L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #232 Context Menu: Labels: Source Criticism (Otto Eissfeldt only)

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 #231 Context Menu: Labels: Speech / Interactive: Speaking to God - Logos Forums

This label has some odd behavior that I have reported as BUGS so I considered skipping it but it is still very useful when used with caution. It is also the first tagging that covers the same ground as some Andersen-Forbes coding i.e. very old Logos coding.

The values available for the label are:

Verbum Help (Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2022). said:

Source Criticism

The data collated in the Source Criticism dataset has been curated by specific source critics. Verbum has utilized the analysis of these authors and created searchable data based on their analysis. The data is thus organized by the original creator of the analysis.

• critic:Eissfeldt — To date, the only data curated originated with Otto Eissfeldt.
• source:... — One of the following five sources:
• E — Texts which refer to God with the generic term elohim.
• D — Texts which refer to a source (or author) associated with Deuteronomy.
• J — Texts which explicitly use the divine name.
• L — Texts centered around the duties of lay Israelites.
• P — Texts which refer to the rights of the priesthood.

For example:

• sourceCriticism:(source:P AND critic:Eissfeldt)

The Concordance guide section has two behaviors that are notable:

1. While the tagging is not restricted to verse boundaries, the Concordance display is which results in some misleading entries. This will be apparent in the color coding of the text below.
2. The Concordance display has overlapping entries that are sometimes inexplicable.

The Bible tagging/visual filter has an unusual structure:

1. The tag appears multiple times in the text, even within a verse with no change in attributes leaving it unclear what unit a tag applies to.

The Help file, documentation (Parks, Jimmy. Source Criticism in the Bible Dataset Documentation. Bellingham, WA: Faithlife, 2018.), and Information panel are as expected.

The search is unremarkable.

I find source criticism data most useful when I use a visual filter to color-code the text by source. The issue becomes how to interpret the data when two different sources are applied to the same text. (Note the blended colors at the red arrow).

In comparison, the source criticism data for Andersen Forbes lacks this issue so I tend to run the two views side by side.