If you read this blog regularly (or know me personally), you know that I work at Faithlife, the makers of Logos Bible Software. Today, we announced the latest version of that software: Logos 6!
The list of cool new features is too long for a single blog post, and it has already been laid out very well elsewhere. Here I’ll just note a few that I’m most excited about:
1. The Ancient Literature Tool
The Bible wasn’t written in a vacuum, and hasn’t existed in a vacuum since it was written. It both drew on other forms of ancient literature and influenced later literature. Now you can explore how the Bible relates to other ancient literature (both contemporary to its writing and later) with the Ancient Literature Tool, which is part of the passage guide. You will need to own the resources it links to for them to work, but many of them are available in Logos base packages:
2. Bible Book Guides
The Bible Book Guides are a quick way to get an overview of any biblical book. Before you get into the text, you often have questions about who wrote it, where they wrote it, when they wrote it, and who the original audience was. The Bible Book Guides assemble that information and get you a jump start on presenting it to others with neat background slides (I wrote the text for these slides, and our awesome designers made them look cool).
3. Psalms Explorer
Logos 6 has lots of new interactive media features, some of which focus on particular biblical books. Some of my other favorites are the Weights and Measures Converter, Israelite Feasts and Sacrifices, and Canon Comparison. I also have a personal connection to the Psalms Explorer: at the 1-minute mark in the video below, the narrator points out how the Psalms are labeled by theme. I labeled all of the Psalms (and Proverbs, too) several years ago as part of my work on the Preaching Themes database.
I have been using Logos for almost ten years, since before I was an employee. It is amazing to think about how far the software has come in that time. While it is not for everyone (I often compare it to a luxury car), I have found it to be an incredibly powerful tool for my own Bible study. I am glad that for the last four-plus years I have played a small part in bringing it to the world.
If you would like to see more videos about what Logos 6 can do, you can do that here. If you want to see what books are in Logos 6 base packages, you can do that here (and keep an eye out for a few that I edited myself!).
Elliot Ritzema 