Some possibly dumb questions/issues regarding Lexham Hebrew Bible and Logos morphological tags
I am doing some comparisons between the Lexham Hebrew Bible (LHB) and Biblia Hebraica Westmonasteriensis 4.18 (BHW) and finding a few unpleasant surprises. I want to make sure they're not "operator" error issues vs. actual problems:
1-First, the good: I really like how LHB seems to have done a much better job providing morphological tools for examining verbs/ structures with the TAM. Being able to search on constructions like the the vav-conjunctive vs. the vav-consecutive is awesome.
2-HOWEVER, LHB seems to come up very short on properly identifying nouns and adjectives as either masculine or feminine--which is rather surprising. (And begs the question what else might be missing.)
I have created some filters to highlight masculine nouns blue, feminine ones pink, as well as masculine adjectives in double-blue box, and feminine ones pink; proper nouns are double-boxed in white; LHB is on the left and BHW on the right. Here is Genesis 1:1-2 (note how BHW causes some of the masculine/plural to show up purple, as opposed to nothing being shown by LHB, and how feminine words, such as eretz are not identified by LHB as being feminine):
Even worse, LHB seems to be inconsistently tagging data, even within itself; for example, look at the masculine adjective tov correctly highlighted in Genesis 1:4, but not in Psalm 23:6:
3-LHB also seems to be often incorrectly tagging adverbs as nouns/or not at all?
Here is 2 Samuel 10:5, where the word me'od is not identified as an adverb (orange filter); also note how the word melech is also not identified in LHB as being masculine:
I know, however, that my LHB adverb filter IS working, because of results like Genesis 1:7-9
These are just a few examples, but all of this is a long preface to ask:
1- Am I missing something about how to search using the Logos bible/morph search for more accurate information on nouns, adjectives, and adverbs? I am a little disappointed by these results.
2- Assuming it's not a search syntax problem, is this an issue that Logos would work on making more accurate? I thought I remember a post where Faithlife noted they can't do anything to the morph text of BHW, but they own LHB.
Any thoughts/advice/ways forward? Thanks in advance!
Comments
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I don't know Hebrew but putting on a bit of a philology hat, have you looked at the documentation of the LHB and BHW to see how the terms are defined? And at how ambiguities are resolved? The reason for different morphologies is that they capture different aspects of the language.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Hi biblemanstan,
I don't have any special insight into how LHB was tagged, but I have a fair amount of expertise in Biblical Hebrew. The reference grammars for BH have fairly detailed discussions on the various aspects involved in how gender is identified for nouns and adjectives. It gets complicated with masculine nouns having feminine endings (qohelet) or feminine nouns having no ending, which is usually a masculine indicator, or usage breaking the gender agreement rules. I noticed that many of the terms that didn't come up in the visual filter for LHB had a gender tag of "common" or one was "unmarked gender." My BHS SESB edition has similar tagging to LHB for the examples of yours that I double-checked. I suspect that LHB and BHS were tagged more according to function at any given point while BHW was tagged formally. If you have any Hebrew grammars in your library, you could see what they say about identifying gender for nouns (for adjectives it depends on substantive usage or noun agreement). In my own use of Hebrew Bibles in Logos, I have noticed that different ones were tagged differently. When there is a difference (and it's important for my research), I go to the grammars and lexicons and try to sort out what is going on. There is enough ambiguity in Hebrew grammar in actual usage in the text versus what a grammar textbook might say that people can reach different conclusions about how to reflect what's going on with a fairly limited tool like morph or semantic tagging.
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OK, I need to preface this all by saying I am not a Hebrew scholar and have had no formal training in Hebrew.
My basic understanding, which may be wrong, is that Hebrew marks gender at various levels (morphological, syntactic, semantic; see BHRG §24.2). And IIRC (I am not employed by Logos any more so cannot verify) the LHB only encodes what can be determined by form at the morphological level and leaves ambiguities to be resolved by the reader, either through their own analysis or through consultation of other morphological analyses that take a more morpho-syntactic approach to encoding morphology, like the Westminster edition or the Andersen-Forbes text.
I'll wait for the corrections to this statement to roll in. Again, IANAHS ("I am not a Hebrew scholar")
(Addition: Yes, read Doug Mangum's post above for the perspective of a bona-fide Hebrew scholar.)
Rick Brannan | Bluesky: rickbrannan.com
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This forum post has a simple presentation of the differences in representation of the gender categories for Hebrew nouns.
https://community.logos.com/forums/t/213386.aspxI'll need to dig in some more before I can answer more detailed questions like why the LHB leave many Hebrew nouns unmarked for gender. But as I find answers I'll make an effort to report them back here.
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Jimmy - that would be awesome. Thank you very much. Also, thank you for everyone else who weighed in. It was helpful to get some sanity checks.
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Thanks very much, Jimmy! Thanks to everyone else who chimed in as well.
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