How can I perform a search for all Hebrew passive verb forms in the book of Esther?

Irving Salzman · 2025-03-15T09:21:02+00:00

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Grateful if anyone could tell me how I might do a search of all Hebrew passive verb forms in the book of Esther. (Probably all niphal verbal forms.) And would it also be possible to find out how the book of Esther would rank compared to all other books of the bible in terms of the number or percentage of passive verbal forms? Thanks so much for any guidance.

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DMB

Base-text-wise the OT is basically Leningrad. The more likely difference is the english (RI).

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Francis

@Irving Salzman Open search, then from either the Bible or Morph search tabs, pick either a Hebrew text or a Bible that has reverse interlinear, then restrict the search to Esther, then type @ to open the morphology picker and choose your options there:

Francis

To compare with other OT books, run the same search on the entire OT, then click on the Charts button, choose whichever chart type you find most useful and then the statistic you want displayed:

Donovan R. Palmer

@Francis I know enough Hebrew to be dangerous. I ran this search using LHB as a base text and received a slightly different result. Nothing significant certainly from my current level of Hebrew study, but it led me to the question of what was different between the LHB and the NASB. Any chance you know?

Francis

@Donovan R. Palmer the answer is probably in the base text that the LHB uses for the OT vs that of the NASB. We must never forget that our original language base texts are critical editions.

DMB

Base-text-wise the OT is basically Leningrad. The more likely difference is the english (RI).

Francis

You could be right, DMB, that the issue is at the RI level as the NASB is in fact aligned against the LHB.

There are differences in counts for the same search on both texts. I don't have time to look into it right now.

NichtnurBibelleser

BHS:

DMB

Yep … Logos offers maybe 6 hebrew morph assignments (eg Lexham, BHS, WIVU, Bht, AF, WHM). But the initial example was Lexham vs RI/Lexham.

Bradley Grainger (Logos)

There are differences in counts for the same search on both texts.

Searching the LHB (or GNT) will return the number of hits in the original language base text.

Searching an English translation (for a Hebrew or Greek word) will return the number of alignments, which may be different.

For this reason, we recommend searching the original language text when you need to know the actual word counts (for a Hebrew/Greek word or morph).

Bradley Grainger (Logos)

Another source of differences is qere/kethiv readings. For example, יָנִין in Ps 72:17 has VdI3MS-J as an alternate morph code, which returns an extra hit in LHB that's not present in the NASB95 reverse interlinear alignment.

Jack Caviness

https://community.logos.com/profile/4195/Irving%20Salzman "Probably all niphal verbal forms"

Nifal is not the only passive Hebrew verb form; you would also need to search for the others. The more common ones a pual and hofal, but there are several more passive forms.

Irving Salzman

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1362796#Comment_1362796

Granted. I agree. To your list, we could also add qal passives and even hithpaels, which are sometimes passive. But could you tell me how to conduct the search query here. I don’t have any experience doing these kinds of searches in and with Logos? Thanks.

Jack Caviness

In a Search panel, select a Hebrew Bible, Morph Search, and Esther instead of All Passages. type @, then Click on verb, and select the verb stems for which you wish to search. Each stem you select will add a code to the search string. Then initiate the search. This screen shot shows the result of selecting several different verb stems. In Esther, that search yielded 82 results in 58 verses. Those were probably not all passive, nor did I select every passive form, but it should show how to do the search.