriac expansion (akkadian left in sands of time; Ben's more hopeful).
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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I mean, here's some detail from memory about BW. Let's say I want to find Hebrew occurrences in Genesis wherein YHWH does something. Here's all it would take.
Hit Esc key (Takes cursor to command bar. Contrast with Logos' shortcut to the command bar of Opt+Cmd+L. Not nearly as fast/easy/muscle memory as… esc.)
"wtm" enter (sets the search version to morphological Hebrew Bible of the Westminster coding)
"l gen" enter (sets the search limits to the book of Genesis)
"'@v* yhwh" enter (finds any Hebrew verb followed immediately by the tetragrammaton)
All of that in under a second, from conception to results."The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."- G.K. Chesterton
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I would say BibleWorks and Accordance for original languages and Logos for library. I do love being able to search all my books in my library. However there are things that could be done in BibleWorks and Accordance that either Logos can't do or it's much more difficult.
I asked for a minor enhancement of the copy verse too. Nope. I cando cartwheelswith copying in BibleWorks as far as customization and number of resources. With Accordance, one of its strongest features is the graphical language search tool. And their tools work are global and work across all resources unlike Logos where you get what they give you on a tool. If they only want it to work on two or three texts, that's all you get.
It doesn't have to be an either-or, you can use both, but I don't see Logos looking t strengthen its original Languages functionality. They are obviously looking to move in a different direction.
Oh, and as far as the Logos subscription goes, don't hold your breath. The AI can be useful for library searches but so far, no new permanent tools have been added for those of us waiting on the fallback license. I already asked which of the new features were permanent and got crickets. Unless you want the AI, I would take a wait and see approach and see what they deliver. The focus now has been mostly window dressing like a new toolbar that no one asked for.
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I know neither Hebrew nor Greek; I have used neither BibleWorks nor Accordance, so I have a rather different take on Logos' relationship with original language tools. I was not impressed when Logos released Learn to use Biblical Hebrew (Greek) in Logos because they oversold what an average user could do with a smattering of original language. In my mind, Logos was encouraging playing at studying the Bible while pretending you had skills you did not have rather than encouraging the study of scripture using the skills you actually had. Again, when they added semantic roles, their training revolved around complex academic interpretation rather than the semantic roles that users misuse grammar to emulate. Then they made the data difficult to find. When they implemented a concordance function, they failed to provide for multi-word lexical units … a primary reason for the non-original language users to use a concordance. They implemented the Bible sense lexicon as a hierarchy rather than a web, omitted some relationships, and wondered why we didn't ooh and aah over a tool with great but unrealized potential. While excellent sentence diagramming tools are available on the web, Logos provides clunky manual drawing tools emphasizing Kellogg-Reed style grade school diagrams for English rather than tree diagrams that are language independent and can compare structures in the original language to the translation. Then there is my biggest bugaboo - Logos chooses its preferred reading and preferred linguistic theories (think Longacre on genres) and presents them to us as "the answer" rather than offering multiple theories or interpretations for us to struggle with. My study patterns carry much more of the Jewish hermeneutics than that - I prefer to grapple with, struggle with, engage with scripture.
I would suggest that complaining about other companies having better this & that's for original languages misses the real point. Logos is a collection of cool tools developed as text computing was coming of age. Logos has never stopped and thought about original language studies/linguistics/text analysis as a cohesive whole and the various roles tools must play to add value to those studies. I see Logos as having great potential were it an integrated whole rather than myopically implemented pieces. No, AI is not the solution to the issues; it is another bandaid.Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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It doesn't have to be an either-or, you can use both, but I don't see Logos looking t strengthen its original Languages functionality. They are obviously looking to move in a different direction.
I would rather not mention who, since I am not sure if he would want to be named, but relatively recently a Logos employee did reach out to me and thank me for discussing some of Logos' shortcomings when it comes to original language work. So from what he said, I was left with the distinct impression that Logos DOES want to improve their original language functions. I truly hope they do, as it is a genuine need for many of us who do scholarly original language work and are, at the moment, dependent on Accordance and BW for aspects of our work as a result.
So I found that encouraging, and I hope it encourages others as well. I understand that Logos is a company, but my impression is that they truly do care about their customers, and I am under the impression that Logos understands the importance of some of the work many of us are doing.
Oh, and as far as the Logos subscription goes, don't hold your breath.
I still despise subscriptions and am very grateful to own Logos. In fact, what pushed me over the edge to finally by it is learning that they might be introducing a subscription. I am pretty sure I might have called sales that day. When I spoke with the sales guy, he kind of downplayed the subscription and spoke of it like other things Logos has played with over the years, saying they might do it, or might not, and it might be around for a long time, or it might not be. I really hope they go back to the option where people CAN buy it if they want to, but then have a subscription option for people who would find that more helpful.
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With Accordance, one of its strongest features is the graphical language search tool
Not long ago Bradley mentioned in a similar thread to this one that a graphical tool was something we might see in the future.
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Logos has never stopped an thought about original language studies/linguistics/text analysis as a cohesive whole and the various roles tools must play to add value to those studies
If they have thought about it, we have not seen anything communicated about their vision for OL, nor has the software improvements over the last several years indicated that there is a priority for textual studies use cases.
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Or the fact that numerous people who have acquired the $1000 Aramaic Bible (which is on my list) have complained about the poor implementation… which discourages me from buying it.
Actually it gets worse. If you try to use CAL in a multiview (next to a flawed AB), the bugs in multiview result in displaying the CAL fragments, even when there's no verse matchup.
"If myth is ideology in narrative form, then scholarship is myth with footnotes." B. Lincolm 1999.
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Also the Bible translators all over the world need access to original languages.
Bible translation to various languages is globally a hot topic, and quick action is needed.
Gold package, and original language material and ancient text material, SIL and UBS books, discourse Hebrew OT and Greek NT. PC with Windows 11
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My impression is that Accordance is better at original languages (everything has Strongs tagging, root function, etc), and things like looking at more than one verse at a time is super simple in Accordance and a bit of a commotion in Logos. Really everything about the original languages is smoother in Accordance.
That said, I have found extrabiblical material to be far easier with Logos, and it is huge that the notes and other user data is able to be exported without a problem. While I do appreciate that Accordance's notes are biblical order by default and scroll in parallel with the text, the export function is huge.
So I find myself translating with Accordance and importing notes into Logos, and I pretty much have them both open all the time now.
On a side note, regarding your comments about students, one concern I have with Logos is the Factbook tags. In Accordance I would personally study the text and determine antecedents etc, so when I came to a conclusion I not only felt confident but I could document my train of thought and could defend it. By contrast, hovering over a word teaches nothing, and sometimes (rarely, but sometimes), I don't agree with the tagged antecedent. While I don't have a concern with this for people who already know the text, I do have concerns regarding students. While I know you can turn the Factbook tags off, how many students will do that voluntarily?When I first got Logos I found it pretty frustrating, in part since simple translation exercises which would take 5 minutes in Accordance take 30 minutes in Logos, but if I forget about translation and use it for notes and extrabiblical research, I genuinely like it.
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I strongly agree with @MJ. Smith's analysis here:
I would suggest that complaining about other companies having better this & that's for original languages misses the real point. Logos is a collection of cool tools developed as text computing was coming of age. Logos has never stopped and thought about original language studies/linguistics/text analysis as a cohesive whole and the various roles tools must play to add value to those studies. I see Logos as having great potential were it an integrated whole rather than myopically implemented pieces. No, AI is not the solution to the issues; it is another bandaid.
It does feel like an uncoordinated patchwork of "cool tools," and the result is neither fish nor fowl. It's not easy to use as a "Bible program" for casual study and it's not well integrated for focused original language study. The best fit I personally found was for doing English language research for seminary papers (which I'm not doing any more). But it does feel like Logos doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up.
Having said that, the underlying library system is great, and the range of resources available is incredible. It's all the uncoordinated features built on top of it that baffle and frustrate me.
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Logos is a people pleaser and people pleaser often ends up pleasing no one… I can sympathise with them. After all they’re just serving God with their best.
That said, I’m a new user so I might not have been seasoned enough to know what I’m talking about 😅 I came from Olive Tree, eSwordX and biblehub. It’s a gradual transition.
Hence I was extremely delighted when I found out Logos feature with the Word study & Septuagint tool in all that eye candy GUI. That’s how I learn to understand a closer meaning of words being used in Hebrew culture/thinking.
With reference in Logos resources, it does help to understand why the author uses certain words to represent certain meaning.
I made my own PBs from some open resources and it’s working so well for me in Logos without spending more money because it seems so silly when I’ve inherited & spent much on hundreds of physical biblical theme books…Of course the Logos research collection is a dream for me 😮💨I’m still looking for the perfect chiasm tool. Found one but it’s online and I don’t like having to rely upon online tools. Maybe 🤔 a new PB project.
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I think it would be helpful on here to demonstrate in a video what Accordance does with OL and what Logos does with OL. Then we can literally see the difference many are discussing.
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Thanks for this thoughtful thread, it's appreciated. I've asked some of our content people to take a look at it, so they're aware of what you're looking for.
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I think it would be helpful on here to demonstrate in a video what Accordance does with OL and what Logos does with OL. Then we can literally see the difference many are discussing.
I think there are almost too many differences for that, but I can just mention a few things coming to mind.
1) Accordance lets you see Gen 1:1 alone, or Gen 1:1, Gen 5:1 etc at the same time in one step. By contrast, it is"possible" to only see one verse at a time in Logos, or see a few verses which are not next to each other, but it is a multistep process.
2) Accordance lets you search for lex, lemma, or root regardless if I searched for Gen 1:1 and see the whole text, or just Gen 1:1, or Gen 1:1 and Ex 1:1. By contrast, Logos does not let you do searches on the words in the "search" window or passage list. You can once you open the verses outside of those places, but it has personally been a pretty sharp learning curve understanding when a word is clickable and searchable and when it is not, since in Accordance it is searchable everywhere.
3) In Accordance it is very easy to copy a word or copy isolated letters of a word. In Logos it is possible to select words, but it is pretty tricky to isolate only one letter to copy or search. Enough so that if I need to do that I go to Accordance. I am not sure if this is user error issues or how the program works.
4) Accordance as a "User Bible" and all I need to do is have the biblical references next to the text, import it, and it scrolls in parallel with other published Bibles. I can also do word searches on my own imported User Bible, highlight it, etc, and treat it like a Bible. By contrast, Logos has their PB which Logos will NOT recognize as a Bible UNLESS it is littered with milestones. After that is done it apparently works, but now the text is left with all of these milestones. While that might be ok if someone has a text which is complete, it is truly not practical for someone working on an active translation which is being frequently updated. In Accordance I can make a few changes and upload it and it works fine. I can also copy sections of my text and do other things with it (since it is just a pure text with only Bible references), while Logos' PB can't be simply copied and pasted places because of the milestones. The only option is thus to keep TWO copies, one of a plain text to be used for non-Logos reasons, and then a Logos copy with milestones. Then every time I make an edit I need to make the edit TWICE, once in the clean copy, and once in the Logos copy. (I actually tried that and quickly discovered that was not realistic to maintain).On a side note, I understand that there are perhaps some advantages to the Logos PB (like footnote capability, (if I am not mistaken), while Accordance's User Bible does not. So I can see how it might be really helpful for some people, but it is for sure not an Accordance User Bible replacement.
There are a lot of other differences also, but those are just few random things coming to my mind. The main thing which keeps me using Accordance is their User Bible and how I can quickly view multiple verses out of order all at the same time and have all the words still have lex, lemma, and root functionality (and Strongs, of course, everyone knows I love Strongs numbers by now, and of course the OL texts are tagged with it also in Accordance).Thanks for this thoughtful thread, it's appreciated. I've asked some of our content people to take a look at it, so they're aware of what you're looking for.
I was just getting ready to press enter and saw your comment. :) If you can pass on the feedback to the correct department about the User Bible, I would appreciate it. If it would help for me to communicate with you privately about it more in detail, I would be happy to do so.
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3) In Accordance it is very easy to copy a word or copy isolated letters of a word. In Logos it is possible to select words, but it is pretty tricky to isolate only one letter to copy or search. Enough so that if I need to do that I go to Accordance. I am not sure if this is user error issues or how the program works.
@Kristin In Program Settings in the Text Display category there is a Text Selection setting. This can be changed to suit your needs better. Be aware that you can also hold down the Alt key while dragging the selection to temporarily enable precise selection.
Andrew Batishko | Logos software developer
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Hi @Andrew Batishko,
Thanks so much! :) I was able to find that in Program Settings and that helps a lot! :)
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