L/V 10+ Tip of the Day #239 Using classical figure of speech data

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: How do I search for nouns associated with a particular person (i.e. God's heart) - Logos Forums

One element of scripture study is studying the figures of speech as they were known to the authors i.e. how the audience was expected by the authors to understand them. This is in contrast to the figurative speech as understood by contemporary linguists. Many users will immediately say that this is outside what they know; they can appropriately ignore the feature but are not free to call it bloat. Why? Because over 68% of my Bible commentaries contains a common name for a figure of speech. The context menu allows a user to find similar cases without knowing any precise definition.

To find documentation to know what you are talking about (not a necessary step) go to Help.

Bullinger’s Figures of Speech

This dataset ships a bundle of Figure of Speech labels that mirror information found in Figures of Speech Used in the Bible by E. W. Bullinger. If (and only if) a verse is mentioned in Bullinger’s discussion of a figure of speech, that verse is labeled with that figure of speech. Each label supports:

• name:... — Where the title name of the figure appears (e.g., “Zeugma” or “Aposiopesis”).
• description:... — Is the short gloss for the figure (e.g., “Unequal Yoke” or “Sudden-Silence”).

For example:

• figureofSpeech:name:Ellipsis

Note the secret location of the documentation - Bullinger. If you are genuinely interested in the topic, the Mormons provide the best site: Silva Rhetoricae: The Forest of Rhetoric (byu.edu) I recommend this site over most books on the topic.

If you aren't comfortable wandering around topics you are not knowledgeable about, there are other approaches which don't provide precise results but get you the raw data to work through:

Using heart and "person:God" in a search or the Bible Sense Lexicon bring verses where God is in the verse, but they do not limit the use of heart only to God's heart.

Try  heart WITHIN 2 WORDS person:God 

It is not easy to restrict it to God's heart, but 150+ results should be easy to deal with

versus

I would take a different tack. God has no heart. Any use of heart is anthropomorphism. Therefore, I would search a Bible for figureofSpeech:(name:Anthropopatheia) INTERSECTS heart which yields 38 results

The ability to use Logos to get to the data either way, is its strength - not unnecessary bloat or complexity but an acknowledgement that different users bring different knowledge to their Bible study.