Verbum Search through Tip of the Day #26

MJ. Smith

Tip 26: Factbook Biblical Person: Bible Sense Lexicon, Louw-Nida

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The Bible Sense Lexicon entry under consideration is:

The notation “ancestor ⇔ father” is to be read as “ancestor expressed as father”. Generally, read ⇔ as “expressed as”.

In datatypes, the basic format is <datatype operator value> So far the operator has simply been allowed to default. Consider the operator = vs. ~

Grandfather is a Bible sense that is not subdivided so = and ~ produce identical results. Move up one level in the hierarchy to ancestor and repeat the search

Here the search <Sense = ancestor> selects only words that have the exact Bible sense of “ancestor”. The search <Sense ~ ancestor> selects word that have the Bible sense of “ancestor” or any of the senses below it e.g. father, mother, . . .

For Louw-Nida, the hierarchy works slightly differently. For 87 Status à C High Status or Rank (including people of high status) (87.19-87.57)à 87.48 πατήρe, πατρός, displays:

Run the search for an exact match and up one level:

Here for the class LN 87.48 only the exact match “=” produces results. Moving up to LN 87, up two levels in the hierarchy, there are no results with a exact match, only “~” produces results of all the elements below.

To get the intermediate level C, one must specify the range e.g. <LN 87.19-87.57> using a more succinct notation:

<sense grandfather> vs. sense:grandfather

Both <sense grandfather> and sense:grandfather look for words with a Bible sense of “grandfather” but they return quite different results with sense:grandfather always being a subset of <sense grandfather>.

This is the effect of a fundamental difference between clause searches and Bible searches. The clause search is focused on the verb and words in relation with the verb; it ignores other occurrences. The Bible search searches the entire text. Therefore, the clause search is designed for searches seeking information on grammatical, syntactic, and semantic role uses. An example: