This is not strictly speaking an Olive Tree post, but I feel compelled to put in a good word for studying any Scripture with at least two translations. This study habit takes English-only students more than half the way towards original-language studies. It is the single best text-observation habit that I can think of.

Of course, this is greatly enhanced if you pick two reliable translations that are a little bit apart in their philosophies of translation. Having a parallel King James and New King James is not what I’m talking about. I recommend a fairly literal translation (KJV, ESV, NASB) paired with a more free translation (NIV, NET, CSB/HCSB). This allows you to see when a translator feels like there is some leeway in the rendering of the meanings into English. No two translations are going to make the same decisions, but you need to realize those decisions happen. Mono-translation Christians may never realize how much work translation actually is.

Today I was looking at Ephesians 2 for our small group. In my Olive Tree I put the free ESV on the left and the free HCSB on the right:

After you’ve done this, start reading carefully and noting things you might want to look into more deeply. Here are just a few things that stood out for further study.

First, the identity and role of Satan. I’m totally used to the terminology “prince of the power of the air,” but the HCSB translators see the need for further clarification. They have “ruler who exercises authority over the lower heavens.”

Remember, I’m only looking for clues for further study right now. I’m not taking sides. But it looks like that word “prince” and that word “air” could use some more research.

Next, I see how the ESV tends to preserve Hebrew-sounding idioms while the HCSB feels free to render them into more normal English. The “sons of disobedience” in ESV (reflecting the original words in Greek) becomes merely “the disobedient” in HCSB. This is not an error or an omission, it is the translator’s decision that “sons of” is not a helpful 21st century carrier of meaning. At least it merits further study.

Thirdly, I notice that by using two translations side by side, I’m reminded that “Christ” is not just Jesus’s last name, it is the word “Messiah.” Having the two together reminds me that when Paul wrote “Christ,” his readers would think more or less “Messiah,” depending on their Jewish or non-Jewish background.

Finally, I see that we are “his workmanship” in verse 10, and merely “his creation” in the HCSB. This gives me a mental note to try to find out whether this is just the run-of-the-mill word for “creation,” or is it a special word for craftsmanship? Again, I don’t know just yet, but it gives me fruitful thoughts for later study and research.

This is just a sample of the benefits of having two Bibles at your fingertips at all times, which is a habit that Olive Tree makes simple!

 

Hello again. We’ve seen what split screen can do for us, and we know we can customize the fonts for the top and bottom (or left and right) screen to match our preferences.

Your preferences may not be mine, but generally I want my split screens to synchronize. The top (or left) screen is the boss, so that when you page back and forth in that screen, your split screen follows what you’re doing.

The synchronization feature is called “Window Sync,” and it’s such an important feature, it’s on the main gear menu directly accessible from the top of the screen.

(From now on, when I say “top screen,” just assume “left screen” if you’re in landscape mode.)

A longstanding bug, or design, in OliveTree, is that when you enter split screen mode, the bottom screen won’t synchronize until you page the top screen back and forth. I find this inconvenient, but that’s where we are right now.

Another confusing design item about split screen is that due to OliveTree’s design of how the bottom screen is to be used, you don’t open resources in the bottom screen the same way you open them in the top screen.

On the top screen, you access the books directly from the bar at the top of the window.

On the bottom screen, if you want just a particular book, you have to hit the “Parallel” icon at the bottom of the screen, and then it will show you a list of books you can access on the bottom screen (it’s the same list of books).

If you hit Parallel but you are already in a particular book, hit the Back icon and then the list of books will be displayed.

 

Ok, we’ve installed Olive Tree, and beefed it up with all the free Bible resources we could find. Now, what can we accomplish with just the free items?

First, let’s tip our hat to the many free Bible programs that are out there. YouVersion was a great product the last time I tried it. It even included downloading and free audio (as long as you were connected to data). Even Logos has some free options. But our purpose here is to unfold the study tools of Olive Tree.

Let’s set ourselves up for maximum study. I’m using an iPad Mini 2 for these tests. (The PC version is a slightly different beast, and we’ll need separate blog posts for some of the unique things that the Windows version brings with it.)

Start by getting rid of the strange default of double-columned text. Let’s turn that off (Settings > Advanced > Display > Multi-Column Text). The helpful Window Sync option comes turned on by default.

Now, if you don’t see Open Study Center at the bottom of the screen, touch the middle of the screen to make it visible, and then select Open Study Center.

Immediately we see a list of our installed Bibles, but what we’ve really opened is the Resource Guide. Pull the three-bar handle up to show a bigger list of what the Resource Guide contains.

Let’s dissect this a bit.

Olive Tree’s favorite study tool is the Resource Guide. I admit, I don’t find it all that helpful. The idea is that with a Bible open at the top of the screen (or the left, if you turn the device sideways), you will have a vast wealth of supplementary study information available on the right hand side. If you’re used to a paper study Bible, you basically have two columns of study info: (1) The cross references from each verse, and (2) the running commentary at the bottom of the page.

The Resource Guide in Olive Tree is supposed to be a souped up version of that. Your possible study materials are arranged in categories:

• installed Bibles’ cross references (all of them).in a section called Related Verses
• Commentaries on the verses displayed on the page.
  • Sometimes the study notes of an installed study bible are designated as Commentaries. Others are not.
• Bibles (for parallel reading of the same passage)
• People (these are entries from Bible dictionaries that you’ve installed)
• Topics (same thing)
• Maps that pertain to something in the passage
• Outlines from any resource that may have one
• Introductions to the Bible book you’re looking at
• Sermons
• Videos
• Your own notes
• Tags

Sounds exhausting, doesn’t it? If there are categories you never use, you can turn them off in the settings.

Here is a display of “Related Verses” from the ESV cross references

Possibly you’ll notice that any translation you happen to be using may have its own cross references inside the text, indicated by small clickable letters. These are based on the same exact lists as the Related Verses for each bible translation, but, if you use the ones that are inside your chosen version, then they are connected to individual verse sections, rather than just the whole verse. That can make a difference for your studies.

If you click the Commentary section on Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown, you’ll see the individual commentary paragraphs that go with this passage. If you click on one of these sections, the split screen will go to that section of the whole commentary, for continuous reading.

Here, I’ve simply clicked on one of the parallel Bibles, in this case the SBL Greek New Testament. Notice how it’s super-small and hard to read.

Thankfully, you can change the font size individually for various kinds of text. Greek can be changed without messing with any other text:

That’s enough for tonight! Remember, everything we’ve done so far is still free.

 

Since yesterday’s post, I’ve discovered that my search skills on Olive Tree’s stores are a bit lacking.

When you go to “Free Bibles,” you get the ones I made a list of yesterday, but you have to use the picker down at the bottom of the page, so you can get to all of them:

When you go through the entire list of Bibles, excluding fragments and samples, I see the following, besides the ones I already named yesterday:

• Revised Version
• American Standard Version
• Bible in Basic English
• Tyndale’s NT for the 21st Century
• Young’s Literal Translation
• Darby Translation
• World English Bible (three editions)
• Douay Rheims
• Wycliffe Bible (middle English)
• Tyndale Bible
• JPS Tanakh
• Rotherham Emphasized Bible
• Weymouth NT

In addition there are non-English Bibles:

• Reina-Valera – Spanish
• Louis Segond – French
• Svenska Folkbibeln – Swedish
• Luther Bible – German
• Latin Vulgate
• Statenvertaling – Dutch
• Ostervald – French
• Albanian
• Danske Bibel – Danish
• Károli – Hungarian
• Gdansk NT – Polish
• Azərbaycan dilində Müqəddəs Kitab – Azeri

And some Hebrew and Greek resources:

• Hebrew Bible from Leningrad Codex
• SBL Greek NT
• Scrivener Green NT
• Byzantine Greek NT

Additionally, here are is one more free non-Bible resource:

• Hitchcock’s Bible Names Dictionary

If you’re searching the site, you’ll notice that I’m skipping over ebooks, sermons, and other such things that are also free. That’s because I want to concentrate on using Olive Tree as a Bible reading and study tool. I do expect to sometime do a blog post on the topic of using Olive Tree as an ebook reader, but that’s a distant priority.

iOS search for free resources

To find this same list in an iOS version, go to the store by hitting the shopping cart icon:

and then hit Categories and then choose Free Resources:

 

 

Let’s start by exploring what can be done with the free Olive Tree software without installing anything else that costs money. How much of a power user can you become without spending any money at all?

As you’ll see, I highly recommend spending money judiciously in Olive Tree, but how far can we get before we spend a penny?

I cleared off one of my devices, an iPad Mini 2, and I reinstalled from scratch. Today’s iOS version is 7.3.0, the first version with audio support. The download size is 125.4 MB.

When we kick off to start with, we are asked to Select Free Translations:

Let’s just pick them all:

I’m going to log in with my longtime account, but for this blog post, I’m only going to install free resources. So to start with, I already have an NIV, ESV, NKJV, and KJV. If you’ve been using Bible apps since the 90’s like I have, you’ll know that this is a significant improvement over the past. The first three items are copyrighted, and it used to be that “free” apps only had “free” translations which meant public domain.

I wake up in the Gospel of John in the NIV:

So what else is free? From inside the app, I can shop for free items by navigating to the store. I scroll down to the bottom and I see “Free Resources” with a “See All” link:

Unfortunately, the See All link is misleading, since it throws me back into a page that’s full of non-free resources. The olivetree.com website is better; it has a clearly marked “Free” drop-down where I can get a list of lots of resources:

I see here that I can download HCSB Free and the NET Bible with limited notes. If I switch over to Free Study Tools (different page than Free Bibles), I see that I have some good choices from Christian history:

• Matthew Henry’s Concise Commentary
• Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary
• Easton’s Bible Dictionary

I’m skipping over “map samples” and Bible fragments like the NAB Gospel of Luke. Let’s install these three free resources, along with the HCSB Free and the NET Bible Limited Notes, giving us five Bibles and three study tools.

In the next post we’ll delve into actual usage. What can we do with only free tools?

 

 

 

I’ve been a user of Olive Tree since the Palm IIIxe. I bought …. paid money for  … a copy of the New American Standard Bible for my Palm. It was what it was, but I did switch to other Bible programs for reasons of speed.

Imagine my surprise in the Android era, years later, when I activated a free copy of Olive Tree and found that my license for that NASB was still good! To this day I use my NASB95, but the thought that my purchases would be good for years to come encouraged me to buy a few more resources … and then a few more.

Those of us who’ve gotten used to Olive Tree for our studies want to get the most out of our library, but there is precious little information from the vendor. When I watch the tutorial videos, I think, I knew that. Why don’t you tell them the rest?

This blog attempts to find the rest of the story!

This site, if it continues and gets traction, will become a place to turbocharge our usage of the Olive Tree Bible.

Olive Tree hasn’t had a user support forum in years. Their knowledge base is small. It’s time for a place where we can collect best practices.

Olive Tree is an amazing program where our money goes much further than it does with Logos Bible. Our goal is to extend that money even further, by seeing how far we can take this software during our reading and study!