Another complex search question

Pastor Michael Huffman

I am trying to compile a search string that will give me the places in the Scripture where God uses blood as divine judgment, like He did in Revelation 8 and in Revelation 16. 

I am hoping that Mark Barnes will weigh in on the. I tried to use the principles that he put on a new video on YouTube (which is excellent, but he way), but I cannot seem to find what I am looking for. 

Here is the string that I was using:

({Section <Culture Divine punishment>}) INTERSECTS (<Lemma = lbs/el/αἷμα>, <Thing Blood>)

The results that I got back where judgments because of man's shedding of blood but not God using blood as a judgment. What am I dong wrong? Thanks!

Mark Barnes

This is another difficult one. I didn't have a huge amount of success, but I'll talk you through the process I took, rather than fast-forwarding to the end. It might also have helped if last time I had told you about preaching themes!

I immediately thought of another possible example - the plague of blood at the Exodus. I'd want my search criteria to find that, at least. That gives us three test cases: Exodus 7, Revelation 8 and Revelation 16.

So let's look at what tagging we can use. All three test cases use <Thing Blood> and <Sense = blood>, so that's a good start. However, it's normally best to change the = into a ~ to ensure we capture the sub-meanings (in this case "blood droplet" and "lifeblood"). But what should we do on the other side?

• Exodus 7 has {Section <PreachingTheme = God: Wrath>}, although {Label Miracle} is a possibility.
• Revelation 8 has {Section <PreachingTheme = Judgment>}, although {Section <Culture Sign>} and {Section <Culture Disasters>} might help.
• Revelation 16 has {Section <Culture Divine punishment>} and {Section <PreachingTheme = God: Wrath>}.

So that gives me a starting query of:

(<Thing Blood>, <Sense ~ blood>) INTERSECTS ({Section <PreachingTheme = God: Wrath>}, {Section <PreachingTheme = Judgment>}, {Section <Culture Divine punishment>})

However, there are lots of false positives. Looking at those false positives, I notice that many of them have {Section <Culture Bloodguilt>}, so if we could do a NOT INTERSECTS (we can't), that might reduce the false positives a fair bit. But equally, many of the false positives have <Sense = bloodguilt>, which we can exclude. We can't do that just by changing the ~ back into an =, because they'll still be picked up by <Thing Blood>. So instead, we need to specifically exclude them using NOTEQUALS:

((<Thing Blood>, <Sense = blood>) NOTEQUALS <Sense = lifeblood>) INTERSECTS ({Section <PreachingTheme = God: Wrath>}, {Section <PreachingTheme = Judgment>}, {Section <Culture Divine punishment>})

Note the position of the parentheses, which is very important.

There are still many false positives, but it's a manageable number, I think. And I wouldn't be confident I've captured everything. Revelation 11:6 is missing, for example.

But the reason this is hard, it's because it's a surprisingly slippery subject. Should 2 Kings 9:33 be included? Ezekiel 24:8? Zechariah 9:7? All of them are arguable, but very different from each other. What about Joel 2:30-31, which isn't found by my criteria? Is that judgement? (Logos tagging suggest not, some might disagree).

So my advice would be to go through the results from above, add the references you want into a Passage List, and then check the tagging of those verses to see if you can tweak your criteria a little.

Hope that helps, at least as a start.

PS — don't forget cross references. Look those up for your starting passages to give you more test cases. Use the Passage Guide and/or TSK.