From 1976 to 2004, Drs. Gleason Archer and Gary Hill have compiled and written materials to help pastors and Christian workers, having drawn from, leafed in, or alluded to over 1,000 reference works. They also published a best seller: The Discovery Bible New Testament, with Moody Publications in 1987. (Click here to learn more about this collaboration and other faithful consultants to this project, such as Drs. Grant Osborne and Eugene Merrill.)
The Discovery Bible helps all Bible readers, based on the literary clues in the inspired original text (objective data), to first analyze the foregrounding information (what is "most important" as part of the whole text) in the context of backgrounding information (the remaining parts of the whole text). The divine purpose of the paragraph, larger unit, and a Bible book as a whole is understood in light of this foregrounding information in the original text as inspired by God (Mt 5:18, 2 Tim 3:16)...
Foregrounding info
- Emphatic words (original train of thought)
- Salient verb features
- Key words ("beyond translation insights", word colors), aka "HELPS Word-studies".
Click here to learn what is unique about these word studies.
Backgrounding info
The remaining parts that we don't treat are still made available to Bible readers to explore further as needed. We provide additional tools for this such as NASEC, exegetical commentaries, parsed interlinears etc, and by extension through our collaboration with biblehub.com we provide lexica such as Brown-Driver-Briggs (BDB), Thayer's etc. through that website.