Searching Septuagint Morphology

Hello! I am doing research in the Septuagint and need help figuring out how to preform a specific search. What I need to know is how often does a particular translator use a specific Greek form to translate a corresponding Hebrew form.

So for example, in Genesis 1:1, the translator saw a Qal Perfect (ברא) and translated it with an aorist indicative (έποίησεν). What I need to know is, did the translator always translate a Hebrew perfect with a Greek aorist? Or did he sometimes use a different Greek tense and if so which one(s) and how often?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

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Mark Barnes

You need to search in the resource Septuagint with Logos Morphology. You can't use a Morph search because you can only use one Morphology at a time with a Morph search. But you can perform morph searches in Basic or Bible searches — but constructing morph searches in Basic or Bible search is tricky. So here's what I suggest:

Create your morph search for your Hebrew morphology. It will show in the Morph search as @VaP. Now switch to Bible search. Your search criteria will be replaced with ([field bible, content] <LogosMorphHeb ~ VaP??????>). Copy <LogosMorphHeb ~ VaP??????> to the clipboard.
Now switch back to morph search, and run your Greek search. It will look like this: @VA?I. Again, switch to Bible and it will change to ([field bible, content] <LogosMorphGr ~ VA?I????>). Keep the bit in the angle brackets (including the brackets) to leave yourself with <LogosMorphGr ~ VA?I????>.
Now add "ANDEQUALS", and the Hebrew morphology from the clipboard, which gives you <LogosMorphGr ~ VA?I????> ANDEQUALS <LogosMorphHeb ~ VaP??????>. Remember to choose the Septuagint as the resource you want to search.

That gives you all the occurrences of a Qal Perfect translated with an aorist indicative. I'll follow up with a post that explains how to find all the translations of a Qal Perfect in whatever form.

Mark Barnes

To find all the verb forms used by the LXX translators that translate a Qal Perfect, you need to conduct a Morph search for the Qal Perfect, in Analysis view. (You'll need to do Hebrew and Aramaic separately). Analysis searches can a long time, especially if there are thousands of results, so you may want to limit it just to part of the Hebrew Bible.

In analysis search, you should be able to add columns to the search for number/gender/case, etc. You can drag these columns up to group by them. I'm fairly sure that in the LXX these columns relate to the Greek text, not the Hebrew text, which is what you want. Unfortunately I'm running 6.8 beta and there's currently a bug in that version which prevents it from working. But if you're on 6.7, you should be fine. You can right-click on the column headings to collapse all, which gives you a nice summary. As I said, I can't show you a screenshot because it's broken on the beta, but here's a screenshot grouped by adverb/particle type, with everything collapsed, which will give you an idea of what it should look like. You can group by multiple columns (e.g. tense and mood) if you want.

Curtis M

Thanks for your quick reply Mark! Your first suggestion worked great, I was able to figure out how many times Genesis translated the Qal perfect with a future. The second suggestion, however, is what I was originally doing, but am pretty sure that the results it gives me are the Hebrew tenses and not Greek (as I had originally thought). As you can see in the screenshot below, it says there are 423 imperfects and only one future. There are 423 Qal imperfects in the MT (I searched BHS), but using the search query you suggested in your first post, I got back results saying that 204 of those are translated with a Greek future (I manually checked several, and the results seem accurate, at least there is more than one).

Looking at the Logos LXX inline interlinear, it will only show the morphological codes for Hebrew. To see the Greek codes, you have to hover over the actual Greek word. This makes me think that perhaps I am trying to get information from two separate databases?

At any rate, I can get the information I need by doing several searchings the way you suggested in your first post. It would be nice if I could get a breakdown doing only one search, but doing separate searches will work, there are not all that many options.

Blessings!

Mark Barnes

Looking at the Logos LXX inline interlinear, it will only show the morphological codes for Hebrew.

Given that you're grouping by Tense (Logos Greek), it should show the Greek tense, not the Hebrew tense. Clearly there's something wrong. I'll report that as a bug, elsewhere.

But I'm glad you've been able to get the information you need.

Mark Barnes

Given that you're grouping by Tense (Logos Greek), it should show the Greek tense, not the Hebrew tense. Clearly there's something wrong. I'll report that as a bug, elsewhere.

It's been acknowledged as a bug, and hopefully will be fixed sometime fairly soon. If/when it's fixed you'll be able to use this second method to get a list of all the ways it's translated.