VIRTUAL CHICAGO

A site of biblical proportions: It's been called "the book of books," but a new Web site has launched the Bible off the printed page and into cyberspace.

Created by Richard Goerwitz, AB'83, AM'89, PhD'93, a lecturer in Near Eastern languages & civilizations, the Bible Browser allows World Wide Web users to find biblical verses and references to specific topics almost instantly.

Goerwitz's browser can find all references to a word in the Bible and conduct searches far too complex for standard biblical concordances, he says. A concordance may tell you where Moses and Aaron are mentioned separately, "but to find where they are mentioned together requires a great deal of time comparing references"-but would take the Bible Browser mere seconds.

The site comes in two interfaces: a quick-reference tool, and a more advanced version for the thorough cyberscholar. The various Bible texts include the King James, Revised Standard, and Latin Vulgate versions, and five lesser-known translations.

The Bible Browser has logged more than 2,000 visits in a single day, and churches and synagogues have added links to the site. Keeping the site ideologically neutral is important to Goerwitz, who feels the browser is valuable because it doesn't attempt to promote a particular religious viewpoint, as is the case with most other Bible search programs on the Internet. The address is: http://negus.uchicago.edu:1080/pub/goerwitz/bible_browser/pbeasy.html.