Hebrew syntax searching: How to?

Jason B
Jason B Member Posts: 19 ✭✭
edited November 2024 in English Forum

Ok, so I have been using Logos for many years and love the software, but I don't know a lot about Hebrew admittedly.  I have been needing to research all occurrences of texts that contain a divine noun that also has a plural pronoun.  I have tried creating several different syntax searches, but none of them include Genesis 1:26, which is my proof text that I'm using to know the search is working right, because that text does include both conditions, so I feel that once I have a search that returns that verse as part of the result set, then I probably have a valid search.  Thus far, none of my searches have yielded what I'm looking for.  Here is what I have tried thus far:

Since I don't understand how to construct the search, I started with just using two segments:





Normal
0




false
false
false

EN-US
X-NONE
X-NONE













MicrosoftInternetExplorer4



























































































































































Since I couldn't get that to work, I researched the forums here trying to figure it out, and I created two more searches based on what I found in the forums, but neither of those returned results that included Gen 1:26.  Here is how I did the other two:

And...

So my question now is, where am I messing up, and could someone out there help me figure out how to properly build a syntax search, or else point me to a good video that would accomplish the same thing?  I have looked at the tutorial videos that are on the Logos.com website, as well as searching youtube.com, but thus far I cannot get any help.


As a note, I called support about this, and when they found out there was not a bug with the software, I was told by the lady that I needed training and she could not do anything else to help me.  I was dumbfounded and shocked to be told this quite honestly, because I work for a software company working the support phones as well, and I could get fired for saying such a thing, so I was quite shocked there was no offer of any help to my problem.  Now I will freely grant I don't obviously know how to use syntax searching, and I honestly could understand if she refused to give me an hour long training on how to do syntax searches, as I could understand how that is out of the scope of general support, but I would have been perfectly happy if she would have just told me the solution to my quesiton, even if she didn't explain how it worked...as long as I could get the results I needed in my search, I understand it is up to me to learn how to do syntax searching.  However, to just be told there was no bug in the software and they could do nothing more to help me leaves quite a sour taste in my mouth quite honestly!!!!!!! :(  Don't train me if it is policy, just help me with a workable solution is enough to make me happy and all I wanted.  The other problem is that the online documentation is not clear on how to do this either, as I have tried to study that, but to no avail, so I tried every resource possible before calling support, only to be shot down there, so I'm resorting now to posting here to see if I can get the help I am needing to solve my problem.

Thanks in advance for any and all help you can provide!

Comments

  • Kevin Becker
    Kevin Becker Member Posts: 5,604 ✭✭✭

    Jason, you came to the right place to help you figure this out. Let me show you a search that will produce Gen 1:26 and then I'll talk about a better approach for a question like this.

    Your basic problem is that when you used the the unordered group you didn't specify what segment under which to look. These trees aren't organized so much by verse but by clauses.

    Here's an example search.

    image

    Now let me show you the graph, with the elements emphasized

    image

    The Union/Disjunction (which is a supra-clausal unit) was disrupting your previous searches. Basically the plural pronoun is in a different clause than the divine noun. Essential it's in a sentence that, as a whole fulfills the object role in the sentence, and in this case the supra clausal structure is there because several sentences are strung together as the object. If you notice there is a dashed line before the supra-clausal node, that's why just first attempt (with no structure above them) missed this verse, in one sense these two words are not in the same clause.

    So how to we compensate for this? All we need is the appropriate head node with matching skips levels ticked. This search gets it.

    image

    However, when you are just looking for two items in one verse a simple Morph search will get you what you need

    image

    Hope this all makes sense.