Examples of Your Favorite Searches

What kinds of searches do you get the most value out of in Logos? Share one or two of your favorites, and give an example of the kind of insight you can get from that kind of search.

I'll start.

I've found it useful on several occasions to be able to find where a commentator references one Bible passage in a discussion on another Bible passage. Sometimes I'll notice a connection between two passages of Scripture and wonder if anyone else has picked up on the connection and if so what they think about it.

You can do this by searching for a Bible reference (e.g., <John 3:16>) within a Bible milestone (e.g., {Milestone <1 John 2:2>}). You can use either the WITHIN or INTERSECTS operator.

<=John 3:16> WITHIN {Milestone <1 John 2:2>}

I had a question a couple of years ago while preparing to preach on Matthew 27:46 / Mark 15:34: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" I was curious to see if commentaries discussed a connection with Psalm 22:24, where the psalmist takes a positive turn: "For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help." I found it interesting that Jesus quoted Psalm 22:1 moments before the three hours of darkness ended. Before I worked out the chronology, I would have thought that happened at the beginning or middle rather than right at the end. Did Jesus quote or pray more of Psalm 22, including v. 24? Did God end the darkness in answer to Jesus' cry for help? Did any of the commentators pick up on this and address it?

So I ran a search for Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34 in discussions on Psalm 22:24: (<Matthew 27:46> OR <Mark 15:34>) WITHIN {Milestone <Psalm 22:24>}.

Then I ran a search for Psalm 22:24 in discussions on Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34: <=Psalm 22:24> WITHIN ({Milestone <Matthew 27:46>} OR {Milestone <Mark 15:34>}).

I found a couple of helpful discussions that addressed the issue.

(Originally shared in this post.)

What about you?

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Comments

Graham Criddle

Hi Phil - great question.

Recently I was preparing for a sermon series on how we relate to the different persons of the Trinity - one week thinking about how we relate with the Father, one with the Son and one with the Spirit. I wanted to explore how the different persons of the Trinity relate with / interact with each other and so used subect / object-based clause searches.

An example below:

Then similar searches for:

subject:God object:Holy Spirit
subject:jesus object:god
subject:Jesus object:Holy Spirit
subject:Holy Spirit object:God
subject:Holy Spirit object:Jesus

produced some interesting results.

For the same series I was interested in the times Jesus speaks about "his father" vs "your father"

("my father" OR "your father" OR "our father") WITHIN {Speaker <Person Jesus>}

and I was particularly interested in seeing when Jesus spoke about both "my father" and "your father" in the same context

Graham

Reuben Helmuth

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/992763#Comment_992763

Being involved with an OT translation project, I'm especially interested in searching on the Hebrew scriptures, particularly in such a way that enables me create VF's (preferably for a RI).

Hebrew frequently adds some sort of intensification to a verb by putting the verb in the Infinitive Absolute form followed by the same verb in another binyan (most frequently yiqtol, but always). I wanted to create a VF that would indicate in an RI Bible where this construction was being used (ESV does very well with translating the intensification but even ESV isn't totally consistent (cf Gen 50:24-25).

I ended up using this for my VF, which worked well enough for the section I was limiting it to.

"(([field bible, content] <LogosMorphHeb ~ V?F???A??>) BEFORE 1 WORDS ([field bible, content] <LogosMorphHeb ~ V?[PI]??????>))"

I would have preferred to have the second argument simply be "V?[^F]??????", but this gave too many false hits since I couldn't (or didn't know how to) add a constraint to say that both sides must be the same lemma.

Unfortunately, I also failed to get the VF to work in RI Bibles either. In the "ideal" situation I could search for any feature in the original languages and display the results in any RI Bible.

Reuben Helmuth

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/992776#Comment_992776

For some reason the forum is insisting on converting "PI", when enclosed in square brackets, into an emoji! I even edited in order to put quotes around the search string but to no avail. 🙄

Phil Gons (Logos)

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/992777#Comment_992777

Thanks, Graham and Reuben. Anyone else?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/992879#Comment_992879

I'm holding off replying until I'm sure I have it working correctly.

Dave Hooton

What kinds of searches do you get the most value out of in Logos?

I'll answer on the kinds.

Word proximity queries, morphological queries, <Person>, <Place>, {Milestone}, {Speaker} are used frequently; often with INTERSECTS and NOT in combination with lists (comma operator).

But I like to debunk claims! I heard a criticism of the use of the word God (especially GOD) in the NKJV compared to the AV, and thought I would investigate. So the primary query has to be case sensitive for the words God, God's, GOD (GOD's has no results). Run a search against each bible, convert to Passage Lists and look at the two sets of differences (Merge > Difference). You can compare the text of the NKJV and AV side-by-side in the Passage Lists and see that:

there is a total of 47 passages
Both translations are guilty of using God for god, and vice-versa.
AV uses expressions like "God forbid" or "would God" for a negative emphasis (God not in the original language)
AV uses "God save the king" for "long live the king"

The other query is GOD in the AV, listing the NJKV in the results. Inspection shows that NKJV uses GOD (small caps), or LORD (small caps)! You can't search for small caps, which is why GOD (case sensitive) has to be used.

Mark Barnes

Like you, Phil, I get huge value from the WITHIN {Milestone } searches. I'm still waiting for the WITHIN {Headword } search, though!

I also make good use of the instant collections feature, often to search within the works of a single author.

Everything else is all a bit random, depending on what I'm doing at the time.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/993027#Comment_993027

At the moment, I am trying to build searches where Logos appears to be able to help but not completely answer the question:

What other names is a person known as? (within Hebrew/Greek)
What other names is a person known as because of the two traditional sources? (Hebrew/LXX)
What names are used both as a personal name and as a designation for that person's descendants?
What names are used both as a personal name and as a geographic or ethnic name?

Why am I asking this type of question? Because I am exploring what one needs to know to identify a person/place in order to say you "know" the name and how do you identify names one should know from those you expect to always look up.