Session 4 of today’s Accordance seminar (see also my notes on sessions 1, 2, and 3) ran from 3:50–5:15 PM.

This last session focused on reference tools, the atlas, timeline, and user tools. I use the atlas frequently, and have played around with user tools and user Bibles. I had never purchased or explored the timeline, though.

Highlighting. I’ve never used highlighting in Accordance—not from any disdain for the feature, but just because I’ve never really needed to do so, and never bothered to learn how. The feature offers quite a lot of utility, though. The best part about it is that you can define multiple sets of highlights. Thus, for example, you can download David Martyn’s set of highlights that show one way of dividing up the Pentateuch into sources, Wellhausen-style. This may be something I’ll want to use more in the future.

Timeline. I bought the timeline module today, but I still feel ambivalent about it. It’s kind of fun to play with, and could be a useful quick-reference tool from time to time. The timeline deals with the vexed problem of ambiguous or controversial dates in an interesting way. If you’re trying to build a timeline, you obviously have to put stuff on it, but constructing a timeline of ancient Israelite history can be very difficult, not least in the sorting of historical events from non-historical narratives, aligning the internal, relative chronology of the Bible with the chronologies (themselves disputable) of Egypt and Mesopotamia, and so on. Anyone who has tried to assign a historical date to a biblical event knows into what a morass of argument one can quickly sink. Accordance addressed this by offering two timelines within the same package, labeling one “conservative” and one “critical.” Mark Allison expressed the difference this way in our seminar today: the “conservative” dates are based more on internal biblical data, and the “critical” dates are based more on external synchronisms, where available. The Timeline Supplement documentation goes into more detail. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or establish a unique (one might say “idiosyncratic”) “Accordance chronology,” developer David Lang identified certain “authorities” whose chronologies the timelines now reflect. Again, the Timeline Supplement lists the exact breakdown of sources used. The results are mostly non-objectionable, and I appreciate Accordance’s attempt to use neutral-ish labels for the two broad chronological schemes. The discussion in the Timeline Supplement shows how well aware the developers were of the issues surrounding such a product.

I think that about wraps it up for my report on the Accordance seminar. I learned quite a few new things and now feel like I can use more of Accordance’s power.