Syntax Searching

Folks —

This thread excites me because so many people are so capable of asking and answering questions like this with the syntax databases available in Logos! I'm stoked.

I thought I'd give a few more observations on ways to go about doing this.

First, you could skip syntax altogether and just do a Bible search any English Bible for "husband love". The LEB returns 5 verses for this, including Eph 5.25, 28; and Col 3.19. Or you could get a little more fancy and do "husband BEFORE love" and get 4 verses returned, still including our three verses, Eph 5.25, 28; Col 3.19.

But that would be too easy   If you saw the Logos Blog today, you learned about "Query Forms". One strategy here is to realize that most words don't occur as subject that often; even less often with a particular verb. So you could open your search, select "Syntax", drop down the query, and look for the Subject form (note: OpenText.org templates list the 'English' templates second but their names don't specify "English" ... I've added that to my list to fix). Select the query, type "husband" and you'll see that in both Cascadia and in OpenText.org there are only 10 instances with "husband" as subject (and in both one instance with "husbands" as subject). You'll find Eph 5.28 in this list of eleven. You'd have to hit the OpenText.org query template for Addressee to find the other two instances.

Another strategy would be to do a Bible Word Study on "husband" to find the Greek words translated that way. From there, do a Bible Word Study on one of those Greek words (in this case, ANHR ανηρ) and check out the Grammatical Relationships, specifically the "Subject of ..." and "Addressee of ..." items. (note: You'll find both Eph 5.25 and Col 3.19 in the "Addressee of ..." list for αγαπαω). This still doesn't find Eph 5.28, though.

Another strategy would be to write a custom query. Below is a query I wrote for Cascadia that (with the benefit of y'all's discussion, thanks folks). Can you figure out what I'm doing? This query locates the mentioned hits (Eph 5.25, 28; Col 3.19) but in a manner a bit more concise than OpenText.org. Might help to check the instances in Cascadia and then review the query.

Conclusion: Many times, it's easy to fake a syntax query by searching for co-occurring words (e.g. "husband love" in this case). This will get you some test references to look at, so you can examine the syntactic annotations to better understand how they encode/annotate such things. From there, you can build some queries and look for other instances that may not easily translate into English. Sometimes, you'll find some hidden gems. Other times, it will help confirm that you've already found what you're looking for.

Even if you only end up finding references you already knew about, I'm guessing the work of understanding how a database annotates something will help you understand the syntax of your passage better, help you next time you see a similar pattern, and make it easier to write your next syntax query.