Flipping through Lexicons

Rick wrote earlier about how you can go from a headword in one lexicon to another by right-clicking and executing a keylink from the headword. This is true, and a very useful feature.
But I will show you a still more excellent way …

Once you have a lexicon open to the article you want to read, the quickest way to survey other lexicons and dictionaries in your library is to use the Parallel Resource feature. Whenever you have a resource open, the Libronix DLS does a lot of work behind the scenes to cull through your library to find resources that work in roughly the same way as the one you have open.

The Go | Parallel Resources menu will show you what all these resources are, if you want to choose one randomly from the list. Or you can use the Go | Next/Previous | Resource menu options, which are duplicated on the resource window’s toolbar (big yellow arrows pointing up and down). Usually those arrows advance forward or backward in the current book, but if you hit the little black downward-pointing triangle next to each button, you’ll see a menu of options, one of which is “Resource.”

But I think the simplest way is best: Hit the left arrow on your keyboard to open the previous parallel resource, and the right arrow to open the next one.
When you advance to the next parallel resource, Libronix doesn’t just open it to the front page; it opens to as close to the same spot as it can reckon. In a Bible, this means that if you’re looking at John 1:1 (or if you’re Rick, you’re probably somewhere in the Pastoral epistles), the next resource opens to that same verse. If the next parallel resource on the list doesn’t have John 1:1 (say, it’s a Hebrew-only Bible), then it gets skipped.

With lexicons, the same thing happens, except that the “current location” isn’t defined by a Bible reference, it’s defined by the dictionary headword. Let’s try an experiment: Open your favorite Hebrew Lexicon to the article צדק (tsdq). Then hit the right arrow to zip through all the other Hebrew lexica on your system at the same article. What resources show up will vary depending on your library, but here’s what I see:

• Enhanced Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew and English Lexicon
• Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon
• Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon of the Old Testament
• Glosses for the Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts (Dead Sea Scrolls. Makes sense.)
• The Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament
• HAL Aramaic Volume (Aramaic cognate.)
• Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament (Forgot I had this one; it’s the concise glossary that comes with the Stuttgart Electronic Study Bible product.)
• New American Standard Hebrew-Aramaic and Greek Dictionaries
• Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament
• The Complete Word Study Concordance: Old Testament
• The Complete Word Study Dictionary: Old Testament
• Concise HAL
• Diccionario de Hebreo Bíblico (I forgot I had this one, too. Yo hablo español, pero no mucho.)
• Dictionary of Biblical Languages With Semantic Domains: Aramaic
• Dictionary of Biblical Languages With Semantic Domains: Hebrew
• Dictionary of Dieties and Demons in the Bible (A “Western Semitic deity” … didn’t expect that, but it’s relevant.)

I couldn’t have looked up all those references on my own. I wouldn’t have even known where to look, since I had forgotten that I even had some of these books in my library. Yet I was able to thumb through them in a matter of a few seconds, because the Libronix DLS did the hard work of looking through all the “shelves” in my electronic library to find all the resources I might be interested in, and what’s more, it then opened each of them to the exact spot on the exact page I wanted.