Accordance is a Bible study program for Apple

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

and iPhone, and now

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...

and Android, developed by OakTree Software, Inc.OakTree Software
on company site Although originally written exclusively for the

Mac OS Two major famlies of Mac operating systems were developed by Apple Inc. In 1984, Apple debuted the operating system that is now known as the "Classic" Mac OS with its release of the original Macintosh System Software. The system, rebranded "M ...

(and then

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

), Accordance was then released in a Windows-native version, although it was available prior to this by using the

Basilisk II Basilisk II is an emulator which emulates Apple Macintosh computers based on the Motorola 68000 series. The software is cross-platform and can be used on a variety of operating systems. Christian Bauer (developer of a Mac 68k emulator ShapeShif ...

emulator. Since 2018 there has also been an Accordance app for Android. The program is used for both private and academic study.

OakTree Software

OakTree Software, Inc. is based in

Altamonte Springs, Florida Altamonte Springs is a suburban city in central Florida in Seminole County, Florida, United States, which had a population of 46,231 at the 2020 United States Census. The city is in the northern suburbs of the Orlando–Kissimmee–Sanford Metro ...

, USA. The company has focused on areas of special interest, particularly the study of Biblical texts.

Program history

Roy Brown, OakTree Software's president and application developer, created one of the first Bible programs available for the Macintosh, known as ThePerfectWord, in 1988. ThePerfectWord was later bought by another company and renamed MacBible. By the early 1990s there were a number of good general Bible study programs for the Mac. However, Brown saw the need for a new program which would make it easy to engage in more sophisticated kinds of Bible study, enabling scholars and pastors to do in-depth analysis of the original

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

and

Hebrew Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...

texts of the Bible. Accordance 1.0 was released in February 1994, and it was welcomed for its power and ease of use.Accordance: History
on company site The translators of the

Holman Christian Standard Bible The Holman Christian Standard Bible (HCSB) is a modern English Bible translation from Holman Bible Publishers. The New Testament was published in 1999, followed by the full Bible in March 2004. Beginnings The roots of the HCSB can be traced to ...

, completed in 2004, used it for word studies, comparisons and instant searches. A version of Accordance 5.0 rewritten to run natively under

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

was released at the start of 2002. The company has continued to add and improve features, such as the native

Quartz Quartz is a hard, crystalline mineral composed of silica (silicon dioxide). The atoms are linked in a continuous framework of SiO4 silicon-oxygen tetrahedra, with each oxygen being shared between two tetrahedra, giving an overall chemical form ...

rendering system. Version 8 was released in May 2008 and introduced a universal binary for Intel-based Macs. Version 9 was released in September 2010, version 10 in 2012, version 11 in 2014 and version 12 in 2016. Version 12 also saw a complete refreshing of the packages available, where, apart from individual modules, users must purchase collections from a specialized stream (Hebrew, Greek, English or Graphics). Version 13 was released in November 2019, new features including new look, built-in training, and import from PDF. Accordance for iOS was released on December 30, 2010 as a free app for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. After running through an emulator for many years, 2013 saw Accordance released as Windows-native software, with upgrades and updates generally running in parallel with the Mac software. After a beta in 2017, Accordance for Android was released in early 2018.

Modules available

The program is centered on the Biblical text,User interface concepts
on company site but has many additional texts. There are many optional modules, detailed study tools for the original Hebrew and Greek, commentaries and reference dictionaries, with a unique

cross-reference The term cross-reference (abbreviation: xref) can refer to either: * An instance within a document which refers to related information elsewhere in the same document. In both printed and online dictionaries cross-references are important because ...

system to interconnect the Biblical text with entire libraries of ancient extra-biblical materia

Some modules available include: *

Mishnah The Mishnah or the Mishna (; he, מִשְׁנָה, "study by repetition", from the verb ''shanah'' , or "to study and review", also "secondary") is the first major written collection of the Jewish oral traditions which is known as the Oral Torah ...

Targum A targum ( arc, תרגום 'interpretation, translation, version') was an originally spoken translation of the Hebrew Bible (also called the ''Tanakh'') that a professional translator ( ''mǝturgǝmān'') would give in the common language of the ...

Pseudepigrapha Pseudepigrapha (also anglicized as "pseudepigraph" or "pseudepigraphs") are falsely attributed works, texts whose claimed author is not the true author, or a work whose real author attributed it to a figure of the past.Bauckham, Richard; "Pseu ...

Josephus Flavius Josephus (; grc-gre, Ἰώσηπος, ; 37 – 100) was a first-century Romano-Jewish historian and military leader, best known for ''The Jewish War'', who was born in Jerusalem—then part of Roman Judea—to a father of priestly d ...

and early Christian writings such as the

Didache The ''Didache'' (; ), also known as The Lord's Teaching Through the Twelve Apostles to the Nations (Διδαχὴ Κυρίου διὰ τῶν δώδεκα ἀποστόλων τοῖς ἔθνεσιν), is a brief anonymous early Christian tr ...

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*

Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia The Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, abbreviated as BHS or rarely BH4, is an edition of the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible as preserved in the Leningrad Codex, and supplemented by masoretic and text-critical notes. It is the fourth edition in ...

with the Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphologybr>
*Louw & Eugene Nida, Nida Semantic Domain Lexico

* Byzantine text-type, GNT Robinson Byzantine *

Dead Sea Scrolls The Dead Sea Scrolls (also the Qumran Caves Scrolls) are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts discovered between 1946 and 1956 at the Qumran Caves in what was then Mandatory Palestine, near Ein Feshkha in the West Bank, on the nor ...

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*Bible Atlas and Bible Lands Photo Guid

{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120314035838/http://www.accordancebible.com/store/packages/graphic_resources , date=2012-03-14 *Comprehensive Cross Reference interactive module for Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, Philo, Nag Hammadi Library, Pseudepigrapha, Old Testament Apocrypha, New Testament Apocrypha, Plato, Pythagoras, Dhammapada, Egyptian Book of the Dead, Tacitus, Talmud, New and Old Testaments, Apostolic and Early Church Father

Although the product has many modules, purchasing is simplified by packaging these into
Collections
(which have replaced all of the earlier "bundles" and "libraries").

References

External links

Accordance HomeAccordance Blog

Accordance ForumsAccordance Exchange
Electronic Bibles