Archive - September, 2005

Using DBL’s Semantic Domains

  |  Wed, September 7, 2005   |  Products, Training   4

When you are studying a word, it’s often a good idea to look at synonyms and antonyms for that word as well. For example, if you were studying the English word run, you might also want to consider how words like sprint, jog, or even gallop overlap in meaning with run, and to what extent they are different. You may also want to consider how run and its synonyms are transformed into other parts of speech: What can the word jogger tell us about the meaning of run that runny cannot?

Finding words that are related to one another in meaning is also useful for studying the Bible, or else resources like Girdlestone’s Synonyms of the Old Testament or Trench’s Synonyms of the New Testament wouldn’t exist — not to mention Louw and Nida’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament based on Semantic Domains. The Louw-Nida dictionary is particularly interesting, since it arranges all the words of the Greek New Testament by means of a hierarchical taxonomy, where each entry rests within a “domain” of meaning alongside any other words that have some degree of semantic overlap.

That’s all fine and good if you’re only studying the Greek of the New Testament. But what about the Old Testament?

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Slicing Books for Art

  |  Tue, September 6, 2005   |  Misc   3

At a used bookstore in London I found a Bible atlas from 1900 with beautiful colored engravings. I have seen individual atlas pages in old map shops sold for more than this book cost, and it had 11 full page engravings. Few things hurt me like cutting up a book, but these clean, neat 8 x 10 inch pages simply begged to be framed and hung on the wall for everyone to appreciate.

After a quick check on the Internet to ensure that the book wasn’t too rare, we carefully cut out the pages and scanned them at high resolution before framing them. You will see them on the wall if you visit Logos in the future, and you can download this diagram of the tabernacle and the temple right now. (The file is 2.85 MB and the image is 3232 x 2464 pixels.)
The whole set of corrected images (cropped, rotated, color adjusted and scaled to 50%) are available in an 8 MB file.

Spanish Dividends

  |  Fri, September 2, 2005   |  Company, Products   3

It costs so much to build English-language tools and, incrementally, so little to enable them for other languages that it seems a waste not to do so.

Our large investment in the large English-speaking market should pay dividends around the world, not just here in the US. Building a multi-lingual technology like the Libronix DLS enables that, but users still need Bibles and reference works in their own language.

We’re working on acquiring licenses to those resources, but it is a slow process made all the more complicated by multiple ownership: a Spanish reference work may be a translation, by a Spanish publisher, of an English work, but the translator only owns the print rights and the electronic rights remain with the English publisher, who doesn’t own the translation. (We are working through this, though, and getting results.)

Years ago Logos funded the development of a complete set of biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek lexicons by James Swanson. Controlling the rights as well as high-quality XML source files allowed us to have this Dictionary of Biblical Languages translated into Spanish at a reasonable cost without having to re-do all the tagging and linking. The translators started with the well-tagged English source files and only translated the English, ensuring that the original languages text and extensive links to other resources remained intact.

The Greek dictionary has been translated, and we hope the other volumes will follow soon. Look for it in an upcoming Spanish release.

English:

787 ἄρτιος (artios), ία (ia), ον (on): adj.; ≡ Str 739; TDNT 1.475—LN 75.4 qualified for a function; capable (REB), efficient (NEB), proficient (NRSV), competent (NAB), (2Ti 3:17+), note: many versions use vocabulary that emphasizes the thoroughness or completeness of the equipping; thoroughly (NIV), fully (NJB), complete (ASV, RSV, NKJV), perfect (KJV)

Spanish:

787 ἄρτιος (artios), ία (ia), ον (on): adj.; ≡ Str 739; TDNT 1.475—LN 75.4 calificado para una función, capacitado (RVA, NVI), eficiente, eficaz, preparado (RVR, DHH, TLA), equipado (LBLA) (2Ti 3:17+), nota: muchas versiones usan un vocabulario que enfatiza la meticulosidad o totalidad de la preparación; minuciosamente, completo, perfecto

More on Looking Up Citations: Pseudepigrapha

  |  Thu, September 1, 2005   |  Products, Training   Comments Off

I blogged about looking up Philo citations in BDAG awhile back. But Philo (and even Josephus) aren’t the only potential targets you can work with.

There are a number of reasons to use pseudepigraphal writings (Greek or English or both) to supplement one’s study, though I think such reasons fall into two primary categores: cultural and linguistic. In this article I’ll focus a bit on the linguistic side of things (though I do venture into the cultural a bit), looking particularly at word meanings.

In my personal study, I like to look up cross-references when looking into word meanings. This is particularly handy if a word doesn’t occur often in the New Testament but does occur in other non-canonical writings. I was recently looking at 1Ti 3.8, specifically at the word ?????????????, which the ESV translates as greedy for dishonest gain.

The first thing, of course, was to look it up in BDAG. Here I found that it occurs 2 times in the NT, and both of these are in the Pastoral Epistles (1Ti 3.8 and Tt 1.7). Both contexts are the pretty much the same. But BDAG also cites instances of ????????????? in the Works of Philo (Sacr. Abel. 32) and in the pseudepigraphal Testament of Judah 16.1.
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