The Ezra Project

I met Tobias Klein on the first day of BibleTech and learned about what he is doing when, at the end of a session, I walked out of the conference room and was waiting to talk to someone. Tobias was standing next to me, so I introduced myself to him and began to engage in chit-chat, and talked with him into the start of the next session. Tobias is temporarily living in the San Jose area, doing a church-based training program. On the side, he has recently been working on the "Ezra Project," which he described as a single function application for personal Bible study, and he offered to give me a demo.

Outline Function

What Tobias has done is make it very easy for people to create their own outline of Scripture in a web-based interface. As he explained, making your own outline is one of the key ways that people can process their own understanding of how each book of the Bible is put together. I played with the outlining function for a few minutes and was impressed with the straightforward way in which it made Scripture outlining easy. I will say that Tobias had to explain briefly how to use the interface -- a weakness that should be easy to remedy, given Tobias's excellent user-interface sensibilities.

What intrigues me the most about the Ezra Project outlining function is that it enables each user of the software to engage personally with understanding Scripture in terms of outlining. As Tobias says, making an outline is one of the key ways that people can really wrestle with how a book of the Bible fits together. So helping people to annotate Scripture in this way in a web-based tool has incredible possibilities for personal Bible study. The outlining function is already available online at the Ezra Project website, and it's a lot of fun to use. And when you're all finished, you can get an exported PDF of your outline for each book (XML or HTML would be nice, too!).

Tagging Function

Tobias also showed me, on his development notebook, a tagging function that is not yet in production (but is currently available in testing -- go to the development website for more information). The tagging function lets you create a selection of Scripture verses, then define tags that should be applied to each of those verses. The tags can either be global, across the entire Bible, or local to the specific book. Again, giving people the ability to annotate for themselves what topics they see as being covered by each verse can really help them to wrestle themselves with the meaning of Scripture.

Conclusion

Tobias's work on the Ezra Project combines an excellent, intuitive user interface, with a clear vision for helping people to do personal Bible study. Rather that pre-digesting Scripture for people like most Bible study tools, these tools help people to digest Scripture for themselves. Frankly, I haven't seen anything else like it, so I'm looking forward to seeing what else Tobias dreams up for the Ezra Project.