{"id":4414,"date":"2012-02-01T01:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/?p=4414"},"modified":"2012-11-28T05:05:35","modified_gmt":"2012-11-28T13:05:35","slug":"bob-resources-references-and-links","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lighthousebc.com\/beacon\/2012\/02\/01\/bob-resources-references-and-links\/","title":{"rendered":"BOB – Resources, References, and Links"},"content":{"rendered":"

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by Stephen Rodgers<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s an old expression about God closing doors and opening windows. I always thought that was both odd and awesome, since it seemed to call upon Christians to execute maneuvers most often associated with catburglers and second-story men. Except in this case, instead of metaphorical doors and windows we’re going to be dealing with actual hyperlinks on the internet.<\/p>\n

CLOSED DOOR<\/strong><\/p>\n

At some point last week, Crossway decided to remove the links to most of the content from the ESV Study Bible<\/em> that was previously available online. \u00a0Following the example of other publishers (Thomas Nelson, Zondervon, etc.) they had previously exposed their book introductions (which was fairly standard) as well as their articles and essays (which was exceedingly generous of them).<\/p>\n

They have since decided to remove that content. \u00a0It hasn’t been deleted, it’s simply been moved behind their paywall. \u00a0So if you’ve registered your ESV Study Bible<\/em> on their website, you can still view the material by logging in to esvbible.org<\/a>. (Note: I believe that you still get a free code for this with the purchase of any new ESV Study Bible<\/em>. They also allow you to purchase a digital version of all the content from the MacArthur Study Bible<\/em>\u00a0and integrate that as well, which results in you owning a seriously powerful tool for Bible study that can be accessed from any internet connection).<\/p>\n

By the way, since I’m about to say some less-than-complimentary things about the results of that decision, let me take a moment to make one thing clear: it was absolutely their right to make that choice. \u00a0They paid to develop the material, and if they wish to be more aggressive in monetizing it, they are well within their\u00a0prerogative\u00a0as a publisher. Nonetheless, exercising that right several years after<\/em>\u00a0it’s been freely available is a bit odd.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, since I can’t hyperlink to your physical<\/em>\u00a0book, and since their bible study web interface is fairly non-standard, it’s a pretty big blow to referencing their material online. \u00a0(In other words, while the material is there and at least nominally searchable, the techniques and technology that apply to searching, storing, referencing, and indexing a web document are now useless). And as a result of this, quite a few links from previous BOB articles are now broken. So, since I’m going to have to take the time to touch every article to remove<\/em> those links, I might as well take the opportunity to add<\/em> quite a few resources that have come to my attention since then.<\/p>\n

OPEN WINDOW<\/strong><\/p>\n

As of the publishing of this article, all previous articles in the BOB series<\/a> have been updated with new and improved reference material.<\/p>\n

Briefly, here is a list of the study Bible resources I commonly use that have some corresponding availability online:<\/p>\n