Accordance

Accordance is Bible Study software for Macintosh developed by OakTree Software. Many CATUG members consider it the best Bible software available, whether for private use or academic study.

Although Accordance was initially developed for the Mac OS and iOS, it now also runs on Windows.

OakTree Software

OakTree Software, Inc. is based in Altamonte Springs, Florida, USA. The company has focused on areas of special interest, particularly the study of Biblical texts. Its specific goals are:

• Offering innovative and powerful features which cannot be found anywhere else
• Providing the most intuitive, elegant, and easy-to-use interface possible
• Providing a wide range of useful resources like texts, dictionaries, & commentaries, for Bible study.

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 and Hebrew texts of the Bible. Accordance 1.0 was released in February 1994, and welcomed for its power and ease of use.

A version of Accordance 5.0 rewritten to run natively under Mac OS X was released at the start of 2002. The company has continued to add and improve features, such as the native Quartz rendering system. Version 8 was released in May 2008 and introduced a universal binary for Intel-based Macs. The latest version 10 was released in August 2012.

For some years, Zondervan packaged Accordance in their Zondervan Bible Study suites for Macintosh.

Accordance for iOS was released on December 30, 2010 for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

Even when it was a product developed exclusively for the Mac OS, Accordance also ran on PCs using the Basilisk II emulator. A Windows-native version was released in 2013.

Modules available

The program is centered on the Biblical text, but has many additional texts. There are many optional modules, detailed study tools for the original Hebrew and Greek, commentaries and reference dictionaries.

Some modules available include:

• Jewish writings including Mishnah, Targums, Pseudepigrapha, Josephus
• Early Christian writings such as the Didache
• Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia with the Groves-Wheeler Westminster Hebrew Morphology
• Dead Sea Scrolls
• Bible Atlas
• Bible Lands Photo Guide

Although the product has many modules, purchasing is simplified by packaging these into standard collections.

Discounts

Discounts are available to students, educators, current & retired ministers, missionaries, homeschoolers and CATUG members. These are not cumulative, i.e. only one discount can be claimed at a time.

Check the website for current special deals on additional modules.

External links

• Accordance Home
• Accordance Blog
• Accordance Forums
• Accordance Exchange

Reviews

• Accordance 9 is another big step forward in Bible study software, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, September 24, 2010
• Premier Bible Software – A Comparative Overview at Bible Software Review, December 29, 2006
  • Accordance 8 - The Best just got Better, August 6, 2009
• Review of Accordance 6 by the Society of Biblical Literature
• Accordance 5.5c review in Macworld, 2003
• Independent reviews listed on Accordance site

Credits

Shamelessly edited from the Wikipedia article (to which CATUG members had contributed) on June 3, 2010. Updated by Neville Reid in Nov 2017.