Search all occurences where God speaks "I am with you"

Hello,

I wanted to search for all occurrences where God speaks "I am with you". So I opened Bible search and entered the following query : {Speaker <Person God>} INTERSECTS "I am with you". Which returned 21 results in 13 verses.

Questions :

1. Why is the phrase "I am with you" split and returned as 2 separate results in E.g. Gen. 26:24, Gen. 28:15, with "I" being matched separately from "with you" ? I would expect 13 results in 13 verses to be returned by the search query, not 21 results in 13 verses.

2. Why are occurrences of Jesus speaking the same words not returned as well, E.g. Matt. 28:20 ? Which is properly returned if I change the search query to : {Speaker <Person God>} OR {Speaker <Person Jesus>} INTERSECTS "I am with you". Does <Person God> exclude Jesus ? Sounds unintuitive.

3. Haggai 1:13 is missed from the query, but IMHO should be listed there too :

¹³Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord’s message, “I am with you, declares the Lord.”

I guess this is a tagging mistake ?

Many thanks in advance for your explanations.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

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Comments

Graham Criddle

Great questions!

1. Why is the phrase "I am with you" split and returned as 2 separate results in E.g. Gen. 26:24, Gen. 28:15, with "I" being matched separately from "with you" ? I would expect 13 results in 13 verses to be returned by the search query, not 21 results in 13 verses.

You will actually different numbers of results - and ordering - in different translations.

It looks like you are using the NIV (or something structured the same way)

If you open the Interlinear ribbon you can see that the word translated am isn't in the underlying text. As such it won't be tagged - as tagging is done against the original languages - which is why you get the results you noted.

Does <Person God> exclude Jesus ?

Yes - the <Person God> tag references God the Father

3. Haggai 1:13 is missed from the query, but IMHO should be listed there too :

¹³Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord’s message, “I am with you, declares the Lord.”

I guess this is a tagging mistake ?

You probably noted it is tagged as Haggai speaking - I remember quite a discussion about nested speakers in this type of situation but I'm afraid I don't remember the outcome so don't know if this would be seen as a tagging error or not

Bradley Grainger (Logos)

¹³Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord’s message, “I am with you, declares the Lord.”

I guess this is a tagging mistake ?

This does look like directly reported speech that should also be tagged {Speaker <Person God>}, so I'll report it to the team to see if it should be tagged that way.

Famille Thevoz

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1110775#Comment_1110775

Hello Graham,

Many thanks for your answer !

What I find a bit inconsistent is that if I search only for the phrase "I am with you", the phrase is not split in parts and multiple hits per verse. However when I add the reference to the Speaker, then the phrase is split in parts and multiple results per verse are returned. I guess this is due to the mechanics on how the search works underneath, with Speaker tagging being linked to original language terms rather than the translated surface text.

Do you know in this case how the search mechanics work to match a phrase such as "I am with you" with the underlying original texts ?

Thinking about it, I would guess that :
1) Surface text is first searched for all matches of the phrase "I am with you" (as when searching for "I am with you" only)
2) Each result is then further filtered against Speaker <Person God>. This is where the surface text is matched against original language words to look for Speaker tagging, and where the split of the phrase into multiple parts occurs.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

Famille Thevoz

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1110784#Comment_1110784

Hello Bradley,

Many thanks!

Yes, I would intuitively expect directly reported speech to be tagged with its original Speaker as well.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1110861#Comment_1110861

What I find a bit inconsistent is that if I search only for the phrase "I am with you", the phrase is not split in parts and multiple hits per verse

Yes - in this case the software is simply searching the surface text in the translation. As this all appears together there is no split

However when I add the reference to the Speaker, then the phrase is split in parts and multiple results per verse are returned. I guess this is due to the mechanics on how the search works underneath, with Speaker tagging being linked to original language terms rather than the translated surface text.

That is correct - because of the underlying tagging against the original language

Looking at the interlinear ribbon for Gen 26:24 you can see that the word shown as am in the translation is not actually present in the original language text (represented by a dot)

With the Speaker tag being applied to the underlying Hebrew, there is no intersection with the word am.

So it is less that the phrase is being split but that the word am no longer matches the search criteria and so does not feature in the results.

Do you know in this case how the search mechanics work to match a phrase such as "I am with you" with the underlying original texts ?

Effectively - to the best of my knowledge - the INTERSECTS operator causes the search to function at a "lower level" - trying to find cases where the Hebrew words that were translated as "I am with you" intersect with those Hebrew words that are tagged as spoken by God.

Then the results are propogated up and shown in the translation.

Famille Thevoz

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1110864#Comment_1110864

Hello Graham,

Many thanks!

Interestingly, the phrase does appear to be split. The search {Speaker <Person God>} INTERSECTS "I am with you" does return 13 verses, each having only one instance of "I am with you". However, search returns 21 results in 13 verses, and you can see from the seach output that this is due to the multiple splits of the phrase "I am with you" in 2 parts as you highlighted : "I" + "with you", with "am" being ignored as not part of the original text.

Thinking about it, I would guess that :
1) Surface text is first searched for all matches of the phrase "I am with you" (as when searching for "I am with you" only)
2) Each result is then further analyzed and filtered against Speaker <Person God>. This is where the surface text is matched against the underlying original language words and the split into multiple parts may occur.

Kind Regards,

Thierry

Graham Criddle

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1110866#Comment_1110866

Interestingly, the phrase does appear to be split. The search {Speaker <Person God>} INTERSECTS "I am with you" does return 13 verses, each having only one instance of "I am with you". However, search returns 21 results in 13 verses, and you can see from the seach output that this is due to the multiple splits of the phrase "I am with you" in 2 parts as you highlighted : "I" + "with you", with "am" being ignored as not part of the original text.

Sorry - you are correct.

Sean Boisen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1110784#Comment_1110784

¹³Then Haggai, the messenger of the Lord, spoke to the people with the Lord’s message, “I am with you, declares the Lord.”

I guess this is a tagging mistake ?

This does look like directly reported speech that should also be tagged {Speaker <Person God>}, so I'll report it to the team to see if it should be tagged that way.

Yes, this is an error in the annotation: we'll get this fixed. Thanks for pointing this out Thierry.