An easy question for somebody

Thinking
Thinking Member Posts: 368 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

I know there is a way to find all the Bible references to God as a father (God with the attribute of Father, Father referring to God). But I am not sure I have a complete search.

These types of searches really give Logos power, but I have difficulty in mastering them. How would the experts go about this task?

Comments

  • Mark Barnes
    Mark Barnes Member Posts: 15,432 ✭✭✭

    Thinking said:

    These types of searches really give Logos power, but I have difficulty in mastering them. How would the experts go about this task?

    When you're looking at an individual concept, it's usually easiest to start from Factbook. There's a topic there called "God the Father".

    Within that entry, you should be looking at three sections:

    1. Passages — which lists many of the Bible passages relevant to this topic.
    2. Senses — which looks at the senses of individual words. This is narrower, and only lists eight occurrences of "God = Father".
    3. Cultural Concepts — which looks at the concept in much ancient literature, including the Bible.

    The nice thing about this method is you don't need to learn any clever search syntax to get your results.

    Having identified these three areas, I'd personally save all the results into a Passage List (or several passage lists that you merge together), and then manually remove those which you don't find relevant to your personal study.

    * To save Cultural Concepts as a passage list, click on "Search All Resources for 'God as Father'" at the bottom of that section, then switch to a Bible search. You can then save as a passage list from there.

    This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!

  • William Gabriel
    William Gabriel Member Posts: 1,091 ✭✭

    I struggled through this earlier in the year. You can read the discussion here: https://community.logos.com/forums/t/106509.aspx

  • Thinking
    Thinking Member Posts: 368 ✭✭

    I am glad to see I wasn't the only one confused about how to do what at the start seemed like a simple task, but never quite seemed to give me the results I expected or needed.

  • Thinking
    Thinking Member Posts: 368 ✭✭

    Thank you for this very helpful response. This gave me what I needed. I didn't realize this was in Factbook. Should have thought of that.

    By experimenting around as you suggested, I learned some helpful new ways to work with passages. Logos has some many features it would take a number of lifetimes to master them all.

  • Larry Nisle
    Larry Nisle Member Posts: 2 ✭✭

    Jesus addresses God as his Father most of the time, except from the cross when he had the sins of the world on his shoulders.  I would like to learn if David ever addressed God as his Father in same way.  Is there a way to do this search?

  • Graham Criddle
    Graham Criddle MVP Posts: 33,287

    Hi Larry - and welcome to the forums

    If you are a Logos Now subscriber you can search for "Addressees" (introduced at https://community.logos.com/forums/t/114049.aspx) which allows you to build a search for words spoken by David to God. Searching for Father within that gives you what you are looking for

    As you can see there are just three references - and the first two don't count.

    The third is where these words are attributed to David in a Psalm as something he will say.

    If you are not a Logos Now subscriber you can do the search without the Addressee component - this just gives you 20 possible results which you can then scan through to see if any match

    Graham

  • Larry Nisle
    Larry Nisle Member Posts: 2 ✭✭

    Thank you for the quick response.  I seem to be able to do a search {Speaker <person David>} but I do not seem to be able to do the "{Addressee <Person God>}" .  I am not able to ask Logos to search for any Addressee.  I am running Logos 6.8.0.0049.  I have also purchased the extra tools that come with higher base packages than I have. 

  • Bradley Grainger (Logos)
    Bradley Grainger (Logos) Administrator, Logos Employee Posts: 12,191

    I do not seem to be able to do the "{Addressee <Person God>}" .  I am not able to ask Logos to search for any Addressee. 

    The Addressees Dataset (and search) requires a Logos Now subscription.