Greek search question

Eric L. Keefer

Greetings,

I'm an old BibleWorks user who has continued to use BibleWorks for most of my Greek and Hebrew searches.  However, I'm trying very hard to use Logos to do the same searches that I would on BibleWorks.

Logos seems pretty straightforward if I'm searching for a single word (e.g., a lemma or a particular form), but I struggle when I'm looking for a string.   

For example, if I'm searching in BW with the morph database I can enter: 'εκκλησια ο θεος and find all the places where this string occurs.  However, I'm struggling to reproduce this in Logos.

I've tried: "lemma.g:ἐκκλησία lemma.g:ὁ lemma.g:θεός" but that doesn't find any results.  If i remove the quotes I get 173 hits but it finds any combination as long as a form of these words are in the verse.

I've tried: "lemma.g:ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ" - which is what I'm actually looking for, but that yields no results.

I've tried: "lemma.g:ἐκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ" but that gives me again any word order.

I think I'm missing something fundamental with the string searches but I'm just not sure what it is.

Any help would be appreciated.

Dave Hooton

For example, if I'm searching in BW with the morph database I can enter: 'εκκλησια ο θεος and find all the places where this string occurs.

A string/phrase should be in double quotes  e.g. "εκκλησια ο θεος"  but that phrase does not occur in Greek bibles. εκκλησια NEAR "ο θεος"  does provide results, but εκκλησια does not occur BEFORE "ο θεος".  You could also use εκκλησια WITHIN 3 WORDS "ο θεος", because you will find there is a separation of at least 3 words.  A phrase in quotes requires no intervening words.

I've tried: "lemma.g:ἐκκλησία lemma.g:ὁ lemma.g:θεός" but that doesn't find any results.  If i remove the quotes I get 173 hits but it finds any combination as long as a form of these words are in the verse.

A lemma phrase does not work. So you have to try different proximity operators, bearing in mind that lemmas can produce different results to manuscript words e.g.

lemma.g:ἐκκλησία THEN lemma.g:ὁ THEN lemma.g:θεός 

THEN ensures the order of the lemmas with no intervening words.

NB. Use Greek bibles only for this type of search.