One question that frequently comes up when studying or researching a Bible study is “what are the references to and from this topic/word/phase/verse/passage/chapter”.
Let say I want to learn more about the “angel of the Lord“, what are the verses in the Bible that refer to this? (Genesis 16:7, Exodus 3:2, Numbers 22:22 …). What are the references out there that speaks about this topic? Wikipedia has a write up about it and there are many people who studied and wrote about it, like Angel of the LORD (this was just picked from the search result).
Considering online materials only, these might be broken down into three types of cross-references, namely
- Verses – Topic, Topic – Verses (Genesis 16:7 – angel of the lord)
- Topic – Online resources (angel of the lord – Wikipedia)
- Verses – Online resources (Genesis 16:7 – Wikipedia)
Not too long ago, I came across YouVersion while looking into Web2.0 in the context of Bible study and reference. Wouldn’t it be good if everyone’s effort put into researching a topic or passage could be captured and shared? It looks like YouVersion is moving in that direction. Very promising.
At this point, I’m still trying to crystallize my thoughts on what to do for my project. One important consideration is not to repeat what had already been done but to build upon existing work.