New Module: The Great Scott Lexicon

Any BibleWorks user who is anybody, keeps an eye on the official BibleWorks forums, but just in case someone missed the post, I wanted to bring it to everyone's attention that BW7 now has released the giganto version (yes that is the technical term) of the Liddell-Scott lexicon (referred to in BW7 as LSJM for its main editors Liddell, Scott, Jones and McKenzie). This is "the" Greek lexicon. If I'm lucky there might be another lexicon which surpasses Liddell-Scott in my lifetime, but I highly doubt it. In other words, if you spend the money on this one, you're making a valuable and long-term investment.

This lexicon is different from the Intermediate Liddell-Scott (Middle Liddell) which comes "free" with the BW program in that it is, well, much bigger! Unlike the Middle Liddell which has vague references to who uses words, the Great Scott lexicon uses actual references, which really makes it much more useful!

Recently, classicists have been able to access Great Scott via Perseus, but the BW7 LSJM module has a few distinct advantages.

• First, it'll be available on your computer even when you're not connected to the Internet (Perseus lately has been notoriously hard to use because it's been on and off-line so much).
• Second, unlike the Perseus LSJ, this version includes the supplementary entries to the Great Scott, which are readily accessible within the BW Lexicon browser.

Now I am probably one of the few out there who own the paper edition of Great Scott (and that is mostly because, as has been mentioned earlier, I am a book fan), but the BW edition of LSJM is sooooo much the superior to the book edition for a few reasons.

• First, it is darn near impossible to use the real book because it is so huge, the paper is so thin (I'm afraid to use it lest I tear a page or two right out of it), and the print is so very small. In BW, the lexicon can be as small as your laptop, there will be no papercuts and the text can be as big as your screen can allow.
• In addition to that, the supplementary lexical information in the book LSJ is found in the back in supplementary appendices. In other words, if you want to find out any new information about a given lexeme, you have to page through multiple parts of the lexicon in order to find it. Sounds easy enough until you try to keep one finger where you were, and use the others to page forward in the giganto book without tearing any of the pages! Well in BW, all the supplementary information is accessible in an organized and easy-to-use manner. (I'll try to put up a screen shot in a day or so).
• BW folks have also worked hard to differentiate the text so that the entries are easier to understand. Specifically what this means is not only is the text in BW's LSJM the same as the written text (including bold and italic font), but LSJM is different than the print book because the entries are broken up with indentations, which make definitions and glosses in the entries so much easier to use. This was not done in the print LSJ because it would have made that volume 4 or 5 times as long, but in the digital world, this is not a problem!

Other reasons why LSJM is super cool:

• It will help you plow through some of the classical Greek works I've been releasing for BW.
• It will give you the "big" picture of how words in the Biblical corpus (LXX (and earlier), NT, and beyond) are used in other literature and give you citations so you can verify this for yourself.
• Did I mention the lexicon has clickable links to the Biblical verses within the entries just like BDAG and other lexica of BW?

Whew. I probably meant to make some grand point at the beginning of this post, but I got carried away. What can I say. This release excites me!