Hebrew Search — Why Search Highlights a sentence in LEB and not Elohim?

ds. P.J. Kotze · 2025-01-13T18:15:45+00:00

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I'm a bit confused?

I searched for Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) in LEB and found in Dt 6:15 that more words than "Elohim" are selected. I expected אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ to be selected, not all the other words? When the results are grouped by "sense" I find "nose" as a sense. I would expect "nose" as sense to be available when searching for "אַף" not "אֱלֹהִים".

Doing the same search in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia: with Westminster 4.2 Morphology returned the expected results and highlighting.

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Andrew Batishko

This isn't a bug.

The problem is that you are searching an English Bible, not a Hebrew Bible. As Dave indicated, the association of Hebrew to English in this specific case is an idiomatic many to many mapping. This means that individual Hebrew words aren't associated with individual English words. This prevents the application from being able to highlight individual English words in the result. There is no capability to highlight the original language words in an English Bible. Only English words can be highlighted.

While reverse-interlinears are very helpful and convenient in allowing you to search an English Bible for original language constructs, this is one of a couple examples of limitations that arise from the mapping. In cases where you care about things like this, you are better off searching an original language Bible (as you mention you tried).

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Graham Criddle

I searched for Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) in LEB and found in Dt 6:15 that more words than "Elohim" are selected
. I expected אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ to be selected, not all the other words?

Are you doing an Inline Search? If so please post a screenshot showing the details

When I run a Bible Search in the LEB I get results as expected

Dave Hooton

@ds. P.J. Kotze

I searched for Elohim (אֱלֹהִים) in LEB and found in Dt 6:15 that more words than "Elohim" are selected. I expected אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ to be selected, not all the other words?

In Dt 6:15 elohim is part of a phrase or idiom:

Second, some expressions in biblical languages are idiomatic, so that a literal translation would be meaningless or would miscommunicate the true meaning. The LEB uses ⌊lower corner⌋ brackets to indicate such expressions, with a literal rendering given in a note. W. Hall Harris III et al., eds., The Lexham English Bible (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2012).

The words of the idiom are part of one Interlinear cell (click "God" to see) and the Hebrew is treated as being in the same location in the bible. Hence the extended highlight in the translation
אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙ is a compound word which is treated as two words in a translation i.e. "your God", so lemma.h:אֱלֹהִים (elohim) will only highlight "God".

ds. P.J. Kotze

@Graham Criddle : Are you doing an Inline Search?

I did a normal Bible search as showed in the screenshot.

@Dave Hooton : The words of the idiom are part of one Interlinear cell (click "God" to see) and the Hebrew is treated as being in the same location in the bible. Hence the extended highlight in the translation.

I understand that it is idiomatic. But the search was not an idiomatic search, it's a word search for a single word. The result is misleading. The popup menu (right click) give options to search any word from the idiomatic phrase. If I select one of them I expect the result to make use of. that focus point. The result returned imply that they should rather have given die complete Hebrew idiom as an option to search and not separate words. I don't expect to see the complete forest when I'm inside the woods beside a flower.

Dave Hooton

I understand that it is idiomatic. But the search was not an idiomatic search, it's a word search for a single word. The result is misleading.

Each Hebrew word could have been translated on its merit as per ESV, but note NRSV. The implementation of the emphatic Hebrew expression at the start of v.17 is reasonable, but see the ESV.

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Andrew Batishko

This isn't a bug.