Why Your Greek Students Need to Know About Stepbible.org (Gupta)

I love Bibleworks  – I use it everyday. But a few years ago I wanted to have my students buy Bibleworks and they had to pay more than $300. For a researcher like myself, it is a no-brainer to invest in heavy-duty software, but I did feel bad having my seminary students fork over so much when they would not end up using all the features.

Last year I was very excited to discover www.stepbible.org – a new *FREE* Greek software program designed by Tyndale House (Cambridge, UK). It just went through a major revision and operates very smoothly. Obviously, since it is free, you are not getting things like Louw-Nida, BDAG, or access to Dead Scrolls. But it meets the basic needs of seminary students. Here are the key features:

-Quick lexical access to LSJ (and Thayer’s I presume) when you hover over a word in the NT text (Greek, or even English).

-Ability to do word (and multiple words) search in English translations like ESV and NIV (no NRSV or NET, sadly)

-Ability to do word searches easily in Greek

-Shows Greek interlinear if you want

-Ability to Greek word search the Septuagint

-Helps students identify “related” Greek words.

There are also some public domain commentaries (Luther, Lightfoot, K & D)

There are lots of “free” Greek-English Bible websites, but stepbible seems to me to be the best for teaching Greek word studies and for getting students quick and easy access to Septuagint.