Bible Word Study Problem

In conjunction with a study of Exodus 6:3 this morning I attempted to run the Bible Word Study on the Hebrew word שַׁדַּי (ESV = 'Almighty'). It returned 41 results. I knew, however, that the term was used 48 times in the OT. Also, I noted that Ex. 6.3, the passage that I was focusing on (which has the word), was not included in the 'hit list'. Looking at the text, I thought that it might be that in Ex. 6.3 the word is in pause (pointed שַׁדָּי instead of שַׁדַּי). Thinking that might be the problem I ran the word study again with an unpointed form and it returned all 48 results correctly but the translation chart discriminated between the places that the ESV (my preferred text) used 'almighty' as a translation of שַׁדַּי and those places that it used it as a translation of אֵל שַׁדַּי . Since what I was really after was a chart showing the usage distribution of שַׁדַּי that I could use as a graphic in class, that distinction was not helpful, and I could not find a way around it. I tried making one of the BHS versions my preferred bible, but that did not seem to help; I got the same results.

I played with various variations of the search for an hour or so. Since I could not find any way to get the Bible Word Study tool to consolidate all the instances of the term, I next turned to the Bible Search function and repeated the process. Searching for שַׁדַּי in BHS/WIVU and BHS: Westminster 4.2 and AFAT returned only 39 hits (but did include Ex. 6.3!). Searching Westminster 4.0 produced 40 hits. Searching BHS: SESB produced only 25 hits. I searched the BHS: Westminster 4.2 text in another piece of software and got the correct 48 hits. But no matter what I do, or what text I use, I cannot get the correct results using the Bible search tool.

In one of that attempts I noted that the 'Textual Searches' section at the bottom of the Bible Word Study indicated 48 hits in the Hebrew Bible. I clicked on this and it ran the morph search using the string "<lemma = sesb/he/שַׁדַּי>" and it returned the correct 48 hits. Thinking that I was almost home after nearly 2 hours of work, I clicked on the 'Graph Results' button only to get a blank page. I think that this was because the "in" parameter was blank (it was BHS: SESB in the morph search, but the setting apparently did not transfer to the graphing function correctly). Moreover, the parameter box would not drop down and let me select the correct text. I tried variations with other texts in the morph search function. In some places I got the same results, in other places I could get no results at all because I could not guess the proper search string. I noted that sometimes the 'Graph Results' button was grayed out and other times it was selectable but did not work.

So I guess my point is two-fold: (1) is there anyone out there who can figure out how to do this (i.e. get a graph of the usage distribution of שַׁדַּי); and (2) it really should not be this hard, should it?