Clausal Search - Hell

Joel J.

No, I'm not cursing.   I have a question about using the clausal search for "hell."  I contacted Logos, and unfortunately, they said that they could not help.

I'm wondering if anyone could come to my aid.  

My question:  "Let's say I wanted to find when Jesus talks about hell... person:Jesus thing:hell has no results.  Any ideas?"

Response from another user:  That's a good one.  If you do a 'bible' search, "hell" appears 12 times... I try the same search in the clause engine and get nothing.  Nearly all places it is the object of a preposition or maybe even seen as the object of the verb (e.g., thrown into hell, gates of hell, sentenced to hell), but object:hell" doesn't work.  Nor "preposition:hell" nor "subject:hell" nor "thing:hell."  I just could not seem to get a combo.

Help?!  

MJ. Smith

partial answer

Allen Browne

Joel J. said:

"Let's say I wanted to find when Jesus talks about hell

Hi Joel. If this was just an example, someone may give you more specific help, but let me explain what I've done FWIW.

1. Go to a verse where Jesus talks about hell, such as Mark 9:43.
2. Right-click the word "hell." On the context menu that pops up, choose Lemma beside γέεννα (not the one beside o), and click Search this resource.

That gives you a search pane with a dozen verses. All except James 3:6 are in the gospels. (You could narrow the search from All Passages to Gospels if you wish.)

Those are the verses that use the word Gehenna (a valley south of Jerusalem where idolators burned their children in sacrifice, and dead bodies were burnt after battles).

The other Greek word is Hades which means death or the place of the dead. (It translates the Hebrew word Sheol). To find that:

1. Go to Matt 16:16.
2. Right-click "hell" (Hades in some translations), and choose Lemma beside ᾅδης (not o which is just "the"), and click Search this resource.
3. At the top of the search panel that pops up, change All Passages to Gospels. (That range option should be there in a recent version of Logos, or you can create it if you need to.) This eliminates the verses from Acts and Rev, leaving just 4 verses.

Even if you don't know Greek, you can do these studies in Logos. It is actually quite important to distinguish between these two words to understand what Jesus says. I use a visual filter to distinguish them in English:

You just copy the search terms out of the search windows you already have, and paste them into a new Visual Filter. (The last one appears only in 2 Peter 2:4)

Hope that's helpful.

Jack Caviness

Joel J. said:

 Nearly all places it is the object of a preposition or maybe even seen as the object of the verb (e.g., thrown into hell, gates of hell, sentenced to hell),

Note that the examples you gave as "object of verb" are actually objects of prepositions. Tried playing around with Syntax Search, but Jesus is not the subject of any clause in which either γέεννα or ᾅδης occurs. 

In case you are interested, here is the Syntax Search for either term as the object of a preposition. Someone else may do it better as I am just now learning how Syntax Search works.

The search results using Cascadia yields 15 hits (OpenText had 17). You can look at the context to see when Jesus was speaking.

One problem with such searches is that Jesus used other terms to refer to the place of punishment—"outer darkness", etc.

NIOTE: Liked Allen's visual filters. May adopt that myself.

Dave Hooton

Joel J. said:

I have a question about using the clausal search for "hell."

It isn't even classified as a place, and if associated with a person it is God! So Clause search will not help. Another clue is that you want to find "when Jesus talks about hell". So you want results in passages that represent the Words of Christ. The first result below is performed using the search field Words of Christ in the ESV. I have to use English terms because the tagging is only done against the manuscript (English) words. So if you want to use lemmas you need a passage list (WOC-All) that includes the same passages. It gives the same results and I included "outer darkness" as this is an expression used by Jesus (you could also use  lemma:ἐξώτερος).

EDIT:  you can make a passage list from http://community.logos.com/cfs-filesystemfile.ashx/__key/CommunityServer.Discussions.Components.Files/77/3755.WOC_5F00_ESV.txt.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/520848#Comment_520848

This is really tricky, as Jesus speaks about hell in so many ways, sometimes with synonyms (Hades, Lk 16:23), sometimes with metaphors (outside/darkness, Mt 8:12), and sometimes in indirect speech ("Their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched." Mk. 9:48; fortunately this one comes right on the heels of mention of the actual word "hell").

It might be best to use a resource where someone has painstakingly cataloged all references to hell. The entry for Hell in the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery gives some of Jesus' metaphors for hell. The Dictionary of Bible Themes has a number of entries on Hell (9511 - hell, as a place of punishment; 9512 - hell, as an experience; 9513 - hell, as an incentive to action; 9520 - the Abyss; 9530 - Hades; 9540 - Sheol; under each of these are lists of Scripture references, and you can create look up which of these are within words of Christ. Topical Indexes (e.g., New Nave's Topical Bible) or the Thematic Bible could be of some help too.

You will probably miss some entries if you try to construct an automated search. At some point you're probably going to need to dig into the text yourself and find what's there. You'll probably learn more through that exercise anyway.

Josh

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/520849#Comment_520849

What do you mean by the word "hell"? The Lake of Fire? Hades/Sheol?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/520874#Comment_520874

I assumed that he intended the lexical sense hell in the BSL ... which appears to be labeled as neither a place nor a thing which is the root of the clausal search problem.