DATA BUG: wife in 1 Chronicles 4:19

In Meyers, Carol, Toni Craven, and Ross S. Kraemer. Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. there is an entry for Jehudijah/Hodiah. In NRSV Logos has her tagged simply as "wife" not even "wife of Hodiah". This makes it impossible to add the appropriate community tag to the Women in Scripture dictionary.

This is exactly the sort of oversight that creates feminists. Faithlife, you are better than this.

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Comments

Sean Boisen

In this case, policy rather than oversight, and unrelated to gender issues: see https://community.logos.com/forums/p/170228/986090.aspx#986090 .

I recognize that not supplying unique identifiers for every unnamed individual fails to support your goal of annotating texts. Since there's almost nothing we can say about the vast majority of these individuals, it's low priority for us.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/986091#Comment_986091

In this case, policy rather than oversight, and unrelated to gender issues: see https://community.logos.com/forums/p/170228/986090.aspx#986090 .

I believe your policy needs to be rethought. I understand your concern about "clutter" with people we know little about - but many people with names are essentially unknown e.g. the names of the returnees from the Babylonian exile or many names in the genealogies ... You would rightly say that because they are named, people will want to "look them up" to verify their identity. However, I would submit that:

anytime a person, named or unnamed, appears as a headword in a Logos resource, users will want to "look them up". The user doesn't know how many times they have been mentioned and this Logos policy deprives them of the opportunity to learn the answer. Not to mention that the number of times a person is mentioned is canon dependent.
it is very difficult to study, for example, the generic wife (cultural image of wife) when the searches return all unnamed wives as well as the generic wife. The same issues arise when studying laws surrounding wives. One cannot even do a study of unnamed individuals because there is no distinction between unnamed and generic - which are very different uses of a term in terms of referent.
try to study the laws regarding slavery - note that the fact that the male slave is Israelite is captured; the fact that is wife is subject to specific laws is not (use Exodus 21:2-10 as an example of the distinctions made in the text than cannot be made in a search).
from a user perspective, if Logos tells me that referents are coded, I expect all referents to be coded. I do not expect Logos to decide for me what aspects of scripture I wish to study.

In short, I think the Logos policy is ill-advised and should be revised in the very near future. However, a genuine thanks for taking the time to explain the data oddities.

Sean Boisen

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/986155#Comment_986155

For me, the difference is that someone who is named has at least one useful piece of information: their name (and related information like pronunciation, etymology, etc.). For someone who is unnamed, however, there's usually really nothing to look up. If they're a relative of someone, the relative is generally named in the same verse or nearby, and that person's name is therefore hyperlinked. Detailing that this person only occurs 1x-5x in the immediate text doesn't seem particularly useful to me either. Typically, all we know about them is in the immediate text.

I'd say your point is strongest when the "same" person is mentioned in a parallel passage (like your other example of Shimeath and Kings vs Chronicles): then at least an identity (and Factbook entry) would let you find the matching passage. But I expect in most such cases, Passage Guide > Parallel Passages would still reveal the parallel (though admittedly not as conveniently).

It's not that i disagree with your principles: it's just a matter of prioritizing our curation work.

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One cannot even do a study of unnamed individuals because there is no distinction between unnamed and generic - which are very different uses of a term in terms of referent.

...

I don't know of a way to do this search in Logos, but we could probably generate a list of unnamed (but not generic) references for such study.