How do I search for "I will" when the "I" refers only to God?

I'd like to find all the places in Jeremiah where God says "I will" or "I have." I can search for those phrases, but the results may include references to other people. How can I only find the places where these phrases refer to God?

If I use the search parameter "<Person God> will" then I can end up with "the Lord will" instead of "I will." Smile

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Beloved Amodeo

I'd like to find all the places in Jeremiah where God says "I will" or "I have." I can search for those phrases, but the results may include references to other people. How can I only find the places where these phrases refer to God?

If I use the search parameter "<Person God> will" then I can end up with "the Lord will" instead of "I will."

What you ask is difficult because the Hebrew works differently than English. You're asking for the instances where the Hebrew is rendered "I will" or "I have" and the Hebrew lemma may say something quite different. So my question to you is what do you want to do with the search results?

You may very well have to accept the mixed results you get with a search like <Person God> "I will" or <Person God> "I have".

Bradley Grainger (Logos)

I'd like to find all the places in Jeremiah where God says "I will" or "I have." I can search for those phrases, but the results may include references to other people. How can I only find the places where these phrases refer to God?

One approach would be to use the Reported Speech dataset. You can find everywhere that the English phrase “I will” occurs within speech attributed to God with

"I will" INTERSECTS {Speaker <Person God>}

However, this will also find speech where God is quoting someone else, e.g., Jer 2:20, 25 (ESV)

Since most verbs should be tagged with the implied subject, you could also just try searching for “I will” where it overlaps the tagging for God:

"I will" INTERSECTS <Person God>

This will miss occurrences where “I will” has been inserted by translators and/or isn't aligned with the Hebrew text, e.g., Jer 15:14; 18:7, 9 (ESV).

You may want to search for all other occurrences of “I will” and manually check them to make sure they're not ones you want to study:

"I will" NOT INTERSECTS <Person God>

Finally, this is a search on an English translation; it may miss Hebrew verbs that don't happen to be translated with “I will” (I don't have any specific examples for this).

Bradley Grainger (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/991888#Comment_991888

You can also combine these searches to review instances that may be tagged in unusual ways. For example, this will find all occurrences of “I will” that are within God's speech but aren't tagged as God (e.g., as implied subject):

("I will" INTERSECTS {Speaker <Person God>}) NOT INTERSECTS <Person God>

This returns some interesting results, such as Jer 9:10 (ESV).

Here “I will take up” is an ESV/NASB rendering that's not shared by NRSV/LEB/HCSB. It appears that the LHB tagging (of <Person Jeremiah>) assumes the NRSV interpretation, where Jeremiah is taking up weeping, but if you follow the ESV, you probably would want to assume this refers to God.

Since “I will” occurs less than 300 times (depending on your translation), you may wish to take the time to just search for "I will" then examine each occurrence and categorise it based on your preferred translation or a comparison of a few versions.

Jim

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/991888#Comment_991888

One approach would be to use the Reported Speech dataset. You can find everywhere that the English phrase “I will” occurs within speech attributed to God with

"I will" INTERSECTS {Speaker <Person God>}

Wow. That's seems like what I need. I didn't know about this search syntax (Logos' help seldom helps me with searches) and this did what I was after.

I had several purposes: to find the percentage of time God said he would do something in Jer 30-33 compared to the rest of the book, create a list of the kinds of things God said he will do and to whom he will do them as well as comparing this list between chapters 30-33 and the rest of the book. The list is impressive some 273 occurrences in Jeremiah, 145 in Isaiah, none in Daniel and 401 in Ezekiel (using the LEB). While the numbers may be approximations, it's a lot of times God says he will act and that doesn't count the times he reminded everyone of what he has already done. That would be another interesting search.