Bible search for 10 commandments

Lonnie Spencer said:

I need help devising a bible search for any combination of the 10 commandments (two or more) across the entire bible. Examples would be across a chapter-  Exodus 20, Leviticus 19, Deuteronomy 5 or across a few verses- Psalm 50:18-19, Ezekiel 20:16-20- or single verse- Hosea 4:2, Luke 18:20, Romans 13:9. 

I don't think a bible search like this is going to be possible, or necessary. There's too much nuance, so it's a job for a human, not a machine.

The good news is that humans have already done this already. All you need to do is collate their work. I would therefore recommend:

1. Creating a Passage List for every commandment.
2. Looking at the Factbook entry for the topics that relate to each commandment (e.g. adultery). Save the Passages section as a Passage List.
3. For completeness, you could also:
1. Look up the topics in a topical dictionary and add additional Bible references from there. I recommend starting with the Dictionary of Bible Themes, but you could also try Nelson's and New Naves.
2. Search the Bible using the Cultural Concepts section of Factbook.
3. Add in all the cross-references to the individual verses in Exodus 20:3-17 (e.g. cross-references to Exodus 20:14 for your adultery Passage List).

The difficult bit will then come in finding overlap between these various datasets, as Logos only lets you compare one against the other. This will take time. I think the best way of doing that would be using the following syntax in a Basic Search:

({PassageList NoOtherGods}, {PassageList CarvedImage}, {PassageList NameInVain}, …) NEAR ({PassageList NoOtherGods}, {PassageList CarvedImage}, {PassageList NameInVain}, …)

That would give you some false positives if there were two identical sections near to each other, but you could weed those out fairly easily.

You might want to replace NEAR with WITHIN 500 CHARS or whatever you feel is appropriate (for some reason you can't specify WORDS with this type of search). In testing I discovered you get different results if you replace NEAR with WITHIN, so that's worth doing as a second search.

(If you want to save time, you could not bother with PassageLists and rely instead on the Cultural Concepts search that you found in step 3.2. Less work, but probably less accurate too.)

Lonnie Spencer said:

and why sometimes a partial list is used and why these particular commandments were selected

Maybe, just maybe that the ones listed in any given time or place depended on the makeup of the audience present.   [[and then we write long sermons on why only those were mentioned when it was just the ones that that audience needed to be reminded of]]

Another resource available in Logos is my book, The New Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.

I specifically remember setting up extensive cross references for the Ten Commandments.

If you have this resource, check it out.