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By Rob Pegoraro
Washington Post Staff Writer
June 27, 1997

A well-organized Web page and a decent database can work wonders with such otherwise intimidating material as the tax code. So it makes sense that Web front-ends exist for another lengthy, confusingly organized, yet even more important document, the Bible. Brown University's Scholarly Technology Group offers one of the best such interfaces, its "Bible Browser." It's astonishingly fast at fetching by verse or finding individual words, and its listing of search results helpfully offers links to the previous and next passages and the ability to switch between King James, Revised Standard and (for power users) Jerome's Latin Vulgate editions. This is great for both researchers and just plain folks — don't think of looking up, say, the one instance of the word "Bethesda" in the New Testament without it. Brown's site doesn't handle searches on phrases too elegantly, but a Bible front end at the University of Virginia's Electronic Text Center does that job nicely.

— Rob Pegoraro
rob@twp.com