Unexpected Bible Search Results

Can someone explain the results I got from a search for "king" in a Bible search limited to NT of my Greek bibles (LXX & N27) I get: Δαυιδ, Ιωβεδ, Ιεσσαι, etc. (David, Obed, Jesse, etc.) See the screen shot. I expected Βασιλεα or nothing because I put an English word in the search field to search Greek resources. I'm baffled, but then I've been baffled a few times by searches. I look forward to the help files being released to figure searches out.

Is this a result of badly linked interlinear words? That might explain David and Solomon, but Obed and Jesse?

Hi Chris.

In the edition of the Greek you're searching, there is an extended gloss in the data. If you open the resource, and go to the display dropdown, you'll see an option for "English Gloss". This is off by default because they are typically long (too long for an interlinear cell, anyway). But the "English Gloss" for Δαυιδ is "David, king of Isr.", this is where your hit comes from. The gloss for Ιεσσαι is "Jesse, the father of King David". Ιωβεδ is "Obed, the grandfather of King David".

So that's where the "king" hits come from.

You probably just want to search the "English Literal Translation" content (by default both the literal and gloss lines are searched). To do that, specify the field and the term, like: "literal:king" (w/out the quotes). This probably gives the hits you're intending to find.

Note that the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament (LGNTI) likely doesn't have this issue as its glosses are not as descriptive as the longer glosses in this resource. (I can't test it as I don't have access to it presently).

Hi Chris.

Thanks for your thoughts. On the particular issue of "king" and the general issue of searching an interlinear for English text, I'd say you would benefit from using a different Greek New Testament. I think that using the Lexham Greek-English Interlinear New Testament would do the trick as its glosses are more focused on defining the term, in both context-free and context-sensitive forms, without adding extra information (e.g. "the grandfather of King David").

I have no clue what to do with Syntax searches. I've probably spent upwards of 10 hours trying to get something out of them and have not a clue what I'm doing - right or wrong - if I'm close or miles away. I suspect there are some terms I need to be using, but don't know. I don't know where to look to even define the terms that are used in Syntax. Every search I've done is a shot in the dark and I've yet to get any results.

On syntax searching, yes, it does take a bit to get one's brain in the right state.First know that the easiest syntax searching you can do is to do a Bible Word Study on a Greek (or Hebrew) lemma from a reverse interlinear. The "Grammatical Relationships" section is driven by syntax data and scads of syntax searches underlie that data. You get the benefit by just doing a word study without having to think about how to form a syntax query.

In Logos4, we're also including search templates with syntax databases and hoping this makes things a little easier. This means that you can select a template to do somewhat common things, like search for where a particular term is the subject. We hope to have English and original language forms for each template, so you can either type in an English gloss, or the Hebrew or Greek lemma for a template, and just go from there.

[Note: I'm unsure if all of these templates made beta 7/8. If not, they should be in a subsequent release.]

From the search dialog, after you've selected "Syntax", you'll see templates on the left side of the "Query" drop-down.

If you select a template from here, a text box will insert itself under "Search [All Passages]", like below:

I typed in "king", so I'm searching for where the English gloss "king" is the subject of the clause. Note that there is an issue where the query text disappears when the search results are displayed; my understanding is that this is being worked on and will hopefully be resolved soon.

Alternately, if you open a template from the Syntax Search query editor, you'll get an editable form of the whole query. Here I'm clicking "English Subject (Cascadia)":

And I end up with the following:

From here I can edit the properties for word. I could insert a gloss or lemma, I could add additional items to the query, or just play around with it. But it gives a starting point for starting to understand how these things go together. So, for instance, here's the template for adverbial negation (when a verb is negated by something functioning adverbially). Folks likely wouldn't initially come up with this, but it gives a starting place, and hopefully it will lead to more experimenting and understanding on the part of users since they'll now have a decent place to start with queries -- instead of the blank canvas many stared at in LDLS3 but couldn't figure out where to start.

From here, you could just select the "Word 2" object and add your verb (try "fear" as a gloss, perhaps?) and see what happens.

I've been a little long with this response, and apologies to those on lower bandwith for all the images, but hopefully this helps some folks out, particularly on how to start up with syntax searching.

Okay, I'm not sure what happened, but I cancelled that and tried to start over and get "Syntax searches are disabled because the necessary resources are currently unavailable." I'm not downloading or indexing, so what happened? I had the same templates you did just 10 minutes ago? I know only the glossary of Cascadia appears in my library, but the rest seemed to be there - I had about five options besides Cascadia graphs.

Don't you love running a beta?

There are some issues noted with syntax searching in the current beta in other threads. I'm hoping they get worked out for the next release.

Thanks for being understanding as we work out the kinks.

 - Rick