Bible Sense Lexicon

Michel Pauw
Michel Pauw Member Posts: 585 ✭✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

I'm a bit confused and disappointed with the following example from the Bible Sense Lexicon. I'm preparing a Logos workshop and I have taken John 11:35 as an example to explore some features of the context-menu.

After right-clicking on 'wept' (in the NIV84), the only sense that is mentioned is 'to cry (tears)'. If you then do a search on that sense <Sense = to cry (tears)> in 'this resource', you will only get 1 hit, which is exactly John 11:35. 

It appears that this verse is indeed the only verse in the NT that has the Greek word δακρύω (I never realized that this common word in classical Greek is a hapax legomenon in the NT, although it does occur a few times in the LXX).
Anyway, thought I did a SENSE search and not a lexical search. So I would expect this search would also return e.g.: 

  • the synonym κλαίω, at least in similar contexts like: Mark 5:38, 16:10
  • other instances of κλαίω, where in the contexts tears (δάκρυα) are mentioned, like: Luke 7:38.

I am aware of the difference between searching for <Sense = to cry (tears)> and <Sense to cry (tears)> (which does bring up the other results), but that wouldn't solve my problem.

Any insights?

Dell XPS 17 9700, W11, 32GB, 1TB SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060
L5+L9+L10 Portfolio | Logos Max | Translator's Workplace

Comments

  • Keep Smiling 4 Jesus :)
    Keep Smiling 4 Jesus :) MVP Posts: 23,165

    Michel Pauw said:

    Any insights?

    Root search <Root = lbs/el/δακρυον> includes Luke 7:38 that has two Bible Senses (different words) so expanded <Sense to cry (tears)> to:

    <Sense to cry (tears)> OR <Sense teardrop>

    that includes all Root Search results plus more. Looking at Bible Sense Lexicon, found another expansion:

    <Sense to cry (tears)> OR <Sense teardrop> OR <Sense tear>

    Keep Smiling [:)]

  • Jeremy Thompson
    Jeremy Thompson Member, Logos Employee Posts: 158

    Hi MIchel:

    The Bible Sense Lexicon has analyzed κλαίω as a more specific kind of crying than δακρύω, similar to the difference in English between bawling and crying. So, in the BSL hierarchy κλαίω is at a subordinate level to δακρύω. This is why searching without the "=" brings up all of the results: the sense is being searched with everything subordinate to it.

    It is somewhat confusing because English translations often render both of these words as "weep", but I think there is some precedent in other lexicons for treating κλαίω as a more specific kind of crying. For example, Louw and Nida:

    To me, the entries in BDAG also seem to suggest a similar difference. That's not to say that the BSL analysis is correct. It's only an attempt to explain where the difference in searches comes from and why we chose to analyze the words this way.

Categories