How do I analyze the words within a book of the Bible?

Elizabeth Schick

Hi - I'm trying to do a study on the book of Revelation looking for verbal/conceptual links between Rev 1-3 and Rev 4-22. Is there a search tool that would enable me to see when similar phrases/words/images are being used?

Mark Smith

Elizabeth, that would be a complicated and sophisticated tool. Search in Logos will allow you to search for more than one word at a time so you could pick key words, phrases, or images in chapters 1-3, put them together in a search and run the search on chapters 4-22. 

And example might be prophecy OR kingdom OR "Firstborn of the dead".

That is the simplest way to do what you want. You can dive in further by using the cultural concepts that are found in the first three chapters. Open the Passage Guide and be sure 'Cultural Concepts is added to the guide (under the Add button upper right). Run the passage guide on Rev. 1-3 and you see:

For each concept you can Search Library. Click on that then change the search to a Bible search and narrow that down to Rev 4-22 to see if there are any places the same concept is marked in those chapters.

I am sure others will have additional suggestions.

Mark Barnes

Elizabeth Schick said:

Hi - I'm trying to do a study on the book of Revelation looking for verbal/conceptual links between Rev 1-3 and Rev 4-22. Is there a search tool that would enable me to see when similar phrases/words/images are being used?

In addition to Mark's excellent suggestion of using cultural concepts:

You can create a list of all the words that are used both in Rev 1-3 and Rev 4-22 using the Word List tool, and then creating a union of the two lists. You'll get a count of the number of times the words are used, but it would be up to you to weed out common words and find those of real significance.

You could also use the concordance tool to create lists of all the People, Places or Things found in those two passages. This could be exported to Excel for further manipulation.

Or you could you use analysis search to find Louw-Nida domains or Logos Senses, and again export to Excel to find those that are common between the two passages.

Logos does have intertextual tagging, but it only supports OT->NT at the moment.

If you need more specific help on any of the above, please ask.

Elizabeth Schick

Thank you so much for the suggestions! I'm going to try them all out and see what comes of it.

Blessings,

Elizabeth