Recently in Syntax Category

Awhile back in the Logos newsgroups, someone asked this question:

I am trying to do a search of the Greek where you have a controlling preposition followed by two nouns joined by a conjunction. I am sure it can be done, but I am not experienced enough with searches to do it.

A couple of examples might help you understand what I am trying to accomplish. In John 3:5 you have EX (εξ) being the controlling preposition followed by UDATOS KAI PNEUMATOS (υδατος και πνευματος) the two nouns UDATOS (υδατος) and PNEUMATOS (πνευματος) joined by a conjunction KAI (και).

This example is one of those things that is just easier to explain in the context of a video than in writing. So I shot a video—watch out, it clocks in at over 15 minutes—to show how I worked through the problem.

Click the image below to launch the video in a new Window, or download it and save it for later.

Watch | Download

Today's guest post is from Dr. Steve Runge, a scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software and author of the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament and Lexham High Definition New Testament.

I have been reading through one of my seminary textbooks, the first edition of Robinson's Biblical Preaching. The more I read, the more I was struck by how closely his approach to exegesis matched up with the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament and the High Definition New Testament. Grammar professors are usually interested in the detail, the specifics of the words. The homiletics profs focus on the 'big idea', i.e. how the smaller parts contribute to the whole. The hard part is synthesizing these two elements.

This synthesis is captured in Robinson's Stage 3 of preparation, after the lexicons, dictionaries and commentaries have been consulted. He states, "As you study the passage, relate the parts to each other to determine the exegetical idea and its development" (p. 66). What is interesting is that while he lists eight different kinds of resources to help you through your study Stage 2, he does not list any for Stage 3. Apparently, you're on your own.

The core part of Stage 3 is identifying what Robinson calls the Subject and the Complement. The Subject "accurately describes what the author is talking about" (p. 67). Complements "complete the subject and make it into an idea" (p. 67). In other words, any given passage is made up of subjects, to which complements are added. The most important part of identifying these elements, says Robinson, is understanding the structure of the passage. If the structure is understood, then the flow of thought or reasoning can be accurately discerned and communicated. This is accomplished by developing what he calls a 'mechanical layout', essentially a block diagram that charts the flow of the text.

Such a layout points up the relationship of the dependent clauses to the independent clauses. . . . Either a diagram or a mechanical layout brings analysis and synthesis together so that the major idea of a passage is separated from its supporting material. (68)

Here is the sample of his mechanical layout from Appendix 2 of the first edition. It is not included in the second edition.

Now let's shift gears and take a look at what is found in the Lexham Discourse Greek New Testament. It provides the same kind of block outline for the entire New Testament as seen in Robinson's layout.

The independent clauses can be differentiated from the dependent ones by the labels in the left column, by the indenting, and by the discourse annotations like backgrounding (e.g. Text).

Where the Greek writer uses special devices to highlight that something is part of Robinson's Subject, the LDGNT annotates this as a frame of reference (e.g. ^[TP Text ^TP]). Some frames of reference introduce topics, others introduce information that helps you relate what follows to the preceding text. Either way, they are clearly marked to avoid confusing them with Robinson's Complement. Greek writers also used special devices to emphasize the most important part of the Complement. This too is indicated for you using bolding.

The LDGNT was intentionally developed for preachers and teachers. It includes many other devices that help you identify where the writers highlight key themes, or highlight significant connections between ideas, and much more. We felt like this information was so important that it had to get into the hands of folks without training in Greek. This resulted in a slightly simplified version called the Lexham High Definition New Testament: ESV Edition.

Check out the videos for the HDNT and LDGNT to learn more about each resource.

Those of you who already have the LDGNT will be excited to hear about a forthcoming resource I've been working on: Discourse Grammar of the Greek New Testament: A Practical Introduction to Discourse Features for Teaching and Exegesis. This text introduces the discourse concepts annotated in the LDGNT, starting with how standard Greek grammars like BDF, Robertson, Wallace and Porter treat them. Keep an eye out for it on the Pre-Pub page.

Over on his Exegetica Digita blog, Mike Heiser has been doing some tutorial videos on the Andersen-Forbes syntax resources.

• The Hebrew Bible: Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text
• The Hebrew Bible: Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Phrase Marker Analysis
• A Systematic Glossary to the Andersen-Forbes Analysis of the Hebrew Bible

These resources are included in the Original Languages Library and higher (Scholar’s, Silver, and Gold). If you don’t have one of these base packages, visit http://www.logos.com/upgrade to see your upgrade options.

If you’re interested in learning how to put these resources to good use, let Mike show you how in these five videos.

• Morphological Databases vs. Syntax Databases: Understanding the Difference | 4:46
• Finding Andersen-Forbes Database Resources in Libronix | 2:17
• Creating an Andersen-Forbes Workspace in Libronix | 3:14
• Finding Words in the Andersen-Forbes Database | 11:46
• Using Morphology, Semantics, and Source Tags in Lemma Searches in Andersen-Forbes | 9:34

For more Andersen-Forbes videos, see the Syntax section on our Videos page.

At Exegetica Digita, one of Mike Heiser's blogs, he looks at John 10:30-33 and what light our syntax databases shed on the proper translation of the clause at the end of verse 33, "because you, being a man, make yourself God" (in Greek: ὅτι σὺ ἄνθρωπος ὢν ποιεῖς σεαυτὸν θεόν).

Mike explains,

The end of verse 33 is typically taken by both Mormons and Jehovah's witnesses (for different reasons) as better translated, ". . . you, being a man, make yourself a god," thereby muting this passage as a testimony to the deity of Jesus. They argue that the absence of the definite article before θεόν in verse 33 justifies the translation, "a god."

Mike goes on to show you how to set up a search that will find all the places in the NT with similar syntax to see if the claim holds up that the Greek word for God when it doesn't have the article (θεός vs. ὁ θεός) should be translated "a god."

The references that his search turns up are Acts 5:29; Gal 4:8, 9; 1 Thes 1:9; 4:1; 2 Thes 1:8; Titus 3:8; and Heb 9:14.

Head over to Mike's blog to see his conclusion. He even provides you with the syntax search file so you can download it and run it for yourself.

First, a teaser. Here's where we're going:

Mixing syntactic force and lemmas in a Bible Speed Search?!

[Maybe you just want to cut to the chase and watch the video instead of read. That's fine, go right ahead! — RB]

The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament comes with two primary views. One is the Syntax Graph, (formal title: The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Sentence Analysis; shortname is LEXHAMSGNTGRAPH) where the text is in a column on the right, and a graph of arrows and lines shows how the text is structured. Hovering the text brings the Expansions and Annotations data for the word into a popup. If you use the Lexham SGNT, this is probably the view you're most familiar with.

However, there's another view, one I like to call the "running text" view. This has the text of the Greek New Testament (UBS/NA) but it has one clause on each line, with indentations to show the relationships. This view is also an interlinear. The resource is The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament, shortname is LEXHAMSGNT. Here's an example, note that I have my interlinear configured to only show the Greek text and the English gloss line (you can control this in View | Interlinear).

James 3 from the Lexham SGNT

Now, what not many people know about this edition of the Lexham SGNT is that it is tagged for Syntactic Force. This is what many people refer to as "syntax" when they talk about the Greek of the New Testament, and it is the sort of thing that many second-year programs at seminaries and colleges dig into. You can see the clause and phrase breaks and the hierarchy implied by indentation; what you can't see is that each word carries a syntactic force annotation. So, in the above example, when I hover over ειδοτες, a popup informs me that this could be either a circumstantial participle or an adverbial participle. Definitions of these terms are given as well.

ειδοτες in James 3.1 from the Lexham SGNT

Did you know that you can search for this kind of thing using the Bible Speed Search report? It's a little verbose, but possible: sgnt-syn = "circumstantial participle" andequals lemma:οιδα In the material covered by the Lexham SGNT, this happens 10 times (I know because I just did the search).

This is just one example; I made a video that explains things a little more. This combines a few different advanced concepts: non-Bible data type searching, the andequals operator (also note the notequals operator) and using the lemma field. But it allows you to find some pretty specific things. Like, copulative conjunctions that aren't και.

• Video: 10 minutes, 7.7MB, Flash, with sound.

To further facilitate this kind of searching, I've also compiled a list of valid syntactic force codes that you can key into the Bible Speed Search dialog. So, instead of having to type "circumstantial participle", you'd know you could instead type "ptc-circum". You can download this file (PDF); hopefully it'll help in your use of the Lexham SGNT.

Lastly, I should note that the Lexham SGNT is a work in progress; at present it includes annotations of Romans-Galatians and Hebrews through Revelation. If you find annotations that you don't agree with or would like to suggest alternate annotations, we want to know about it. Send an email to syntax@logos.com and we'll make sure it gets to the editor.

Awhile back over on the Logos Newsgroup for Greek, someone asked a question:

Someone has commented that there are 484 occurrences of the definite article occurring without a noun introducing a prepositional phrase, such as, "τα επι τοις ουρανοις." I wonder if someone would teach me how to search my GNT (N/A27) to confirm this statement?

The example is (I believe) from Eph 1.10:

εἰς οἰκονομίαν τοῦ πληρώματος τῶν καιρῶν, ἀνακεφαλαιώσασθαι τὰ πάντα ἐν τῷ Χριστῷ, τὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς οὐρανοῖς καὶ τὰ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς ἐν αὐτῷ. (Eph 1:10, NA27)

as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (Eph 1:10, ESV)

Note that the same structure is used in "things on earth" in the same verse.

Anyway, the best way to find stuff like this — where you're really searching for a relationship between words and/or phrases even though it looks like proximity will get you close enough — is a syntax search. In this example, the relationship is between the article and the prepositional phrase. It is more than proximity (occurring close to each other or in sequence); it is functionally that the prepositional phrase in some way further modifies/qualifies/distinguishes the article (which, in cases like these, tends to function like a relative pronoun).

The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament makes this relatively easy to find. Let's look at this portion of Eph 1.10 first to see how it is analyzed:

Here the word group contains a head term; the head term contains a word (τα) and the structure that modifies it. Here the structure is a relator. A relator is basically a prepositional phrase that functions adjectivally, modifying a substantive (instead of functioning adverbially, modifying the primary verb of the clause). So all we need to do is find where a relator modifies a word that that is an article.

There are two basic cases to consider. The first is like Eph 1.10, where the word is the root word of the head term, and the relator modifies it. The second case is where the word is a modifier itself, like in Mt 5.16:

Here note that τον is a definer, and the relator (adjectival prepositional phrase) modifies the definer.

These are the two cases to consider. A syntax search that looks like the following should account for both of them:

You'll notice I've used an unordered group to contain the word+modifier portion of the query. Why did I do this? Because I really want to find where a word and a modifier are siblings (occur at the same 'level' in the annotation) because this implies they are in relationship with each other. The containing structure(s) (here the head term or modifier at the root of the query) constrain the elements to already being in the same unit. The unordered group allows for this, letting you specify the elements you care about (here a word and a modifier), and it will run the permutations, including optional elements occurring between them, while it searches. It makes query specification a whole lot easier.

When the search is run, 298 occurrences are located. Here's a snapshot of the results dialog:

The different colors in the results come in because of the "OR" in the query. In this way you can tell that some results come from one half of the "OR". Here the greenish color represents the top half of the "OR" (word is a direct child of head term); the brown represents the bottom half (word is a direct child of modifier).

So, to answer the question posed on the Greek newsgroup; I'd respond that according to the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament, there are 298 instances of the definite article occurring without a noun introducing a prepositional phrase.

We've given frequent attention to the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament here on the blog. It's a tremendous collection of resources. The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament, the other set of NT syntax resources, hasn't been in the spotlight quite as much, mostly because it is still a work in progress. At present it covers the following 11 books: Romans, 1 Corinthians, Hebrews, James, 1-2 Peter, 1-3 John, Jude, and Revelation. (If you don't have access to all of them, make sure to update to 3.0d to get the latest LSGNT resources and syntax database. A revised version of the LSGNT that includes 2 Corinthians and Galatians is included in 3.0e, which is now in beta.)

But don't let its incompleteness keep you from taking advantage of the wealth of information available here. Unlike the OpenText.org resources, the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament resources use the traditional syntactical categories that perhaps the majority of Greek students are familiar with, so it will likely prove to be the most helpful for students as they learn and teachers as they instruct.

When I was in seminary I had the opportunity to teach elementary and intermediate Greek. I was always looking for more examples to show my students so they could learn the grammatical concepts that we were covering in class. Most grammars provide several examples—Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics was especially helpful in this regard—but I was always running down additional examples to discuss in class or to use in handouts, exercises, quizzes, and tests.

How I wish that I had had access to the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament when I was teaching the genitive absolute, the purpose infinitive, the dative direct object, the nominative of appellation, or the double accusative. In about 15 seconds, I can open the Syntax Search tool and generate a list of 55 genitive absolutes, 113 purpose infinitives, 122 dative direct objects, 26 nominatives of appellation, or 78 double accusatives—plenty of fresh material for in-class examples, handouts, quizzes, and tests. It's as simple as adding a Word to the query, checking the box next to the grammatical category for which you want to generate a list, and clicking Search.

But these tools aren't just for teachers. Put them in the hands of your students and have them analyze all 68 of the attributive participles in John's letters or the 85 subjective genitives in Romans, for example. Simple access to so many examples will surely make grasping abstract grammatical concepts much more attainable.

So don't forget about the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament. It is included in the top four base packages (Original Languages, Scholar's, Scholar's Silver, and Scholar's Gold). If you haven't yet upgraded, visit our upgrade page to see your options.

Check out our other blog posts dealing with the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament:

• Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament Updated and Expanded
• Greek Syntax: Syntactic Force Annotations
• Syntax Search Example: Relative Pronouns
• Syntax: Glossaries of Terminology
• Greek Syntax: Lexham SGNT Expansions and Annotations
• Greek Syntax: Lexham SGNT Running Text
• Greek Syntax: Introducing the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament

The Logos syntax databases and resources have revolutionized advanced searching and analysis of the Old and New Testaments in their original languages. As with most powerful tools, there is a bit of a learning curve to using them effectively. One of the best ways to learn how to use them is to reproduce the searches of others. This is easiest to do by seeing a series of screenshots or watching a video.

Learn by Example

To help you learn the ropes, we continue to provide you with blog posts and videos that discuss and demonstrate syntax searching. If you haven't been over to the video tutorial page at Logos.com recently, there are dozens of syntax videos that you can watch. I just updated it to include all of the syntax-related videos that have appeared here on the blog, so go take a look! If you have a slow internet connection, you may want to purchase the Syntax Demonstration Videos on CD-ROM.

Work Backwards

Another great way to learn how to perform syntax searches is to work backwards from one of the syntax resources.

• The Hebrew Bible: Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis
• The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament: Clause Analysis
• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Sentence Analysis

Show Us Your Syntax Searches

We love to see the ways you are putting the syntax tools to use. I stumbled across a blog post where one of our users creatively used the Anderson-Forbes Syntax database to locate all of the occurrences of bears in the Old Testament. His search missed one (Pr 17:12, where the gloss was "she-bear" rather than "bear"), but it was an excellent example of how syntax searching can be a very quick and simple way to access a list of data that would have taken longer to find with an English search or a combination of Hebrew and Aramaic morphology searches. Nice work, Mike!

If you blog about creative ways to use the syntax resources, send an email to blog@logos.com and let us know. We'll add a link to your post below. If we think it's really cool, we may even take a whole post to show off your syntax skills! Just a hint: it should probably contain screenshots or video. (Check out Jing if you don't know how to capture video on your screen.) We're looking forward to seeing what you've got!

I've blogged a bit about the prepositional phrase εν Χριστω in 1Th 4.16. There are three previous posts in this series:

• Greek Syntax: First Thessalonians 4:16. This post introduces the problem and shows how to do searches for the prepositional phrase.
• Greek Syntax: First Thessalonians 4:16, Part II (with video). This post shows how to just search for adverbial instances, and those in relation to where the verb (predicator) stands in the clause. So, does the prepositional phrase come before or after the verb? Or is there even a verb in the clause?
• Greek Syntax: First Thessalonians 4:16, Part III (with video). This post shows how to search for articular and anarthrous instances of εν Χριστω.

Today's post, the last in the series, is a follow-up to Part II. We'll further explore how to search for εν Χριστω in relation to the verb (predicator) that it co-occurs with; only today we'll search for this with both adverbial (as in Part II) and adjectival instances. For those of you who can't wait, here's a link to the video:

• Video: Flash, 7.5MB, with sound, 5:30

In 1Th 4.16, εν Χριστω occurs before the verb, as shown below:

This instance is somewhat ambiguous (indeed, that's the reason why the JBL article was written); there are equally good reasons for the prepositional phrase to modify the subject or the verb. OpenText.org SAGNT annotates this as an adjectival relation, further modifying the subject. In order to examine like cases, we need to find where the prepositional phrase itself (whether the OpenText.org SAGNT annotates it adjectivally or adverbially) occurs preceding the predicator. Our earlier search in Part II only located OpenText.org's adverbial instances.

So today's video starts there and then shows how to search for where OpenText.org's adjectival instances precede the predicator. The combination of those two lists provides the whole set of instances where the prepositional phrase precedes the predicator.

• Video: Flash, 7.5MB, with sound, 5:30

Once the lists are available, the analysis can proceed. Examine not only the verbs, but also the other clausal components that are similar to 1Th 4.16. Which of these instances, like 1Th 4.16, appear to be genuinely ambiguous as to where the prepositional phrase can attach? And can those instances help in establishing reasons to prefer either adjectival or adverbial modification in 1Th 4.16?

Lastly, after surveying the material, you may want to do a reference search of your Greek grammars to see if any of them discuss the issue of how the prepositional phrase functions in 1Th 4.16; you may also want to check some of your commentaries (like NIGTC on Thessalonians, perhaps; or the WBC or ICC volumes if you've got 'em) to see what they say.

I've blogged a few times about 1Th 4.16 and the prepositional phrase εν Χριστω (see here and here).

But there's more to talk about.

One thing that could be handy is searching for when the prepositional object (Χριστω) is articular, and when it is anarthrous. Our initial search for the prepositional phrase found both articular and anarthrous instances.

But in tracking how εν Χριστω functions, it may be necessary to consider articular and anarthrous instances separately. With syntax searching, you can do this. I've created a video that starts with the basic search for the prepositional phrase and adjusts it to first locate articular instances (so, εν τω Χριστω) and then to locate anarthrous instances (εν Χριστω) .

• Video: Flash, 7.4MB, with sound, 7:18

A few days back, I posted an article about 1Th 4.16, specifically on using syntax searching to find all instances of the prepositional phrase εν Χριστω. And that is helpful, but it isn't the whole story.

Today's article will build on that previous article. In the previous article, I discussed how one can find instances of prepositional phrases that modify a verb; so, adverbial instances of prepositional phrases. What can be more interesting, particularly when attempting to discern what is going on with a particular prepositional phrase such as occurs in 1Th 4.16, is to do some searching that examines how the prepositional phrase stands in relationship to the syntactic items around it.

So today's article will use the same basic concept to find instances of εν Χριστω that modify the clausal verb; but we'll look for where the prepositional phrase precedes the verb; for where it follows the verb, and if it occurs modifying a supplied verb.

Because it is easier to show than document in writing, I've created a video that walks through these searches.

• Video: Flash, 16.7MB, with sound, 9:21

Why is this important? Well, in examining 1Th 4.16's use of εν Χριστω, you'll notice that there are two strong possibilities for the prepositional phrase. It can either attach to the subject οι νεκροι, or it can attach to the verb αναστησονται. In 1Th 4.16, the verb follows the prepositional phrase. One strategy, then, is to look for analogues (similar instances). Where else does the verb follow the prepositional phrase? And where it does, what else is going on in those verses syntactically?

That won't give the whole answer; but it may help in getting there. And syntax searching isn't just searching for words, or collocations of words, or even collocations of words with some morphological data thrown in — it is searching for relationships between words, and for relationships between higher-level syntactic components (such as subjects, predicators, and the like).

In this case, we've specified relationships between words to define the structure that represents the prepositional phrase εν Χριστω (which is why syntax searches implicitly locate items like εν γαρ Χριστω even though postpositives are not explicitly accounted for in the search) and we've also specified structures that specify relationships between clause components (the predicator and the component containing the prepositional phrase).

We've been able to sift our hits with (relatively) little effort and, more importantly, with precision. These different search results, then, can help us walk through like structures, looking for analogues that may shed some light on how to determine whether or not εν Χριστω in 1Th 4.16 is functioning adverbially or adjectivally.

[NB: The update at the bottom of the article is new; if you've found this article useful please review it. Thanks! — Rick]

The most recent issue of the SBL's Journal of Biblical Literature (vol 126, no 3) has an article entitled "The Syntax of εν Χριστω in 1 Thessalonians 4:16" (pp. 579-593). SBL members are able to download the article from the Society of Biblical Literature web site.

The article's authors, David Konstan and Ilaria Ramelli, examine the question of whether or not the prepositional phrase εν Χριστω ("in Christ") attaches to the clause subject (οι νεκροι, "the dead") or to the clause verb (αναστησονται, "will rise").

Why is this important? Basically the question the authors seek to answer is whether it is more appropriate to translate the clause "the dead in Christ will rise" or "the dead will rise in Christ"; important to the authors as they state:

The choice between the two versions is of considerable importance. On the first interpretation, only those who have died in Christ will be resurrected, whereas the second can be taken to signify that all the dead will be resurrected in Christ—the necessary premise for the thesis of universal salvation or apocatastasis defined by Origen and other patristics writers, including Gregory of Nyssa. (580)

At this point, I think it is worth stating that the way one answers the question may allow for an interpretation of universal salvation, but it surely doesn't dictate it. I should also note that the authors don't say that the way one answers the question dictates interpretation; I just thought I should make that clear.

I'm not going to interact directly with the article's argument; I just thought it would be helpful to use this as a springboard to talk some more about (surprise!) syntax searching. Because examining questions like this really is syntax searching.

The authors of the article locate all instances of the prepositional phrase (there are 84 instances)* and then work through many of them looking to see what light they shed on how the prepositional phrase is attached. Of course, if you've used the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament, you know that you can at least get their reading on questions like this. Here is how they organize 1Th 4.16:

As you can see, the OpenText.org SAGNT read the prepositional phrase (εν Χριστω, "in Christ") as modifying the noun phrase, thus "the dead in Christ."

Next we can search to find all instances of the prepositional phrase εν Χριστω. As you can see, The OpenText.org SAGNT does not specifically mark items as prepositional phrases, but it does have consistent encoding. There are two ways that prepositional phrases are annotated, and it depends on if they are adjectival (modifying a noun) or adverbial (modifying a verb). As can be seen in the above example, when the prepositional phrase is adverbial, one has a modifier that contains a modifier that is a specifier followed by a word that is the prepositional object. This query could be expressed as follows:

Adverbial instances are different; Romans 9.1 is a good example:

Inside of the word group (wg), the head term contains the exact same structure as the modifier in the adjectival version above. This can be expressed in the Syntax Search dialog as follows:

If you combine both searches with an OR, you can get a list of all of the instances of εν Χριστω to follow along and consult as you read the article.

This essentially gives you a second opinion to check out while you follow the authors' argument. And for technical arguments like the sort made in this article; that can be helpful.

* The authors' count is 84; however a syntax search returns 86 hits. There are two verses that have two hits apiece. First is 1Co 4.15, which has εν and Χριστω separated by a postpositive γαρ in the second hit of the verse. The other verse is Php 4.19, which has an ambiguous modification structure (εν δοξη εν Χριστω Ιησου) that causes searches to locate each εν as the basis of the hit. Therefore a Syntax Search provides evidence of 85 instances; as the authors of the article do not provide a comprehensive hit list, there is no way to tell where these lists differ. My guess is that their count is a count of verse instances (84) and not of hits (85), though they do phrase it as if the number 84 reflects instances and not number of verses in which instances are found—a subtle but important difference.

Update (2007-12-07): I've revisited my original syntax search and the hit count discrepancy (84 vs 85). I've determined that 84 is the proper number. In my original syntax search, I should have done two things differently. First, I should have stated morphological criteria for the lexical form χριστος; or I should have just searched for the inflected text Χριστω. Second, the anything objects were unnecessary. A screen shot of the revised query is below. This query returns 84 instances, and these are likely the same 84 instances cited by Konstan and Ramelli in their article.

Hopefully this clarification helps.

If you will be attending the SBL national conference in San Diego next week, you might be interested in some of these additional sessions that Logos is sponsoring. You'll see new stuff we've been working on (like the Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database and the Semitic Inscriptions) and you'll be able to associate some faces with names!

If you're not able to make these additional meetings but will be at the AAR/SBL meetings, please do at least drop by the booth and say "hello" to us!

(Yes, we'll be at the ETS national conference too; we'll have a post on what's going on there next week)

AM17-36 An Electronic Database of the Biblical Qumran Scrolls
Date: 11/17/2007 - 11:45AM-12:45PM
Room: New York - MM

This meeting presents, for the first time, a searchable database of the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. The session will demonstrate searching and display strategies for comparison of the biblical scrolls with the other texts of the Hebrew Bible. In addition, a variety of books now available in digital form for the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls will be presented.

Additional Links:

• Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls Database
• The Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts
• Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls (12 Volumes)
• Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition
• Product Guide for Hebrew Texts and Tools
• The Dead Sea Scrolls Today (VanderKam)
• The Dead Sea Scrolls and Modern Translations of the Old Testament (Scanlin)

AM17-51 Syntactically-Tagged Databases for the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament
Date: 11/17/2007 - 1:00-3:30PM
Room: New York - MM

This session will overview the latest quantum leap for computerized research and teaching in biblical texts: databases tagged for syntactical structures and functions. The session is appropriate for anyone interested in computer applications for exegesis and teaching of the Hebrew Bible and Greek New Testament.

Additional Links:

• Article: Why Syntax Matters ... to You
• Logos Blog Posts on Syntax
• Free Video Tutorials on Syntax
• Syntax Demonstration Disc

AM 18-21 Electronic Books and Databases for Research in Josephus, Philo and the Pseudepigrapha
Date: 11/18/2007 - 11:45AM-12:45PM
Room: Manchester 1 - MM

This meeting presents an overview of searchable, morphologically tagged databases of the Greek Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, the writings of Philo (the Philo Concordance project), and the Niese edition of The Works of Josephus with critical apparatus. Along with these databases, scholarly monographs now available in digital form for the study of these texts will be presented.

Additional Links:

• Josephus
• The Works of Josephus (Greek, English)
• Flavius Josephus Collection
• Synopsis of the Greek Sources for the Hasmonean Period
• PBI Old Testament Studies Collection
• Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah
• Philo
• The Works of Philo (Greek, English)
• Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah
• Pseudepigrapha
• Old Testament Greek Pseudepigrapha with Morphology
• The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English (R.H. Charles)
• Second Temple Period Collection (19 volumes)

AM 18-51 A Discourse Annotation Database for Biblical Texts
Date: 11/18/2007 - 1:00-3:30PM
Room: Columbia 1 - MM

This meeting presents a searchable database of descriptive annotations of grammatical features based on their function within the discourse. These annotations describe the pragmatic choices of the biblical writers/editors and their effects. The descriptive aspect of the methodology takes into account stylistic idiosyncrasies. The function-based aspect allows for stylistic comparison. The Greek NT database is complete. Preliminary data for the Hebrew Bible and LXX will be presented.

We don't have any additional links describing this at present because it is still in development, but you may want to examine some papers by the project editor, Steven Runge, D.Litt, housed on his Logos bio page.

AM 19-11 Electronic Books and Databases for Ugaritic and Northwest Semitic Inscriptions
Date: 11/19/2007 - 11:45AM-12:45PM
Room: Orlando - MM

This meeting includes a demonstration of the use of a searchable database for the Ugaritic corpus (Ugaritic Databank, Madrid) and searchable scholarly reference works for Ugaritic. The session will also feature a new database for Microsoft Windows users for select Northwest Semitic Inscriptions representing languages and dialects such as Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Moabite, and Ammonite. The inscriptions database includes morphological tagging.

Additional Links:

• Northwest Semitic Inscriptions
• Semitic Inscriptions: Analyzed Texts and English Translations
• Northwest Semitic Collection (7 vols)
• Ugaritic
• Ugaritic Library (12 vols)
• The Context of Scripture (3 vols)
• Writings from the Ancient World (16 vols)
• Article: What's Ugaritic Got to do with Anything?

I was working my way through the first portion of 1Ti 6.10 the other day. This is the well-known clause, "For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils" (1Ti 6.10a, ESV).

I was specifically looking at "... of all kinds of evils", and had some ideas on how to use syntax searching to help me examine that portion of the verse. It was too much to write down; at almost 15 minutes it was nearly too long for a video (I ramble a bit at the end, though).

• Video: Windows Media, nearly 15 minutes, 17.5 megs, with audio

For the past two summers, the church that I attend has had a series called "Summer of Psalms" as the basis of its evening services during the summer. They have someone (not the pastors) do a teaching from a psalm. It's pretty fun, and we end up learning a lot from the different ways in which the lessons are presented.

This year, I taught during one of those services. My text was Psalm 20. And I couldn't help myself; the teaching is heavily influenced by the underlying structure implied by the syntax of the Hebrew—even though I don't really know Hebrew.

If you've read the blog for awhile, you know that I have some level of understanding of the Greek of the New Testament and its grammar and syntax. However, I've not been lucky enough to study Hebrew. I know the alphabet and can vocalize the letters, but I have no understanding of it.

I used the lesson as an opportunity to look at the structure of Psalm 20 using the Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis (aka Hebrew Syntax Graphs). I'd always heard that Hebrew poetry was a beautiful thing, but using the syntax graphs I was finally able to see it for the first time. It gave me a newfound appreciation for Hebrew poetry.

I couldn't help myself; the lesson I put together focused on the structure of the Hebrew of Psalm 20. I didn't do a single syntax search; I just examined how Andersen & Forbes broke the text down (that is, I looked at the arrows) to get an understanding of the poetic structure of Psalm 20. Using the View | Interlinear feature, I throttled the Hebrew Syntax Graphs down to only display "Clause-Immediate Constituent" and "English Literal Translation", so I could track clause constituents without worrying about the other levels (supra-clausal structures and phrase levels). So Psalm 20.7 (in the Hebrew it's v. 8) looks like this:

Psalm 20.7 (v. 8 in Hebrew), click for larger image

I didn't know what to expect from the teaching, but folks said they liked the lesson. That's encouraging. So if you've ever wondered how in the world "syntax" could be directly useful to exegesis and preaching, well, this could be an example. I thought I'd upload the sermon so y'all could look at it and perhaps see how simply looking at the structure implied by the syntax graphs (and not actually searching for stuff) could be used in the context of exegesis and teaching — particularly by someone who has a basic understanding of language and syntax but no formal training in Biblical Hebrew.

In last week Friday's post, I blogged about something that J.H. Moulton calls the "Pindaric Construction". In a comment to that post, David Pereira noted:

The other cases I would question are those in which the "singular things" are joined by "or" or "nor" rather than by the word "and" such as in Matt 12:25. Though these might technically fit the description you gave earlier (i.e. where "a group of singular things in the subject have a singular verb in the predicate"), I don't think they represent any diversion from standard grammar. Take this for example: "Neither a CAT nor a DOG IS allowed inside." Though there are multiple subjects, the conjunction serves to relate each singular noun to the singular verb individually. So, I don't think this is anything more than standard grammar for subject/predicate agreement.

Following up with David, I wrote:

On the search generally -- I was surely thinking but apparently didn't write that syntax searching like this is a way to evaluate assertions made in grammars like Moulton's. Yes, the hits "techincally" match the description; they must be further evaluated to see if they all really do function as proposed. I think, in this sort of application, syntax searching is a way to narrow initial hits (the same search using only morphology and proximity would be complex if at all possible), not always acheive 100% grammatical accuracy (particularly when context can play a role in analysis).

I don't know how special the structure is. There are instances like Mk 4.41 (joined by και) where the two singular things are combined with a singular verb, and it might be interesting to note them. But there are also the sorts of things you mention. Perhaps the better search would be to skip the 'anything' on the second word group, add και as connector, and see how the hit list changes. I smell a follow-up post ...

This is that follow-up post. Here's the modified query I mention above:

There are a few changes to note in this modified form of the previous query.

1. I removed the anything operator between the two word groups in the Subject component.
2. I added a Connector to the second word group, the word και in an effort to search for conjunctive relationships between the groups (or, an 'and' style relationship) instead of disjunctive relationships ('or' relationships) or negative relationships ('nor'/'not' relationship).
3. I added the requirement that the first word group in the query also be the first word group in the Subject. This means that even if there are more than two word groups, the query will only find the structure once — instead of one hit for each combination of two word groups in the structure (as happened in Col 3.11 with the previous query).
4. I changed some highlighting so the whole subject would be highlighted instead of individual word groups within the subject.

The result? Well, the hit list shrinks, from 275 hits to 81 hits. Many of the sorts of hits that David mentions in his comment are weeded out. Additionally, we only have one hit for verses like Col 3.11 (instead of the many hits of the previous query). That's all good.

But some other hits are weeded out too. Re 9.12, one of Moulton's original five examples, is no longer present. Further evaluation leads me to think that Moulton really meant Re 9.2 (which is located by this query) instead of 9.12, which just doesn't make sense.

What does it all mean? I really don't know. Chances are this just once again proves that the nice-and-tidy syntactic structures mentioned in passing in grammars (along with examples) aren't necessarily as nice-and-tidy as they're made out to be. I've said it before, I'll say it again: Language is messy.

But what is possible now with these syntactic annotations is to begin to evaluate these sorts of statements about grammatical structures. We can now, with the assistance of syntactic annotations, build searches that take these larger-level clause and phrase structures into account, along with morphology, and then examine the supposed structure in greater detail to see if there really is something there.

And that was what I was angling toward in the first blog post (along with showing the new Unordered Group object), though I didn't really say it: Here's a structure mentioned in a grammar, what do we find if we actually search the whole corpus for something like it? Well, that is just one of the things we can do now. In the long run, this sort of work will end up making grammars sharper in their discussion and presentation of data.

I don't know offhand how many have installed the latest beta (3.0e RC 2 as of the writing of this post) of the LDLS; and I have even less of an idea of how many of those users have explored the Syntax Search dialog. But we added two new "objects" to the query model, and they're pretty nifty.

These objects are available for all syntax databases, though my example below is from the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament.

• Group: Used to group things together. Order and structure matter in the group operator. This is best used when you want to use OR on groups of objects. Think of it like parentheses in other search/grouping syntax—it allows multiple things to be treated as one, as a "group".
• Unordered Group: One hindrance of the Syntax Search dialog in the past was the necessity to specify all possible options when component order was not important. Let's say I wanted to search for a clause with a particular noun as subject, and a particular verb as the predicator but I didn't care about the order in which the subject and predicator occurred. It could be S-P or P-S. In the past, I would've had to specify both orders and use the OR operator, as well as anything operators between components. Now the components (and their content) can be specified as an Unordered Group, and the software permutes the possible combinations.

Perhaps an example would help explain the Unordered Group object.

Just the other day I was reading J.H. Moulton's Prolegomena volume in the Moulton-Howard-Turner Grammar (which is on pre-pub, BTW ... make sure to get your copy while it is relatively cheap!) and on page 58 he mentions something called the σχημα Πινδαρικον, or the "Pindaric Construction". This is when a group of singular things in the subject have a singular verb in the predicate.

That's not exactly easy to understand; an example would help. A good example is Mark 4.41, " ... that even the wind and the sea obey him?" The subject consists of two singular nouns, but the verb is singular too. A more literal translation might be "the wind and the sea it obeys him". So the subject here acts as a single unit instead of as two things, and the verb is singular instead of plural ("it obeys" vs. "they obey"). Kinda weird. [NB: see the comments to this post for some important clarifications — RB]

Moulton gives five examples: Mt 5.18; 6.19; Mk 4.41; 1Co 15.50; Re 9.12. But I was curious to know how many more might exist in the NT. Moulton says "It is really only a special case of anacoluthon, no more peculiar to Pindar than to Shakspere (sic)." (Moulton, 58). Looking at Mark 4.41, we can see the structure in question:

Note the two word groups in the subject, each with a head term that is singular in morphological number. And also note the predicator, which contains a head term that is singular in morphological number. That's the structure, essentially. So what does it take to find further instances? Here's a screen shot of the query:

A few things to notice in the query.

First, note the use of the Unordered Group object. The contents are two clause components, one a Subject, the other a Predicator. These objects are what are permuted, so you're searching for the equivalent of ([subject]-anything-[predicator]) OR ([predicator]-anything-[subject]) though you didn't have to specify it.

Second, a general note. This query shows how syntax searching takes advantage higher-level phrase-and-clause annotation (clauses, subjects, verbs, groups, etc.) but also relies upon word-level morphological information. Morphology, lemmas, and other word-level information is important and foundational; but syntax searching takes the next step in building additional annotation upon that foundation and allowing interaction between all available levels.

Below is an example of some of the results. All told, there are 275 instances of this query located in the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament.

Once results are available, they can be graphed. Below is an example of a graph charting hit density in chapters. (Or, you could export the hit data from here to Excel, and do your own charting/math/analysis/whatever). Interesting in the chart is Colossians 3, which is densest area listed. Here's the chart:

The hit density in Col 3 is a result of Col 3.11, which has a number of word groups in the Subject. You know, "Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free":

Anyway, queries that search for groups of things (most syntax queries do this to account for varying structures) should be easier now. And once you have that data, you can still do nifty things with it—reviewing highlighted hits, graphing the hits to check different measures of distribution, and the like.

Anyone who has taken a science class has likely had an introduction to the basic concept of an atom (the smallest particle still holding the properties of an element). This person also likely has an understanding that molecules are built up of atoms.

This is all loosely speaking, of course—serious scientists would differ with my imprecise descriptions and use of these terms. This is why we have a periodic table of the elements. The table visually represents the basic ingredients of what I will loosely call “stuff”.

The periodic table of elements
(courtesy http://www.bpc.edu/mathscience/chemistry/images/periodic_table_of_elements.jpg)

Thus atoms of hydrogen (H) are different from atoms of oxygen (O). This is well and good; these basic elements that make up “stuff” need to be kept separate and properly defined.

However, life is not so neat. Outside of a science lab, welding shop or hospital, we rarely concern ourselves with pure elements. We concern ourselves with molecules, like the ever-popular H₂0; two atoms of hydrogen combined with one atom of oxygen—better known as “water”.

H₂O, better known as "water"
(courtesy http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/Water/)

This same sort of relationship exists in grammar. Consider words and information about words (known as “morphology”) are the atoms. And this sort of information—definition, part of speech, etc.—is very helpful.

First Timothy 1:1-2

Here each word (or “atom”) has information associated with it such as a dictionary form (thus a meaning), morphological information (like part of speech) and an English-language literal translation (or a “gloss”).

This information allows one to attempt to deduce further information about groups of words, but relationships are only implied and not expressly denoted. That is, while one may know that the και at the end of line one above functions to join things together (based on morphology as a conjunction that is a “logical connective”), and while reading the text one can intuit what is connected (“God our Saviour” and “Christ Jesus our hope”, based on common noun cases joined by the conjunction), these things are not explicitly marked. They are free-floating atoms that happen to have proximity, their underlying relationship has not been quantified. These relationships (molecules) can be guessed at using atom-level data and proximity, but they cannot be specifically known.

A syntactic annotation makes molecules (word groups, phrases, clauses) of the atoms that are words. The graph below shows that “God our Saviour” and “Jesus Christ our hope” are the items connected by και.

The structure of 1Ti 1.1-2

This is why we think syntax (more specifically, syntactic annotations) is so important. Not because it’s cool (though it is), but because it puts together the individual words (atoms) into more meaningful structures (molecules). It lets us talk about “water” instead of talking about “an atom of hydrogen, followed by an atom of oxygen, followed by an atom of hydrogen”.

Syntax also allows for the combination of molecules, as seen in the above syntax graph. There are relationships between words. So Παυλος (“Paul”) is a “head term word” that is modified (here “defined”) by the whole phrase αποστολος Χριστου Ιησου κατ’ επιταγην θεου σωτηρος ημων και Χριστου Ιησου της ελπιδος ημων (“an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the will of God our Saviour and Christ Jesus our hope”). The relationship between the word and the phrase is one of “definition”. In this case, a new “molecule” is created by adding an “atom” (Παυλος) to an existing molecule (the “definer”) and the relationship that creates the new molecule is specified.

That “definer” consists of two parts, or molecules: the “qualifier” Χριστου Ιησου (“of Christ Jesus”) and the “relator” κατ’ επιταγην θεου σωτηρος ημων και Χριστου Ιησου της ελπιδος ημων (“according to the will of God our Saviour and Christ Jesus our hope”). Both of these molecules further modify αποστολος (“apostle”), telling who Paul serves and by what authority he serves. And this whole structure, the definer, clarifies Paul’s apostleship.

Additionally, because these “molecular” relationships have been specified across the whole of the text, these relationships may now be searched. To use the present example of Παυλος modified by a definer, we can search for where words that are “Names of Persons or Places” (Louw-Nida domain 93, one piece of information assigned at the “atom” level) are modified by definers.

To do this, a search dialog that allows one to visually represent syntactic structure is used to create a query.

A query based on word structure (a.k.a. "syntax")

This query specifies that a head term must contain a word (or “atom”) that specifies it is within Louw-Nida domain 93, it must also contain a modifier (or “molecule”) that is a definer. This search, when run, locates 473 instances of the syntactic structure in the New Testament. An example search hit is Mt 27.37, which has Ιησους ο βασιλευς των Ιουδαιων (“Jesus, the King of the Jews”) where Ιησους is the head term word (or atom) and ο βασιλευς των Ιουδαιων is the definer (or molecule).

Summary

Much like molecules are groups of atoms that allow us to talk about “water”, “sugar” and “gasoline” without needing to specify the molecular make-up, a syntactic annotation allows one to talk about “subjects”, “predicators” and “complements” without needing to approximate contents.

The syntactic annotations do the analysis, building up higher-level structures from the “atomic” level of word data (word, morphology, lemma, etc.). These structures are useful by themselves in that they document how a particular syntactic approach or philosophy has analyzed the structure of the text. They are further useful in that they provide for higher-level combinations of things to be queried. Rather than approximating all of the ways that words (atoms) may potentially combine to form the molecule “subject”, one simply specifies “subject” to bound one’s search to such structures.

In this way, the text can be read, queried and analyzed at a higher level (clauses, phrases, etc.) without sacrificing the necessary and useful information at the foundational word level.

The winner of the Logos-SBL syntax paper award was announced in Vienna at the Society of Biblical Literature International Meeting this week. Here's the announcement as posted at the SBL Forum: 

In September 2006, Logos Bible Software and the Society of Biblical Literature announced the establishment of a Technology Paper Awards program. The goal of the initiative is to foster creative biblical scholarship in the use of technology and to expand our understanding of the grammar and syntax of the biblical Hebrew and Greek texts.

A total of twelve awards were made possible, with the first-place awards consisting of $1,000 cash, a $1,000 Logos software credit, and a $200 SBL book credit.

Fifteen papers were received. After review of the papers by a three-member panel of SBL scholars, it was determined that a first-place student award would be given. In addition, all who submitted papers will be given a $500 Logos software credit and a $100 SBL book credit.

The criteria used to evaluate the papers were: (1) utilization of the relevant databases; (2) originality in framing a significant question for investigation; (3) creativity in using technology to address the question posed; (4) clarity of expression in presenting the study’s process and results; and (5) significance of the process and results for biblical scholarship.

The winning paper was written by Andrew David Naselli, who is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Theological Studies with a concentration in New Testament Exegesis and Theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois. The paper was entitled "A Test Case for Aktionsart VS Verbal Aspect Theory in New Testament Greek: Aorist and Imperfect Indicative Verbs Joined by Kai and Sharing the Same Subject." Congratulations to Andrew for his fine work. Logos and the SBL wish him success in his ongoing studies. Thanks to all who took the time to submit their work.

The awards will be continued in 2008 so look for the announcement!

The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (henceforth Lexham SGNT) is an ongoing project here at Logos. When v3.0 was released, a preliminary version of the Lexham SGNT, covering Hebrews through Jude, was included in the various Scholar's Library packages and the Original Languages Library package. (see more on packages here).

Dr. Al Lukaszewski has been steadily working through the Greek New Testament since that time. The latest beta release (v 3.0e) includes a significantly expanded version of the Lexham SGNT. If you already have access to the Lexham SGNT, the 3.0e beta will update your version. The new version includes data for Revelation, Romans and First Corinthians. Of course, it is a beta release so you should be sure to read all of the warnings and whatnot before you decide to install the beta version.

For an example of the sort of information that the Lexham SGNT provides, check out this previous blog entry which includes a video discussing "Syntactic Force Annotations".

Video: Flash, .75 MB, approx. 1:27, no sound.

If you've read this blog for awhile, you know that sometimes I just notice things as I'm reading through the text. This time, it was a syntactic structure used in 1Ti 6.3, shown below in the ESV NT Reverse Interlinear:

The structure that is highlighted is what we're interested in. This is a neat little syntactic structure where the article + substantive (here a noun) combo surrounds a prepositional phrase. Here's the syntax graph of the verse:

I thought it might be interesting and instructive to walk through constructing a search to find this and other instances (over 100 in the NT!). So I created a video.

• Video: Windows Media, 14.42 MB, 13:55, with sound

[Note: I used WMV format because the video as captured was too big for Camtasia to save as Flash format. I'll try to keep it shorter in the future -- RB]

I am a contributor at another blog called PastoralEpistles.com. That blog is one outlet where I work specifically with my favorite section of the New Testament, the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus).

Over on PastoralEpistles.com, I'm working on a series of posts that combines a few of my loves: The writings of the Apostolic Fathers, Koine Greek, and the Pastoral Epistles. I'm using a book published in 1904 by Oxford titled The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers (that one is actually a Community Pricing title, check it out!) that provides information on areas in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers that show affinity with areas of the New Testament. These "areas of affinity" may be outright quotes, they may be indirect citations, they may be allusions, or they may simply have topical similarity using similar language for similar topics.

I'm also able to use the shortly-to-be-released Logos Edition of the Apostolic Fathers which makes this sort of work loads easier than it was before. It's true, after long last the work on the Apostolic Fathers is done and it should be released on time — so hurry up and get the pre-pub price while you can!.

Basically, I'm working through where writings of the Apostolic Fathers are noted to have affinity with the Pastoral Epistles. I started in the Epistle of Barnabas. Here's an example of an entry from The New Testament in the Apostolic Fathers:

This short section provides the texts in question and a short (emphasis on short) discussion. But it's a starting point. Basically I'm reviewing the texts and considering the linkages. You can check out my discussion on the Ep.Barn. 1.3-6 || Titus 3.5-7; 1.2 affinities.

I'm not writing this post to discuss linkages between the writings of the Apostolic Fathers and the NT (as cool as that would be). Instead, I'm going to shift to syntax. In looking at the above linkages, one notices the Greek ἐλπίδι ζωῆς (hope of life) prominent in both the Barnabas and Titus passages.

This prompted me to ask a few questions. First, I wondered how prominent this "hope of life" (Titus has "life eternal") is in the NT, and second I wondered what other sorts of "hope" there were in the NT. And these questions can be answered with syntax searches.

I made the below video that sets up the search and shows the results. If one just searches the Greek NT for ἐλπίς, 48 verses (53 instances) are located. But there are 18 instances where "hope" is qualified in some way. There are only two instances where it is qualified by "life" (ζωῆς), and both of them are in Titus (the two examples cited above in relation to Barnabas).

• Video: Flash, 7:12 min, 9 MB, sound.

Why do I bring this up? Well, with the advent of the syntactically tagged databases of the Greek New Testament, I find myself asking more and more questions like this. And I'm more and more able to run a syntax query (many of which share the same basic template that this search has) to get a clearer picture of some grammatical phenomenon without having to run a blunt concordance search, and then sift through the hits. I'm able to get more relevant, more meaningful instances of what I'm interested in and sift through less chaff in the process. And this has made my study of the New Testament deeper, which can only help my understanding and application. And to my mind, that's what it's all about.

Here's a fun syntax search. For some reason I thought of searching the New Testament for places where body parts — hands, feet, heads, etc. — served as the subject of a clause.

You know, things like Mt 17.2:

And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light.(Mt 17:2, ESV)

As seems to be my habit, I constructed the search and made a video of the process so I could share it with y'all. Enjoy!

• Video: Flash, 9MB, 5:48, with sound

I received an email from one of y'all with some further questions about word groups, head terms, clausal hierarchy and syntax searching.

Rather than writing something, it was easier to make a video to point out some of the different ways one can structure a syntax search — particularly if you've wondered what "Must be an immediate child of parent" does.

I'll warn you that I rambled a bit, the video is almost 13 minutes. Hopefully the information therein is usable.

• Video: Flash, 16+ MB, 12:47 min, with sound

Read the first five posts in this series: Intro | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4.

2Ti 4.1 offers an example of the Charge Form.

Charge Form in 2Ti 4.1

The discussion of this form is very much preliminary because Smith's recent book, Timothy's Task, Paul's Prospect is the first to propose this form. If Smith is right, it could affect how one interprets the whole book of Second Timothy. One should at least weigh this when working through the book of Second Timothy.

Description of Form

Smith defines the form as follows:

My research has identified four basic elements which comprise the charge: the Charge Verb, Person/s Charged, Authority Phrase, and Content of the Charge. A fifth element sometimes present in a charge is the Implications of the Charge, though this is not a necessary component.[1]

Smith provides more explanation of each of these elements:

• The Charge Verb: Could be διαμαρτύρομαι, παραγγέλλω, μαρτύρομαι, ἐνορκίζω, εχορκίζω, ὁρκίζω, κελεύω, παρακαλέω, ἐντέλλομαι.[2] Smith notes these are to be active apart from deponents, which will occur in the middle.[3]
• The Person Charged: A second person singular or plural, though third person singular or plural are possible. The case of the noun is either accusative or dative. This item is not always a part of the charge, sometimes it may be implied from context.[4]
• The Authority Phrase: Typically following the verb, it may or may not use a preposition. When no preposition is present, the phrase uses the accusative case.[5]
• The Content of the Charge: Typically in a ἵνα clause and a verb second or third person subjunctive, though it may be an infinitival clause or perhaps even a series of imperatives.

Because the charge verb and authority phrase are always present, those will be used as the basis of the query.

The Form in OpenText.org SAGNT

Smith reports the following instances of the charge form: Mt 26.63; Mk 5.7; Ac 16.18; Ro 12.1-2; 15.30-32; 1Co 1.10; Eph 4.17; 1Th 4.1; 5.27; 2Th 3.6; 2Th 3.12; 1Ti 5.21; 1Ti 6.13-14; 2Ti 4.1-8.[6] The query follows:

Charge Form

• A primary clause with a first-person indicative charge verb as predicator. A second clause component, either an adjunct or a complement contains:
• “supernatural being or power” (Louw-Nida domain 12) as head term, or
• οικτιρμος, οικτιρμων or ονομα as the head term

This query, when run, returns 29 instances. Some are duplications based on the “OR” criteria in the word group of the second clause component.

• Instances from Smith located by the query: Mt 26.63; Mk 5.7; Ac 16.18; 15.30-32; 1Co 1.10; Eph 4.17; 1Th 4.1; 5.27; 2Th 3.6; 2Th 3.12; 1Ti 5.21; 1Ti 6.13-14; 2Ti 4.1-8
• Extras located by the query: Jn 14.16; 16.26; Ac 19.13.
• Instances from Smith missed by the query: Ro 12.1-2. This is due to a discrepancy in the annotation of Ro 12.1, where the prepositional phrase that functions as the authority phrase is annotated as modifying the following infinitive verb instead of the preceding indicative verb (the charge verb).

Bibliography

Smith, Craig A. Timothy’s Task, Paul’s Prospect: A New Reading of 2 Timothy (Sheffield: The Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006).

Notes

[1] Smith, p. 27.

[2] Smith, p. 27, 29.

[3] Smith, p. 29.

[4] Smith, p. 30.

[5] Smith, p. 30

[6] Smith, p. 231-233

Read the first four posts in this series: Intro | 1 | 2 | 3.

Php 4.10 offers an example of the Joy Expression.

Joy Expression in Php 4.10

Description of Form

As with the Request/Petition form, Mullins has questioned if such a thing as the “Joy Expression” exists as a form in the New Testament. White describes the form as follows:

Five formal items may appear in joy expressions: (i) either the verb χαίρω (“I rejoice”) in the aorist tense (cf. Phil 4:10 and P.Giss. 21 in type 3), or the noun χάρις (“joy”) in the accusative case as the object of the verb ἔχω (cf. Philemon 7 in type 3); (ii) an adverb denoting magnitude (πολλήν, μεγάλως, λίαν in the examples diagrammed on p. 94); (iii) either a statement regarding the arrival of a letter or a statement concerning something which was heard; (iv) the object which was heard, introduced by ὅτι; and (v) the vocative.[1]

Mullins rightly takes issue with this based on White’s own examples. Mullins writes:

For the joy expression, [White] indicates five elements without saying which are essential and which are optional; he says they “may appear” in the form. Now, if a form is to be a form, there must be something about it which is basic. Presumably in the joy expression two elements are basic: first “either the verb χαίρω (“I rejoice”) in the aorist tense (cf. Phil 4:10 and P.Giss. 21 in type 3), or the noun χάρις (“joy”) in the accusative case as the object of the verb ἔχω (cf. Philemon 7 in type 3)” and, second, “the object which was heard, introduced by ὅτι”.[2]

To isolate instances of this potential form,[3] the two items Mullins understands as basic are used as search criteria.

The Form in OpenText.org SAGNT

Because Mullins’ first basic item has two relatively different options, two queries are necessary.

First Query[4]

Joy Expression, First Query

• A primary clause with a first person aorist instance of χαίρω as the predicator.
• A secondary clause with the conjunction ὅτι.

Second Query

Joy Expression, Second Query

• A primary clause with a first-person instance of ἔχω as predicator and χάρις (or χαρά) as complement. The order may be predicator-complement or complement-predicator.

No comprehensive list of instances of the joy expression are given by either White or Mullins. Their own examples list Php 4.10 (exemplary of first query) and Phm 7 (exemplary of second query) among the NT instances. The following are located with the queries:

• Instances located by the First Query: 2Co 7.13; Php 4.10; 2Jn 4
• Instances located by the Second Query: 1Ti 1.11-12; 2Ti 1.3; Phm 7; Heb 12.28; 3Jn 4.

Bibliography

Mullins, T.Y., “Formulas in the New Testament Epistles”, JBL 91 (1972), pp. 380-390.
White, J.L., “Introductory Formulae in the Body of the Pauline Letter”, JBL 90 (1971), pp. 91-97.

Notes

[1] White, pp. 95-96.

[2] Mullins, p. 384.

[3] For the very reasons Mullins states, existence of this structure as a literary form are doubtful. At the very least, the definition needs to be worked over and supplemented with non-canonical examples from the papyri.

[4] Instead of two queries, the form could be located with a single query that uses OR to join the two separate queries. They are presented separately to isolate the differences in each portion of the overall query.

Read the first three posts in this series: 1 | 2 | 3.

1Co 1.10 offers an example of the Request/Petition form.

Request/Petition Form in 1Co 1.10

Description of Form

There is much debate between White and Mullins on this form. Smith, as the latest writer to review the debate, gets the last word. He sides with Mullins, thus Mullins’ formulation (as described by Smith) will be evaluated here. Smith writes:

According to Mullins, the petition form has three basic elements: the background, the petition verb, and the desired action and optionally the address (i.e. to whom the petition is directed) and the courtesy phrase (i.e. a form of ἔαν σοι δόξη, ‘if it seems good to you’). The background includes the recital of information which the petitioner deems necessary for the official to know so that the official will decide in the petitioner’s favour. The petition verb, which is always in the first person and the present tense, reflects the petitioner’s concern that the official act on his behalf. the typical verbs used are ἀξιοῦν, δεῖσθαι, ἐρωτᾶν and παρακαλεῖν. The desired action outlines the request of the petitioner, that is, what he wants the official to do on his behalf. [1]

No specific structural information is given regarding the “background” section, so this cannot be included in a structural search. The other “basic elements”, the petition verb and the desired action, can be structurally quantified.

The Form in OpenText.org SAGNT

The request/petition form involves consecutive clauses, each with different characteristics.

First Query

Structure of First Query

• A primary clause that has either ἀξιοῦν, δεῖσθαι, ἐρωτᾶν or παρακαλεῖν as its predicator in the first person and present tense. The verb is a first-person present indicative. This clause has a complement (or perhaps an adjunct) with an embedded clause. The predicator of the embedded clause is an infinitive verb. An example is found in Lu 9.38.

Second Query

Structure of Second Query

• A primary clause that has either ἀξιοῦν, δεῖσθαι, ἐρωτᾶν or παρακαλεῖν as its predicator in the first person and present tense. The verb is to be a first-person present active indicative.
• A primary or secondary clause follows. This primary clause has an second person verb in the indicative, imperative or subjunctive mood as its predicator. An example is found in Ac 21.39.

Third Query

Structure of Third Query

• A primary clause that has either ἀξιοῦν, δεῖσθαι, ἐρωτᾶν or παρακαλεῖν as its predicator in the first person and present tense. The verb is to be a first-person present active indicative.
• A secondary clause follows. This clause contains a subordinate clause indicated by the conjunctions ἵνα, γὰρ or ὅπως.[2] An example is found in 2Th 3.12. Note that other secondary clauses may intervene between the primary clause and the subordinate clause (e.g. Phm 10).

Mullins reports the following instances of the Petition Form: Lu 8.28; 9.38; 14.18-19; 16.27; Ac 8.34; 21.39; 26.3; 28.22; Ro 12.1; 16.17; 1Co 1.10; 16.15; 2Co 2.8; 6.1; 10.1, 2; Ga 4.12; Eph 4.1; Php 4.2, 3; 1Th 4.1, 10; 5.12; 2Th 2.1; 3.12; 1Ti 2.1; Phm 9, 10; Heb 13.19; 22; 1Pe 2.11; 5.1.[3]

• Instances from Mullins located by the First Query: Lu 9.38; Ac 26.3; 28.22; Ro 12.1; 16.17; 2Co 2.8; 6.1; 10.2; Eph 4.1-3; Php .4.2; 1Th 4.10-11; 5.12-13; 2Th 2.1; 1Ti 2.1-2; 1Pe 2.11-12.
• Extras located in First Query: Ac 24.4; 27.34; Ro 15.30.
• Instances from Mullins located by the Second Query:[4] Lu 8.28; Lu 14.18-19; Lu 16.27; Ac 21.39; Ro 12.1-2; 16.17; 1Co 1.10; 16.15; 2Co 5.20; Ga 4.12; Php 4.3; 1Th 4.1; 5.12-13, 14; Heb 13.22
• Extras located in Second Query: Jn 17.15
• Instances from Mullins located by the Third Query: Lu 16.27; 1Co 1.10; 1Th 4.1, 10-12; 2Th 3.12; 1Ti 2.1-2; Phm 10-13; Heb 13.19; 1Pe 2.11-12.
• Extras located in Third Query: Jn 17.15; Ro 15.30-32; 2Jn 5
• Instances missed by all three queries: Ac 8.34; 1Pe 5.1.

In the instances missed by the queries, the syntax is not as easily ascertained as in the others. In Ac 8.34, the substance of the desired action is not stated at all; it is implied by asking a question—a question that is formally three short clauses. The petition, then, is to answer the question; it is not explicitly stated at all. In 1Pe 5.1, a complex verbless clause consisting of a subject with embedded participles intervenes between the petition verb and the desired action (stated in a primary clause with an imperative verb).

Alternate Query

Structure of Alternate Query

An alternate method would be to simply find where a present tense, singular form of the petition verb occurs as the predicator of a primary clause. These would logically have a high probability of being examples of the petition form.

This method, completed in a single search, locates all of the instances supplied by Mullins. The query additionally locates the following false positives: Jn 17.9, 15, 20; Ac 24.4; Ro 15.30; 1Co 4.13, 16; 1Th 5.14.

Bibliography

Mullins, T.Y., “Formulas in the New Testament Epistles”, JBL 91 (1972), pp. 380-390.
———, “Petition as a Literary Form”, NovT 5 (1962), pp. 46-52.
Smith, C.A., Timothy’s Task, Paul’s Prospect: A New Reading of 2 Timothy (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006). pp. 10,
White, J.L., “Introductory Formulae in the Body of the Pauline Letter”, JBL 90 (1971), pp. 91-97.
———, The Form and Structure of the Official Petition (Missoula, MT: Society of Biblical Literature, 1972).

Notes

[1] Smith, 47.

[2] White 1971, p. 93.

[3] Mullins 1962, p. 54. Note that Mullins has two typos. “2 Corinthians XX 2” should be “2 Corinthians X 2” and “2 Corinthians V 20; V 1” should be “2 Corinthians V 20; VI 1”.

[4] These instances include overlapping matches between all three queries; this is not a unique list.

Read the first two posts in this series: 1 | 2.

Romans 16 has several examples of this form. Verse 3 offers a good sample:

Greeting Form in Ro 16.3

Description of Form

Mullins describes the components of the greeting form as follows:

The elements of the greeting are: 1. the greeting verb (some form of ἀσπάζεσθαι); 2. indication of the person who is to do the greeting; 3. indication of the person who is being greeted; 4. elaborating phrases. The first three are the basic elements of the greeting. The fourth is optional. These elements may be expressed differently in the three types of greeting. In the first-person and second-person type of greeting, elements one and two are accomplished at the same time by the verb.[1]

As noted in the above quotation, Mullins identifies three different types of the form, one for each grammatical person of the greeter. Thus there are first-person, second-person and third-person forms. Because component 2 can be done with either grammatical person of the verb (first and second person) or a pronoun (third person), the pronoun is essentially optional when considering a syntax-based query. Therefore a syntactic search only need attend to two criteria:

• The greeting verb (ἀσπάζομαι)
• Indication of the person being greeted.

Mullins does not provide a definitive list of New Testament instances, but he does mention epistles that contain instances of the greeting form: “It appears in the letters of Paul, extensively, and in the Pastorals, Hebrews, I Peter, and II and III John.”[2]

The Form in OpenText.org SAGNT

Locating the greeting form involves searching for clause-initial instances of ἀσπάζομαι (as a predicator component) that also have a complement clause component. The complement denotes what completes the predication, thus direct objects are included in the sorts of things that complements encode.[3] Including the complement therefore includes an “indication of the person being greeted”.

Structure of Greeting Form

This query returns 69 instances, though the results are not perfect. Instances in Mark (15.18) and Acts (21.7, 19; 25.13) are returned in addition to hits in Paul, Pastorals, Hebrews, First Peter, Second John and Third John.[4] Romans, with an extensive greeting section in chapter 16, contains the bulk of the matches.

Bibliography

Mullins, T.Y., “Greeting as a New Testament Form”, JBL 87 (1968), pp. 418-426.

Endnotes

[1] Mullins, p. 419.

[2] Mullins, p. 424.

[3] An aside: One could limit greetings to those that list personal names in the complement by restricting the complement to containing a head term word that is also tagged as Louw-Nida domain 93, the “personal name” domain. But this would skip over other valid instances of greetings like Php 4.22, “All the saints greet you”.

[4] Based on Mullins’ article, my guess is that only the Mark and Acts references are extraneous; the rest are valid.

Read the first post in this series...

An example of the disclosure form is found in 1Th 4.13:

1Th 4.13, Disclosure Form

Description of Form

Smith provides a concise summary of the structure of the disclosure form as identified by Mullins:

Mullins has isolated the disclosure form, as a distinct literary form which is used in the NT. He examined the form in terms of structure first. By doing so he observes that this form has four constituent elements: verb of wishing, infinitive of a noetic verb, person addressed and information disclosed. Next he examined the form in terms of content and observed that the verb of wishing is typically θέλω, the infinitive of a noetic verb used is typically γινώσκειν (the tense varies) or ἀγνοεῖν, the person addressed is either second person singular or plural and the content of the information disclosed is diverse and usually found within a ὅτι clause.[1]

White discusses the form briefly in his article:

This form may be delineated in terms of its three principal elements: (i) the verb of disclosure, often a two-membered unit consisting of a verb of desiring (θέλω or βούλομαι) in the first person indicative, and the verb of knowing (γινώσκω) in the infinitive form; (ii) the vocative of address (ἀδελφοί, “brothers,” in the five examples from Paul); and (iii) the subject to be disclosed introduced by ὅτι.[2]

The common points of these descriptions include:

• verb of wishing/desiring
• verb of knowing, in the infinitive mood
• a ὅτι or ἵνα clause further explicating the subject to be disclosed.

Smith reports Mullins determines the following references as containing instances of the disclosure formula: Ro 1.13; 11.25; 1Co 10.1; 11.3; 12.1; 2Co 1.8; Col 2.1; 1Th 4.13.[3]

Because the third item (ὅτι or ἵνα clause) is variable as Mullins’ reported instances demonstrate, candidate instances of the disclosure formula can be located simply taking the first two items into account.

The Form in OpenText.org SAGNT

Locating the disclosure form in the OpenText.org SAGNT involves searching for clauses that contain a Predicator with θέλω and that also contain an embedded clause (infinives are typically encoded as embedded clauses) with lexical forms of either αγνοεω or οιδα.[4] Below is the query that will find Smith and Mullins’ reported instances.[5]

Structure of the Disclosure Form

Syntax Search Results — Disclosure Form Instances

Mullins, T. Y., “Disclosure: a Literary Form in the New Testament”, NovT 7 (1964), pp. 44-50.
White, J.L., “Introductory Formulae in the Body of the Pauline Letter”, JBL 90 (1971), pp. 91-97.
Smith, C.A., Timothy’s Task, Paul’s Prospect: A New Reading of 2 Timothy (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2006). pp. 10,

Endnotes

[1] Smith, 10.

[2] White, 93.

[3] Smith, 11.

[4] Andrew Pitts, in a forthcoming review of Logos Bible Software 3.0 to be published in the Journal of Greco-Roman Judaism and Christianity, uses a similar search with similar results as an example of the capability of the OpenText.org SAGNT.

[5] As of November, 2006, this is not strictly true. 1Co 12.1 is erroneously tagged in the current version of the OpenText.org SAGNT. This error has been flagged for correction and should be updated in a future release of the database.

During the SBL national meeting in Washington DC, we'll be doing a session on Syntactically Annotated editions of the Greek New Testament. Here's the info:

Session: 20-101 — Syntactically-Tagged Databases of the Greek NT: Overview & Training Seminar
Date: Monday — November 20
Time: 4:00 - 6:30 PM
Room: Bulfinch - GH
Description: Exegesis in the Greek New Testament concerns far more than semantics and parsing. Take the quantum leap with software that allows you to search for grammatical/syntactical structures and usage in the Greek New Testament.

During that session, I hope to run through a few examples of things I've been working on with syntax searching in the area of epistolary form criticism. That sounds a bit high-falutin', I know, but it has direct import on exegesis of New Testament epistles.

Think about it. Even today, we have certain "forms" that we use in particular types of communication. When we write a letter, we have a "Dear ______" salutation, we have a signature (e.g., "Sincerely, Rick" or something like that). Those are what could be called "forms". If you write a memo in your office, chances are you do it a particular way.

The same thing happens with ancient letters. There are particular "forms" for opening a letter. There are also forms closing a letter. And there are, some think, forms for other things in between.

If you're working through an epistle, wouldn't it be important to know if there are potential examples of these "forms", and to also be able to find where other instances of them are in the epistles? Might that not have an effect on exegesis?

This post introduces the idea in a little more detail. Subsequent posts in the series (I believe there will be five, though some may be broken up depending on size of post) will work through the structure of some proposed forms (see bibliography below) and examples of syntax searches designed to locate those forms. I hope to post once a week, but I may get off that schedule since we'll be in the holidays.

OK, bonanza might be a bit of an overstatement...but the good doctor has done some "hard time" in our video production studio so that you might reap the benefit.

As part of our ETS/SBL marketing materials, Dr. Heiser, academic editor for Logos, created a number of videos demonstrating the syntax tools and resources in Logos 3.

Crafting these videos can be a painstaking process and, wow, that small room can get hot...but I hope you'll agree that it was worth the effort. We've posted a few of the syntax videos to our Video Tutorials page and I've included direct links to each video below.

How do these differ from the other videos we've done on syntax?

Here Mike takes the gloves off and pits morphology vs. syntax to show some very specific things you can do with syntax searching that are simply not possible with morphological tagging alone.

Mike calls syntax the "new frontier" in Bible software and says, "These video presentations show searches that are well beyond the reach of Bible software as you've known it."

Or in the words of Walt Disney, "It's kind of fun to do the impossible."

Greek & Hebrew Syntax Videos

  The Case for Syntax Searching

Syntax Search vs. Morphological Search (17:33, 17.5MB)

What syntax gives you that morphology alone cannot: better precision in your language research and refined demonstration for teaching.

Hebrew

Search Video #1: Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text of the Hebrew Bible (8:10, 9MB) Compound subject in agreement with a singular verb across verse boundaries.

Search Video #2: Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text of the Hebrew Bible (5:55, 4MB) Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) order vs. Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order in clauses in the Pentateuch generally, and by Eissfeldt source (P, J).

Greek

Search Video #1: OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament (15:23, 14MB) Accusative noun or pronoun as subject of an infinitive, when the infinitive also takes an accusative object.

Search Video #1: Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (4:25, 3MB) Finding double accusatives in the Catholic Epistles.

Update 11/10, 11:05am - If you have limited access to the Internet, you can download the syntax videos as a zip file (46MB). Save the zip file to your hard drive, CD-ROM or other media. To run the videos, unzip all contents to a single folder, then launch each HTML file in turn to view the Flash videos.

I'm in a small group home Bible study, and we're studying Colossians. My Father-in-Law leads the study, but he and Mom were on a short vacation last week so that means I got to sit in the hotseat. Our text was Col 2.1-7.

So Col 2.2 was one of the verses we looked at. Here it is, in the ESV:

that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, to reach all the riches of full assurance of understanding and the knowledge of God’s mystery, which is Christ, (Col 2:2, ESV)

The text has the words "God's mystery". One of the first things I wondered about had to do with what other types of "mysteries" are mentioned in the New Testament. In OpenText.org-speak, what this means is that I wanted to find what sorts of things qualify the word translated "mystery" (μυστήριον).

I've detailed this sort of search before (see blog post Syntax Search Example: What "Qualifies" another Word?), complete with video.

That's cool and all ... but what if I didn't want to go to the trouble of creating a syntax search? Well, I could just run the Bible Word Study (BWS) report. One of the Grammatical Relationships examined for the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament involves qualifiers.

Specifically, it is the "Words and phrases used to further qualify (word)" relationship.

So I just ran the BWS by right-clicking μυστήριον and selecting the Bible Word Study option. Of course, if I was in a reverse interlinear, I could've just right-clicked. Here's the list I retrieved:

Now, assuming you have Logos 3 and the syntax databases, you try it. Here's my question for you: What kinds of "Kingdoms" are mentioned in the New Testament?

Go to Mt 13.11 in your ESV New Testament Reverse Interlinear, which mentions "the mystery of the kingdom of heaven", right-click on "kingdom", and run the right-click option for Bible Word Study.

When it's done, scroll down to the Words and phrases used to further qualify βασιλεία. It should look something like this:

Watch out ... now you're using syntax in your study of the New Testament!

If you've studied NT Greek, you've likely heard of something called the "Granville Sharp Rule".

If you've been around Bible software, you know that many folks use "finding Granville Sharp" as a sort of litmus test for the capabilities of their Bible software.

The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament gives us an opportunity to examine what the Granville Sharp rule really is and to think about new ways to find instances of it.

Awhile back I wrote a paper for internal use here at Logos examining what "Granville Sharp" is and how to find it using the traditional "morphology+proximity+agreement" approach. This approach has problems because one must approximate relationships between words using morphological criteria (i.e. part-of-speech data), morphological agreement (i.e. terms 'agree' in their specified case), and word proximity (i.e. words are within N words of each other).

Then I examined finding Granville Sharp using the OpenText.org SAGNT. With the syntax annotation, you're freed from approximating relationships with morphology+proximity+agreement and empowered to actually specify relationships that the syntax annotation encodes.

The 17-page PDF document linked below is that paper. It has explanation and screen shots of the queries, graphs and whatnot so it should help in thinking about how to go about isolating syntactic structures via searching the OpenText.org SAGNT. It might even help get the juices flowing for those considering the Logos/SBL Technology Paper Awards.

I've also included the two syntax queries discussed in the paper. I just tested them on 3.0b Beta 2, so if you have that version installed, you should be fine. I would think it would work on any flavor of 3.0, but why not upgrade if you're not up to date?

Copy the queries to your My Documents\Libronix DLS\Syntax Queries folder and then load them as you would any other syntax search, from the Load ... button in the Syntax Search dialogue.

• Paper (PDF): Granville Sharp's First Rule and Syntax Searching
• Syntax Query #1: OpenText: Complex Granville Sharp
• Syntax Query #2: OpenText: Granville Sharp Participles

Some syntax graphs are small. Others (e.g. Rom 1.1-6; Titus 1.1-4; Col 1.3-8) are huge.

Sometimes it's nice to zoom in and out to get a picture of the whole structure, or the extent of the clause. And that can be hard to do using the zoom button in the toolbar.

But if you have a mouse with a scroll wheel and a control key ... well, it's pretty easy. And this video shows you how.

• Video: Flash, 1:17, with sound, approx 2 MB

Now try it yourself: click here to open the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed GNT: Clause Analysis and get your zoom on.

Most folks are very familiar with the first part of John 3.16, "For God so loved the world". In the OpenText.org Clause Analysis, that phrase is a Primary Clause (PC), and the word translated "loved" (ἀγαπάω) is the Predicator (P) of the Primary Clause.

Now, if you wanted to find other situations where the underlying Greek word (ἀγαπάω) is used similarly, you could search the New Testament for all instances of ἀγαπάω. You'd find over 100 of them. Perhaps (as the below video assumes) you're only interested in ἀγαπάω as it is used in the writings traditionally ascribed to John. You could search all of those out too; there are 72 of them (in 51 verses).

But if you did a syntax search and just looked for where a Primary Clause has ἀγαπάω as its predicator, you'd narrow your list down to 18 hits, and you'd know they're used as the main verb in the primary clause.

Confused? That's OK. I recorded a video showing all of this. It's just under nine minutes long and is about 10.6 megs. Watch out, though, I'm getting over a cold so I'm a little congested.

• Video: Flash, with sound, 8:47, 10.6 MB

Awhile back, I blogged on Sleepy Disciples. That blog post looked at the predicator (verb) προσεύχομαι and the different adjuncts that modified each of its occurrences in Matthew 26.

Looking at that passage again, I noticed the following embedded clause in the last adjunct in Mt 26.44:

In this embedded clause, the complement is the first thing in the clause. Some would say this is an instance of fronting, where there is non-standard (for narrative, anyway) component order.

It occurred to me that this sort of thing is now searchable, given a syntactic analysis of the text. So I created the below video which explains things a bit more and walks through setting up a syntax search that will locate fronted complements with a headword of λόγος — much like what occurs here in Mt 26.44.

• Video: Flash, 6:52, 7.7 megs, with sound.

A user commented on a recent post:

On the OpenText site, http://divinity.mcmaster.ca/OpenText/resources/articles/a8, Matthew Brook O'Donnell mentions the ability to find THEOS and AGAPE within the same word group. I have not been able to do that yet, probably because I can't yet figure out the nesting structure I need in my search.
I wonder if you might demonstrate that or point me to one of your earlier tutorials where you have done something similar.

Since I haven't blogged about syntax searches like this, and since there is a very cool technique using the Agreement dialogue that makes this sort of search (find two words in any order) fairly simple, I figured I'd do a screen recording video to show y'all how it works.

• Video: Flash, 6:45, approx 9.5MB, with sound.

There are two searches detailed in the video. One answers the question with a very general search, the other searches a bit more specifically.

An earlier post on the Bible Word Study Grammatical Relationships feature garnered the following comment. I inserted the referenced graphic as well.

When I do what you did, I get everything except the side by side translations of the passage as you show above (where you made the notes in red). For instance, I just show the cite Matt 13:14, but not the translations with the colored keys to the study word and the subject. What am I missing?

Yes, this isn't exactly obvious. Grammatical Relationships mirrors the preferences you have set for syntax search results. So try creating a basic syntax search — such as searching for all primary clauses with the word ἀγαπάω as the predicator (verb) in the OpenText.org database. You know, like we find in John 3.16. Here's a short video to show you how: Flash, 9:20, 11 megs, with sound. [NB: When I recorded the video, my computer was in the midst of a massive process that took some significant processor cycles. So it's a little slow in some areas.]

Then modify the search results. Note the "Current View" drop-down in the results menubar. This controls the columns. Also note the Bible button. This is where the English will come in. If your preferred Bible is the ESV, then toggling the button on should cause the ESV to display with proper highlighting in the search results window. Again, the video shows you how this works.

These preferences will then be mirrored in Grammatical Relationships.

Hi folks, I'm back after an extended holiday. And for an upcoming home group study, I'm starting to work through the epistle to the Colossians. So I've been reading it recently. In reading, I came across Colossians 1.9, which has the phrase "we have not ceased to pray for you". In looking at the word "pray", I noticed this is a predicator ("pray", in an embedded clause) with an adjunct ("for you"). At least, that's how the ESV translates it. So I wondered what other sorts of adjuncts modify the word used here for "pray" (προσεύχομαι).

This was the beginning of a rabbit trail, but a fun one. I won't detail the syntax search (I've done similar searches before, check the syntax archives) but I would like to poke around a bit in one area where some interesting hits were grouped together.

In searching for adjuncts that modify προσεύχομαι, I happened across Matthew 26.36-46. In those 10 verses, there are three instances of προσεύχομαι. The first (v. 36) has two adjuncts, the second (v. 42) has three adjuncts, and the third (v. 44) has four adjuncts.

This concentration seemed interesting, so I poked through the text further. I spent all of 15 minutes or so thinking about this before I recorded the one-take video below, but it is an example of the kinds of thoughts that slowing down and examining the clause structure through the syntax graph can generate.

• Video: Flash, with audio, 6:51, approx 5 megs

Serendipitous discovery facilitated.

In yesterday’s post, Dr. Heiser demonstrated a simple example of using the Bible Word Study report with the syntax databases to get answers to syntax questions without ever learning how to write a syntax query manually, showing how even people who don’t know Greek or Hebrew can use these databases to make connections between verses. However, if you learn how to compose your own syntax queries, you can learn to ask a wider range of questions about the Bible. In today’s example, Michael uses the syntax databases to find hits that would take hours to sort through with the older generation of tools.

One of the Hebrew terms for God is Elohim. The ‘im’ ending is morphologically plural, but almost everywhere in the Hebrew bible, the verbs associated with Elohim are singular in number, making it clear that these are references to God, not the plural ‘gods’. Dr. Heiser has done a lot of research in the field of Israelite religion, so when he was learning about syntax databases, one of the first questions he asked was: where does Elohim appear as the subject of a plural verb? He knew that instances of this phenomenon might be theologically or exegetically significant and was quite familiar with several examples, but had never encountered a published list of every time this happens.

Knowing if ‘Elohim’ is the subject of a verb in a given sentence, rather than an object for example, is a syntax question. Without access to syntax tags, one could search for every plural verb that occurs in the same verse as the word Elohim. One would get over 3400 hits (i.e. words returned) in 1057 verses. Only a small fraction of those verses are useful, though, and wading through 1057 verses isn’t a small chore. One might be able to get really creative with filters, and start ruling out verses where certain words occur immediately before Elohim that would typically indicate that Elohim is something other than the subject of the sentence. This approach of simulating syntax using only morphological or lexical form tags is a rather blunt instrument, but I’ve used it in the past to narrow my search results. In capable hands, this blunt instrument can save time over manually checking thousands of hits, but there is now a better way.

Click here to watch the video.

Several readers have requested that we produce more examples of syntax searching. Your wish is my command — at least in this case. I made a video that shows how to make a syntax search to find all the places in the Hebrew Bible where an animal speaks, or more specifically, where a clause has a verb of speaking with a “creature” in the subject. The query uses the semantic categories present in the A-F markup to narrow the hits down to only verbs of speaking with “creature” subjects.

Logos Bible Software 3 offers syntactic databases for the Hebrew Bible and for the Greek New Testament. Some of these resources (the Andersen-Forbes Analyzed Text and Phrase Marker Analysis and also the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament) are informed to one degree or another by linguistics.

I can hear the feedback now: "Huh? Linguistics? Why? Isn't syntax just syntax? You mean I need to learn about linguistics too?!"

David Alan Black, in his helpful book Linguistics for Students of New Testament Greek, describes the importance of linguistics for students of New Testament Greek in this way:

When we study linguistics we are learning how to put the Greek language in its rightful place as a part — perhaps the most technical part — of our work in the text of the New Testament. Through exposure and practice, we can acquire a broader, more confident command of New Testament Greek. ...

But more importantly, the study of linguistics can contribute a great deal to our understanding of the meaning of the New Testament. It can help us become more aware of why we understand a text the way we do when we read it, and it can help us talk about the text more precisely, by providing us with a methodology through which we can show how interpretation is in part derived from grammatical considerations. Linguistics may also help solve problems of interpretation by showing us why one meaning is possible but not another. Above all, however, linguistics can give us a point of view, a way of looking at a text that will help us develop a consistent analysis, and prompt us to ask questions about the language of the text that we might have otherwise overlooked. (Black 3, emphasis mine)

I've highlighted the final portion of the quote because it describes so well one of the primary ways in which the syntax graphs (more on graphs here, here and here) for both the Hebrew Bible (more here) and the Greek New Testament (more here and here) can be used in one's study.

Much of the information about linguistics is already dealt with in the encoding of the databases. The syntax graphs merely make the underlying information explicit. They give you a picture to visualize the linguistic goings-on, here described mostly in terms of syntax.

The bottom line is if you start to read the text using the syntax graphs, a few things will happen.

• First, you'll slow down and take a look at the bigger picture.
• Second, you'll see clause structure (verbs, subjects, objects, etc.) that you likely would not have seen just reading through a paragraph of original language text.
• Third, you'll begin to look across passages for, say, what sorts of things (objects/complements/adjuncts/adverbs/prepositional phrases) further modify verbs (predicators) to track action through a passage. You'll start to look at subjects to see if the subject is the same, or if it changes.
• Fourth, as you begin to look at the text in this different way, you'll have different cues to remind you of things you've seen before.
• Fifth, as Black notes, you'll start to develop the basis on which to ask further questions of the text. You'll notice new, different things. And those new, different things will complement your study of the text.

All of it will help you draw connections — here formulated on the basis of syntax and linguistics — to complement other connections you've already made based on other reading, morphology, commentary, text-critical aspects, and the like. In short, slowly reading through the syntax graph (by all means read the normal text first, and read translations too!), keeping track of the text at a syntactic level as opposed to just words on a page draws on other influences and helps with developing a larger picture of what's going on in a particular passage.

Once again, in the home group study, I ran across a phrase that caused me to ask a question. This time I'm in First Thessalonians 5.2 and the phrase is "day of the Lord".

Earlier, I'd searched for "What other things qualify παρουσία?" (see post here). In this example, I use that same search as a starting point (sort of like a template) to search for "What other things qualify ἡμέρα ('day')?"

So this video (Flash, 11 megs, with sound) shows how to load the old query (which was saved) and modify it.

But as I was making the video, I had a flash of insight: I could use the OpenText.org semantic domain tagging to search for something similar but not constrain myself to vocabulary. I could search for where references to deity qualified words in the time domain. So I run through that aspect of modifying the search as well.

Awhile back, I blogged on how syntax graphs aren't just helpful when it comes to searching. They can be very helpful when reading through the text as well. And they can help one organize thoughts and approach when teaching or preaching on a passage.

A case in point is First Thessalonians 5.12-13. I dug into this passage in preparation for a home group Bible study. The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament: Clause Analysis helped me to organize my thoughts on how this passage is structured, therefore it helped in thinking how this passage should be understood.

As folks who have followed these syntax search examples know, I've been in a home group Bible study that is going over First Thessalonians. This has served as the background for many of these syntax search examples. In the process of doing this, I've noticed that I've begun to ask different questions of the text.

So when the study group was in 1Th 4.15, and when the word παρουσία occurs (yet again), I asked myself, "What other things qualify παρουσία?" Why did I ask that question? First, we need to define Qualifier:

Qualifier: A Qualifier is a modifier that in some way limits or constrains the scope of the word it modifies. Common examples of qualifiers are words in the genitive and dative case, and also negative particles functioning at the word group level.
Porter, S., O'Donnell, M. B., Reed, J. T., Tan, R., & OpenText.org. (2006; 2006). The OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament Glossary. Logos Research Systems, Inc.

So a Qualifier limits scope. In terms of παρουσία, which can be translated "return" or perhaps "coming", when it occurs with a qualifier the qualifier limits the scope of the coming. Thus in phrases like "coming of the Lord", the phrase "of the Lord" acts as the qualifier. It's not just any "coming" or "return", it is the return of the Lord. Just like in 1Th 4.15:

So when I ask the question "What other things qualify παρουσία?" I"m really asking "Are there any other similar sorts of 'return' or 'coming' phrases in the New Testament?" After all, to understand more how the word παρουσία is functioning here, it could help to see it operating in similar syntactic contexts — to see how παρουσία stands in relationship with other instances of words that modify it.

So I put together this video (Flash, 8.5 megs, with sound) to show how I constructed the query to find qualifiers of παρουσία.

After searching, ask yourself the question again: "What other things qualify παρουσία?" Now you have data to use when considering this question. As you evaluate the hits, you can ask further questions:

• Are there any qualifiers that seem to repeat (hint: "his", "of the Lord", "of the son of man", "of the Lord Jesus Christ")?
• What are the unique qualifiers (hint: 1Co 16.17; 2Co 7.6; Php 2.12, etc.)?
• Is there anything that would allow one to say that the use of παρουσία in 1Th 4.15 is the same as or different from other syntactic usages?
• If so, is 1Th 4.15 the use typical or non-typical?
• How does the general understanding of the use of παρουσία with a qualifier in the New Testament affect how we look at the specific use of παρουσία in 1Th 4.15 (or does it)?

Here's a link to the video: Flash, 8.5 megs, with sound

But note well: If you'd rather not go through the hoops of constructing the search as described in the video ... just right-click the Greek word and run the Bible Word Study report. Check out the Grammatical Relationships section. One of the standard word relationships searched for is that of qualification. So this search is done automatically for you in the Bible Word Study report! No assembly required! And it even groups like qualifiers together, so you can see what repeats and what is unique just by looking at the result section.

Also note: A future post will show how to make this query even more generic and search for some things a little differently. So keep comin' back!

In previous blog posts, I've focused on how the syntax databases we offer are used when searching, when asking questions of the text. But this is not the only use. I don't even know if it will end up being the primary use. I was reminded about this with a recent comment on one of my posts:

These blogs are extremely helpful for things like [structure searching], but make it difficult for an average joe like me to get a search result and have confidence that all the cases of what I'm looking for would be covered. . .I'd think "what kind of clause component will this show up in that I'll miss with this search". Certainly, I'll get some results I'd want, but will I get them all?

Instead of focusing more on searching, I figured I'd step back and show another use that doesn't require any searching knowledge at all. Just being able to see the structure of the text in a different way is helpful when reading through the text.

We read through the text in translations with paragraphs/etc frequently. Reading through a syntax graph in addition to reading the text in modern translation can help us slow down when we read, and take note of not simply each word but also the things going on around each word at the clause level.

Ephesians 5.18b-21 offers a good example. I'll give you two hints: Look only at the clauses (primary and embedded) and the verbs in those clauses, and the relationship between these things. No searching necessary. Just reading slowly paying attention to the annotated syntax.

And there's a video (Flash, 3 megs, with sound) that provides a little more information to help in seeing how this can be done.

Here's Eph 5.18b-21 in the ESV, just plain text. Read it in this form and try to think about the underlying structure of the text:

18 And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, 19 addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, 20 giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, 21 submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ. (Eph 5.18-21, ESV)

What can we see from just looking at the syntax here? Check out the video for more explanation, but in short, you'll see how to:

• View only clause information in your graph, removing some of the word group annotation since we're just looking at clause level data here
• Find verbs in the annotation
• Show why this is relevant when looking at the annotation for Ephesians 5.18b-21 (which is a whole primary clause)

Update: If you're interested in using the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament to assist as you're reading through the text, check out this post from May 2006. It's a handy way to work through the Greek text of, say, First John and beef up your knowledge of the syntactic goings-on at the same time!

Update II: Note that I've blogged again about how reading the syntax graph can help when analyzing or outlining a particular passage: Organizing an Outline with Syntax Graphs.

On the Logos Newsgroups, a user asked a question about syntax searching:

I'd like to search for every instance of the construction in Heb 1:2 — ἐν υἱῷ - i.e. ἐν followed by noun without article ... Also (I think) in 1 Thess 1:5 - ἐν λόγῳ — our gospel did not come to you not simply "by means of word\speech"

I could do a normal search, but is this a category of construction that I could find with a syntax search? If so, could someone perhaps suggest how to go about it?

The answer is a resounding "YES!" It was like a slow-pitch softball that I couldn't resist swinging at. So I did. You can watch the video now (Flash, 9 megs, with sound) but be sure to read the rest of the post too.

I should note that I'm running 3.0a beta 2, and you may see some visual changes inside of the Syntax Search Dialog.

If you've read this blog for awhile, you may be asking yourself, "Why Syntax?" That is, why is it such a big deal in Logos Bible Software 3?

We've recently posted an article on our web site by Dr. Mike Heiser, who serves as Logos' Academic Editor, that provides some answers to this question.

And he does it in an easy-to-read way. Even if your first question is "What is syntax?", you'll benefit from reading Dr. Heiser's article. So check it out!

• Why Syntax Matters ... To You!

The other day I was listening to a song that was repeating the phrase "in the name" in the context of the name of Christ. I wondered: What sorts of things in the New Testament are done "in the name"?

To OpenText.org-ify it a little more: Not just where a prepositional phrase with ὄνομα may occur, but what are the verbs connected with instances of a prepositional phrase that has ὄνομα as the prepositional object?

I'm sure, by now, you know the answer. It is a syntax search. And based on the response to my last syntax search example, I've provided another video (Flash, 10 megs, with sound), narrated by yours truly, along with further written description below. Be sure to check out the description, I tell you how to generate some nifty graphs from search results (this isn't in the video!)

Also note that the approach used in this syntax search is incredibly similar to the one discussed in a previous blog article about syntax and morphology searching.

I was reading in 1Th 3.5 the other day and came across the phrase "for fear that somehow the tempter had tempted you" (ESV). Here it is in the ESV NT Reverse Interlinear:

You can see the phrase highlighted using some of our new Visual Markup features. If you click and view the larger picture, you'll see that the same lexical form (πειράζω) is repeated in the verse. Not only is it repeated, but one instance is the subject of the clause, the other is the predicator (verb) of the clause. The syntax graph from the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament shows this a little better:

Is this exegetically significant? Perhaps. But I also had the question — how many other times is the same word used as both subject and verb in the New Testament?

With syntax searching and Logos Bible Software 3, it is a relatively easy question to answer.

As an added bonus, I've even included a video of setting up the search. This video is the first in which you'll hear my "smooth dulcet tones" (as the colleague sitting next to me describes it) narrating the action. You can try the video (Flash, 12 megs, with audio) but be sure to read the description below the fold as well.

Rubén Gómez, in his Bible Software Review Weblog, gives us an example of Graphical Searches in different software applications.

He uses H. Van Dyke Parunak's article on "Computers and Biblical Studies" in Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary as a basis. The article (Vol 1 p. 1118) says:

Particularly powerful patterns are possible in a language that allows one to ask (for example) for all verbs that occur within three words of the phrase “in Christ,” without intervening verbs. A high proportion of the targets matching such a pattern will be clauses in which the prepositional phrase in fact modifies the verb.
Freedman, D. N. (1996, c2008). The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (1:1118). New Haven, CT: Yale.

The Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary (ABD) was published in 1992. At that time, Parunak's underlying target result — clauses in which the prepositional phrase translated "in Christ" modifies the verb of the clause (or, better stated, locating references to the kinds of action done "in Christ") — could only be approximated using morphological searching criteria: "for all verbs that occur within three words of the phrase 'in Christ,' without intervening verbs".

But what Parunak's target result really demands is a search that is sensitive to syntax, not just morphology and word proximity. What about when more than three words occur between the verb and the preposition? What if the prepositional phrase isn't contiguous?

Syntax searches in Logos Bible Software 3 have no such limitations.

(Note: this post has been updated, see the bottom Update section and, of course, comments for further thoughts on syntax and morphology)

I've blogged a bit about the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament before. Sure, it's syntax, and that's important. But how can it be used?

One way is very simple: Use hover popups to show the syntactic force of any word as you read the text, or as you're brought into the text from searches. The syntactic force annotation is a note as to the role that the word plays in the current syntactic context. It isn't about morphological form, it is about syntactic function.

Hover on the inflected word in the Lexham SGNT running text, and see the syntactic force annotation (with definition!) pop up. How cool is that?

Pictures are always good at conveying this sort of thing; moving pictures are even better. The video uses James 1.27 as an example: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world." (ESV).

Video: Flash, .75 MB, approx. 1:27, no sound.

Note that all I did here was move the mouse. Also, when multiple notes of force occur on a word this displays what could be multiple possibilities in a given context or a mixture of possibilities acting together. The Expansions and Annotations resource further spells out those complex relationships.

So if your knowledge of Greek syntax is rusty (or even non-existent) you can still work through the text looking into the structure of the text and the syntactic function of words in the text — just by moving your mouse through the passage you're studying.

Those who have followed the series of posts here regarding the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament (see the syntax category archive) might be interested in the following articles on the OpenText.org site:

• Guide through the OpenText.org Clause Annotation Process
• Guide through the OpenText.org Word Group Annotation Process

These articles walk through the basic annotation process, explaining the OpenText.org annotation process. In the midst of that, you get a great introduction to how and why the data is marked up like it is, which will help in considering how to use the syntactic information therein.

If you're curious about the hows and whys of the Logos implementation of the OpenText.org material, then you need to read these articles.

When working through a passage, it can be important to work through pronoun usage. Sometimes pronouns have direct referents, sometimes the referents are implied.

A familiar example is found in the first three verses of First John:

¹ That which^a was from the beginning, which^b we have heard, which^c we have seen with our eyes, which^d we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— ² the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life^f, which^f was with the Father and was made manifest to us— ³ that which^e we have seen and heard we proclaim^abcde also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1Jn 1.1-3, ESV)

In the above, the English words translated from relative pronouns are in bold, the pronoun referent is in bold italic text. Note use of superscript letters to align pronoun with specific referent as there are two referents in the above example.

How did I know that? Well, let's just say that the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament and the Syntax Search dialog are my friends.

I was talking with Daniel Foster yesterday afternoon. We were talking about syntax search examples and how they're different than other sorts of morphological searches.

One type of search that we used to rely on the Graphical Query Editor to do (and still do; we didn't take this capability away) was to do what is generally known as "agreement searching".

An example would be: Find where two words exist N words apart (where, say, N = 5) and the two words agree on some sort of morphological criteria (like, say, case, number or gender).

This sort of approach is commonly used to find where a noun or participle has an article, or where an adjective is associated with a noun. Things like that. In essence, we approximate an established syntactic relationship using proximity (within N words) and morphological criteria (sharing same case, number and gender).

What we really want, though, is where an article modifies a participle or noun. That is, where the article and participle have an established relationship. The number of words that separate them is incidental, they could be next to each other or they could be 15 words apart. We're interested in the specific relationship.

The good news is: This search can be done in the New Testament with an underlying syntactic database. Since we'll be searching the entire New Testament, we'll use the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament, which has been discussed previously on this blog.

The better news is: We can do even more — like, say, find where participles have an article that modifies, and where the "articular participle" is (for example) in the Complement (object) of a clause. Like what the below syntax search specifies.

I've mentioned in the past that the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament will have Louw-Nida domain information available at the word level. This means that one can combine syntax with Louw-Nida semantic domains and do some interesting stuff when searching.

This is much easier to show you than to write and tell you. So I fired up the video capture software and threw together a quick search. Where, I wonder, in the Greek New Testament does something like James 2.19 occur? ("Even the demons believe — and shudder!") This, translated into a search query relying on semantic domains instead of words, could be stated like:

Find a subject with a head term in semantic domain 12 (Supernatural Beings and Powers) preceding a predicator (verb) with semantic domain 31 (Hold a View, Believe, Trust)

(Flash Presentation, approx. 4 megs, 1024x768).

The video is a single take, no edits. Pardon some of the mouse jitters.

This isn't searching on words, it is searching on domains. It finds clause subjects that contain a word (a "head term", meaning is the primary word in the word group) that are also tagged as having to do with "Supernatural Beings and Powers" that have a clause predicator (verb or predicate) that contains a word (again, a "head term") that is tagged as having to do with belief or trust.

You know, sort of like James 2.19: "Even the demons believe — and shudder!". Only without words, so you can find instances where supernatural beings are said to trust or believe.

With a few more clicks (note the "Copy" button in the Syntax Query dialog, which can "clone" the currently selected structure) we could add an "OR" to search for where the predicator precedes the subject, just to cover all of our bases.

Note especially all of the different ways in which the search results are shown. You can view them with the OpenText.org clausal breakdown, as a syntax graph, or in a reverse interlinear (I have the ESV specified, but I could've specified the NRSV through preferred Bible settings). Click and view. With the English and/or Greek highlighted.

There is a whole lot more going on. Did you see the glossary popup on "Predicator" when the mouse cursor hovered? Did you see the entries from BDAG pop up on hover when hovering Greek text in the OpenText.org clause breakdown? The same thing in the syntax graph? And in the reverse interlinear? The actions captured by the video were all done with the mouse, either via point/click (specifying the query) or hover (glossary information, lexicon information).

This capability (BDAG assuming you have purchased it) should be available with the next beta release of Logos Bible Software v3.0.

We're interested in knowing what you think of this sort of stuff, so please feel free to leave us feedback in the comments to this post. Thanks!

One of my favorite features in the upcoming Logos Bible Software 3.0 has to be the Bible Word Study report. And my favorite aspect of the Bible Word Study report has to be the Grammatical Relationships section of the report.

The Bible Word Study report is intended to help explore how a particular word is used in the Bible. English, Hebrew or Greek, just type it in and the Bible Word Study report goes to work. Even better: right-click on a word in an English text or a morphologically tagged Greek or Hebrew text, and it goes to work.

Because the report is intended to gather all sorts of information about word usage, and because we have these oh-so-groovy syntax databases we've been working on, it seemed natural to do something to explore word usage by syntax inside of the Bible Word Study report. So that's what we've done. And wow, is it cool!

There have been a number of changes and improvements to the syntax feature of LDLS 3.0 in the last couple of beta releases. To obtain Beta 7, visit the Logos Beta Download page. You'll need to install both the LDLS 3.0 Beta 7 download and the 3.0 Beta Resources in order to get all the functionality I describe below.

I'll start off with what's new with the Syntax Search dialog, which can be accessed by choosing Search > Syntax Search from the main LDLS menu. The Syntax Search dialog has seen a lot of exciting changes. If you're interested in syntax at all, I encourage you to use and abuse these new features. If you find any bugs, log onto the beta newsgroup on our news server and let us know.

In an earlier post, I wrote:

You'd be amazed the sorts of things you stumble upon in scrolling through the text and visually recognising similar graph structures in close proximity.

One of the things I keep an eye out for when scrolling through the Greek Syntax Graphs are gaps. If you've studied Greek, you'll know that sometimes it seems like word order in Greek and word order in English have little if anything in common. So I keep an eye out for where one structure has an intervening structure. These sorts of things are called gaps; at least for the purposes of the Syntax Search dialog and underlying syntax database implementation. (Linguists have a more precise definition of "gap", my casual use of "gap" is not to be misconstrued with that more technically correct perspective).

I've blogged about the OpenText.org Syntactically Annotated Greek New Testament in the past (see the Syntax Archives).

The folks who do the work on the OpenText.org project have been doing a lot of work since I last blogged about the project, and the result is that we have a vastly updated data set. The primary new goodie is the consolidation of the Clause and Word Group information.

I know, I know, I said I'd blog about searching the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament. And I will. Really, I will. But not today.

I've been working on a different aspect of the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament project recently: adding glossary information to just about everywhere a clause type or syntactic force note occurs. And wow, is it cool. Really.

Because syntactic terminology is at times confusing, and because different grammars and guides sometimes use the same terminology to describe different things and different terminology to describe similar things (got that?) we knew we'd need to include glossaries with our syntactic databases. And we also knew we'd need to provide links to further discussions of terms in standard grammar and syntactic references, so we've included (where appropriate) links to BDF, Daniel Wallace's Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, and Smyth's Greek Grammar (a classical grammar not yet in LDLS format ... but give us time!).

Last week, I posted on the Lexham SGNT "running text". I mentioned at that time that there are three primary pieces of the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament:

• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament
• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Sentence Analysis
• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Expansions and Annotations

Today it is time to look at the Expansions and Annotations resource. This resource is still in a state of flux, so the implementation may change somewhat between now and the time that the Lexham SGNT is released.

No, I didn’t just randomly press the V, S, and O keys. What these letters represent are the six possible arrangements of subject (S), object (O), and verb (V) within a clause. Several people have asked me, "How would I search for SVO versus VSO clauses in the Andersen-Forbes (A-F) database?" It’s pretty easy, actually.

Awhile back, I posted about the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (Lexham SGNT). At that time, I mentioned I'd blog about the makeup of that project.

It's been nearly two weeks since that post. But now it is time to make good and describe the pieces of the Lexham SGNT in a little more detail.

The Lexham SGNT consists of three primary resources. These are:

• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament
• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Sentence Analysis
• The Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament: Expansions and Annotations

This post details the first item in the above list, the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament (aka the "running text" of the Lexham SGNT).

When approaching a text, one of the initial steps of exegesis is to do some general background study, thus becoming familiar with the larger context of a passage. If I'm looking at a passage in First John, I should have a decent idea of the author, recipient and setting of the letter. Logos has several resources (commentaries, handbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc.) that should provide assistance with this general process.

After this initial step, according to many guides to NT exegesis (e.g. Fee's NT Exegesis) the next step is to work through the the grammar and syntax of the passage. Some guides mention that one should read (and re-read, and re-read) the passage. One must be familiar with the current context and the larger context for exegesis to be effective.

When you're familiar with the text through the reading (and re-reading) of it, you've arrived at the point where detailed picking apart of the text is required. This is the point where one really begins to consider issues of grammar and syntax of the original language.

There are existing resources to consult to learn these things; some are even available in Logos Bible Software. These should be consulted and applied. But detailed reading of a book that provides hints, clues and process for exegesis does not magically transform the reader into a competent and confident exegete of Scripture. This only happens through practice and repetition.

And this is why morphologically and syntactically annotated editions of the primary texts of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament are necessary. They provide an example for you to check your work against, to use in the sharpening of your own skills. This is very helpful when you don't have a hard-grading seminary prof check your work for accuracy.

This article walks through some ways to think about clause boundaries using Logos Bible Software; comparing these to the information provided by the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament.

I've posted in the past regarding a project we've been working on with the good folks at OpenText.org; to make their syntactic analysis of the entire Greek New Testament available in Logos Bible Software. It is a massive project, and it will provide oodles of chunky syntactic goodness to Logos Bible Software users to inform and sharpen their studies of the New Testament.

But that isn't all that we've got cookin' on the Greek Syntax front. We've been working on our own syntactic analysis of the Greek New Testament. We're calling it the Lexham Syntactic Greek New Testament; this post (including a video link, see below!) introduces the work and begins to discuss it in some more detail.

I should say that this project involves a lot of work, and that it will be released in stages as the work progresses. We waited until we had the first major chunk — the General (or Catholic) Epistles, Hebrews through Jude — to consider a release. The first release (as happenstance would have it, perfectly timed with Logos Bible Software 3.0! What serendipity!) will therefore include these books. We hope to release an update in the spring that will include data for the book of Revelation. After that, the Pauline Epistles will trickle out over the following year or so; other books after that. At least, that's the plan for now.

The Andersen-Forbes syntax data is now available as part of the Libronix DLS 3.0 beta. The syntax stuff is 200+ megabytes of data, so we've split it out into a separate beta download.

• Libronix DLS 3.0 Beta - http://www.logos.com/beta/download
• Syntax addendum - http://www.logos.com/beta/download/BetaResources

Once you've installed all of that, you may want to know what to do with all of this syntax information. I've written a short LDLS Syntax Crash Course which is available in PDF format here. You may also want to re-read some or all of the articles in the syntax category on this blog. Or you may want to re-read my ETS paper on the subject.

We are interested in your feedback and your questions. You can leave them as questions in the comments section of the blog, or you can do it on the beta newsgroup forum at news.logos.com.

As mentioned earlier on this blog, Eli and I presented papers at the meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) describing how Logos is moving beyond the word level into syntax of the original languages.

Eli's paper (approx. 350 KB PDF) discusses our approach to issues of syntax in general, using examples from the Andersen-Forbes database to illustrate major points of implementation.

Rick's paper (approx. 1.4 MB PDF) provides information on both Greek syntax datasets that are being worked on and short examples (and screen captures) of how this information can be used.

I've briefly discussed searching OpenText.org material at the word level; this post discusses searching at the clause level, with word group level stuff in the mix.

There's even a groovy video of the search I describe so you can see exactly what's going on (see bottom of this article). One take, no cuts. This is done with the current beta version of Logos Bible Software (3.0 Beta 1) and an extra syntax searching component currently in development.

The ETS and SBL meetings wrapped up yesterday and the Logos team is heading home (perhaps some will make it back in time for our big Thanksgiving lunch at noon today). It sounds like the meetings were very fruitful, with a great deal of buzz around our current and future products.

For those who weren't able to attend, I thought it would be fun to show off the signage that adorned our booth at both events. Click any of the thumbnails below to pop up a larger version.

I was recently dispatched to Melbourne to visit Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes. One of the things I was assigned to discover — other than what kangaroo chili tastes like* — was the underlying linguistic/textual/grammatical philosophy of the Andersen-Forbes database (hereafter, A-F). Sure, they've marked the entire Hebrew Bible for syntax, but what exactly does that mean?

It's been awhile since I've posted about Greek syntax. In the interim, Eli has been regaling us with graph theory and all sorts of other chunky syntactical goodness.

Well, the drought is over.

http://blog.logos.com/archives/2005/11/syntax_andersen.html Consider the simple graph to the right. A graph, you will recall, is a diagram made up of labels and lines. This particular graph has some further special characteristics: (1) This is a directed graph, because the lines are arrows that indicate which labels are “on top,” so to speak; if this were a corporate organization chart, the arrows would always point from manager to employee. (2) This graph is acyclic, which is a fancy word meaning “no cycles,” which is a fancy way of saying that if you follow the arrows in the direction they are pointing, you will never visit the same label twice. Put another way, if no matter where you start, you will eventually reach the end. (3) This particular graph is a tree, because it has exactly one topmost label (the CEO in our org chart), and each label has one and only one arrow that points to it. That is, each employee has only one boss — wouldn’t that be nice?

I think that I shall never see
a graph as lovely as a tree.

Why did we choose graphs to represent syntax instead of something else? Short answer: Because.

The long answer, however, is much more interesting: Because every method of graphically showing the syntactic form of a sentence or clause has its pros and cons. Graphs have a lot of pros, and not many cons.

Good question. For mathematicians and linguists, a graph is a diagram that consists of nodes and edges. For the rest of us, who must communicate using words that we hope others will readily understand, graphs are diagrams that consist of points and lines between them. For our purposes, any diagram that consists of points and lines is a graph.

You may have noticed I haven't been blogging much lately. Mostly, I've been too busy working on the Andersen-Forbes Hebrew Syntax project. As part of that work, I recently went down to Melbourne, Australia to visit with Frank Andersen and Dean Forbes, the gentlemen themselves. It's rare that the two of them are ever in the same room, since Dean lives in California and Frank lives half a world away in Melbourne. When we found out that Dean would be visiting Melbourne for a month to work with Frank, we decided that I should crash the party.*

Last week, I posted an article about "Word Groups" in the OpenText.org Syntactic Annotation. I promised some follow-up; and now it's time for that.

There are obvious uses for this level of annotation in the realm of searching, but what about in just reading the text? Or in working through a passage exegetically?

The good news is that the visualization (graph) supports most operations you're used to performing from a standard morphologically tagged Greek NT in Logos Bible Software. This article is about some of those options.

Since Bob posted about the sentence diagrammer, I thought I'd follow that up just to let folks know that these groovy new syntax graphs we're developing (see previous post) are able to be copied into the Sentence Diagrammer.

Really.

See? Click on each image to see what happens. The first image is a right-click and copy (the blue arrows and such indicate what is selected). The second image is the syntax graph pasted into the sentence diagrammer as a live object. Arrows are arrows; words are words. You can grab stuff and move it around.

Small disclaimer: The first graphic shows stuff like "add to general notes" on the right-click menu. At present, it is unclear whether we'll support notes within these graph resources.

[Note: this is one in a series of posts on Greek syntax and Logos Bible Software. See the Greek category for a full listing. The immediately previous post is here.]

As mentioned in a previous post, the OpenText.org syntactic analysis consists of three primary levels of annotation:

• Base Level Analysis (Word)
• Word Group Analysis
• Clause Analysis

This post will introduce you to the Word Group level of analysis. If this sort of stuff floats your boat, then read on.

I introduced a series of posts on upcoming Greek Syntax tools last week. This is the second post (first post after the intro, you haven't missed anything) in that series.

We have two different data sets that will be made available. If you're at either the ETS or SBL conferences in November, you can see them demo'd. To keep my sanity (and yours) I'll only discuss one data set at a time.

This first series of posts will discuss the OpenText.org Syntactically Analyzed Greek New Testament, as implemented within Logos Bible Software.

Interested in utilizing syntax within your study of the New Testament? Read on!

It would not do to have a syntactically tagged Greek NT without something similar for the Hebrew text. So we are partnering with Francis Andersen and Dean Forbes to make their three decades of work available to you for display and searching, too.

Morphologically analyzed texts have been an important feature of Bible software packages for years. Logos offers several different morphological analyses for the Greek NT and we will soon have three different analyses for the Hebrew. Recently we announced or shipped analyzed versions of the Old Testament Greek Pseudepigrapha, the Apostolic Fathers in Greek, and the Works of Philo. (The Works of Josephus aren’t far behind.)

But what if you want to look at syntax? There have not been a lot of tools available. Logos is partnering with OpenText.org to change that, and you soon will be able to see (and search!) a syntactically annotated Greek NT. The image below is an early view of just one of the ways you will be able to use this data.