L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #230 Context Menu: Labels: Supernatural beings a.k.a. angels, demons, and dei

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10+ Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #229 Context Menu: Labels: Theophany (Christophany, Angelophany, and "Paracletophany") - Logos Forums

Remember that it is important to know what information is available through labels at least to the level of thinking "wasn't there a label for that". They are a very powerful but underused tool. The data available for supernatural beings is:

Supernatural Being

Relevant information from the Angels, Demons, and Deities dataset can be searched using the supernaturalBeing label, followed by one or more of the following attributes:

• location:... — Enter a location associated with the spiritual being.
• name:... — The Bible Knowledgebase entity.
• type:... — Identifies the spiritual being as one of: angel, demon, deity, or other.

For example:

• supernaturalBeing:(type:angel AND name:Gabriel)

In addition to the documentation, there is also a dictionary that covers this material.

• Brannan, Rick. Angels, Demons, and Deities Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2017.
• Toorn, Karel van der, Bob Becking, and Pieter Willem van der Horst. Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Leiden; Boston; Köln; Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge: Brill; Eerdmans, 1999.

The standard layout is as expected except that the phrase "Son of God" is not given a supernatural being tag. Turning on the interlinear panel reveals that there is no underlying Greek for the phrase. Because it is the Greek that is tagged and mapped to the text, where the translators used a variant rather than the text of the reverse interlinear, there will be no tag. This means that for purposes of research, results based on tags are accurate for the original language but imprecise for translations.

Supernatural beings has a group of facets in the Bible Browser:

The label initiated search from the Context Menu is as expected. Note however that there is no link to the Factbook.

Note that the name attribute of the label is in the form of name:person:Jesus. person:Jesus is the Bible Knowledgebase entry in the word information section of the Context Menu left-side tags. That is what provides the link to the Factbook.