Search Problem with Matt 5:45 and matching other word forms.

A few days ago I was trying to find the verse where it talks about the sun shining on the righteous and the unrighteous, so I entered this into the search "sun AND righteous". However, the verse I was looking for did not come up. Many verses with both words came up, including those with other word forms of righteous. After searching the forums, I found out about the option to turn on/off matching other word forms. When I turned it off, forcing an exact match only, up popped Matt 5:45 in the search results (I was doing this in NASB95) "so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

I didn't think much about it at the time, but now I am thinking this behavior is not correct. If I switch it back to matching other word forms, it finds other verses with "righteous" like Rev 19:2, Rev 16:5, Job 8:6, Ec 3:16, as well as verses with "righteousness" & "righteously". But, mysteriously, Matt 5:45 doesn't show up in this search. I tried this with the NIV text and got the same results. No matter how many times I switch back and forth between "exact" and "other word form" options, Matt 5:45 comes and goes consistently.

Is this a bug or is it a behavior of the search I do not understand?

Thanks.

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Jerry M

Hi Christopher, It works both ways for me when I do a Bible search, but behaves the way you describe when I do a basic search. The basic search seems to only give the first occurrence of the word form in chapter five of Matthew, but verse 45 is the only one which satisfies the exact form of the word righteous. If you look to the right side of the search panel it tells you how many hits there are and they will be highlighted as search results in your Bible.

Rosie Perera

Are you doing a Bible search through All Bible Text in All Passages?

As Jerry points out he was able to reproduce what you're seeing when using Basic search, perhaps that's what you were doing. Basic search isn't really meant for this kind of use, since it finds articles that contain both search terms not verses. (For Bibles, "article" is equivalent to a chapter; but it might be units of various length in other resources: e.g., an entry in an encyclopedia, a journal article, a chapter of a monograph.) So it does find Matthew chapter 5, but won't pinpoint the occurrence of these two words together to verse 45.

Bottom line: use Bible search when you're searching in Bibles only.

NB.Mick

Christopher,

welcome to the forums! While it is correct what has been said, that "bible search" works best for bibles (hence the name, presumably), I was still intrigued by your question

Is this a bug or is it a behavior of the search I do not understand?

and in my opinion, this is not a bug.

I recreated your basic searches - let's look at the one without "match all word forms"

you noted that Logos found the Mt 5:45 verse. But actually it says, it has found 2 occurences of parts of your search pattern in "article" Matthew Chapter 5, starting in Mt 5:45. Logos displays the start of the text where it hit your search and you see, it's there.

With "match all word forms" it DOES find your verse, as it now has 5 occurences of parts of your search pattern in "article" Matthew Chapter 5, starting in Mt 5:6.

It is helpful to know that basic search list hits according to "articles", which means chapters if the resource is a bible. But to understand its hit listing, it is good to look beyond the text diplayed by Logos, as the grey number tells you, that there are more hits in the passage than you may see displayed on the screen (which may happen in any resource, not only a bible chapter).

To put it in another way: it was coincidence, that the text displayed with "match all word forms off" contained the phrase you looked for, if there was another hit earlier in the chapter, you wouldn't have seen the verse at all. Thus: if in basic search, look out for the grey hitcounters (unfortunately there is no functionality to open these up to show every single occurence in its own line).

On another note: you may have seen that you slightly misremembered the verse, as it is the rain that is send to righteous and unrighteous. It was the same with me, and I had to reconstruct your search from sun to rain in order to show a feature that works better than "AND" if one remembers some parts of a verse: the rain NEAR righteous only has one hit: bingo

hope this helps,

Mick

Christopher Davis

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/253384#Comment_253384

Thanks everyone for the quick help and information! That does solve the "problem". I was doing it in the basic search rather than in the bible search. If I do it in the bible search it works just as you said. Now I know!

Thanks again,

Chris

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