Results matching “"field searching"” from Logos Bible Software Blog

I didn’t plan to continue my field searching series, but I just stumbled across some very helpful fields in the Critical Review of Books in Religion that I didn’t previously know about. They’re too good not to pass on to you. (It really does pay to look carefully at the information in “About This Resource”!)

In addition to the standard Surface Text and Footnote Text fields, there are Review Title, Author, and Review Author fields.

Review Title Field

This field allows you to search for words that appear in the titles of the books being reviewed. I can think of at least two scenarios where this would be beneficial.

First, if you are doing research and trying to build a list of resources on a particular topic, a Review Title search would turn up a very targeted list of hits in seconds. Let’s say that you are writing a paper on Calvin or getting ready to preach through Romans. The search rtitle:calvin turns up 8 books about Calvin, and the search rtitle:romans turns up 45 books on Romans. You can then read the reviews to see if the books look helpful.

Second, you could use the Review Title field to look up a review on a specific book. If you know the title of the book, a simple quote search will normally suffice, unless the name is fairly nondescript. But if you don’t know the exact title, searching on a word or two in the Review Title field will give you much more targeted results.

Author Field

With the Author field, you can quickly find all the books by a particular person. The search author:carson turns up three reviews for three different books by D. A. Carson. The search author:n* author:wright turns up the two reviews of books by N. T. Wright. Whether you want to read the reviews, look up some missing bibliographic information, or find new books by your favorite author, the author search will serve you well.

Review Author Field

Since there are thousands of reviews, many of the reviewers will be unfamiliar to you. It’s often helpful to know the reviewer’s basic views on the Bible to properly assess his opinions. For this reason you may want to read especially the reviews written by scholars whose opinions you trust. The Review Author fields lets you do just that. A search for rauthor:moo will take you to Douglas Moo’s review of James Edwards’ Romans commentary. Since Moo has one of the best commentaries on Romans ever written, he is well equipped to review other Romans commentaries.

If you enjoy having access to all these book reviews in the Critical Review of Books in Religion (CRBR), you’ll be please to know that the Review of Biblical Literature (RBL), which is essentially the continuation of CRBR, is soon to be available in Libronix.

I got an interesting email last week from an individual who was wondering if there was a way to find all of the geminate verbs in the Old Testament. I had never done this particular search before, but I was pretty sure that it could be accomplished fairly easily since Libronix supports regular expression searching. With my scanty knowledge of regular expressions, I took a stab at it, but eventually had to turn to Bradley Grainger for help.

While this search is a little on the complicated side for those without much knowledge of regular expressions, I thought it would be a great opportunity to demonstrate the power of Libronix. And with a little help from the tips below and Vincent’s excellent article on Hebrew Regular Expression Searching, this kind of searching really is within your reach.

What’s a Geminate Verb?

First, let’s define a geminate verb (also sometimes called double ayin, ayin-ayin, or ע״ע verbs). Hebrew verbs in their dictionary form are composed of three consonants. A geminate verb is a verb whose second and third consonants are identical. So סבב would be a geminate verb, as would ארר ,חנן ,צרר ,חלל, and שׁדד.

How Do You Search for Geminate Verbs?

What we want is to do is search the lemma field for words with a consonant followed by another consonant, which is followed by that same consonant again, and we want to search only for verbs, not nouns or other parts of speech.

Here’s the search that we would use to accomplish this for two different morphologies:

lemma:/.(.)\1/ @ WestMorph = v*

lemma:/.(.)\1/ @ AFMorphHeb = V*

To perform this search, you can use the Bible Speed Search, the Bible Search, or the Hebrew Morphological Bible Search (which is handy if you want to search multiple Bibles that share the same morphology).

What Do Those Letters and Symbols Mean?

Let’s break the search down into its main components so you can see what’s going on.

The Field: lemma:

The lemma: is a field search telling Libronix to ignore everything else besides lemmas. (We’ve recently covered some of the benefits of field searching here on the blog.)

The Regular Expression: /.(.)\1/

The next part, which begins and ends with /, is the regular expression. It is composed of three parts.

1. The first period specifies that we want any character. Since we are limited to the lemma field, it will find only a letter from א to ת (the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet).
2. The next part, (.), is just a repetition of the first part, specifying that we want another letter from א to ת. (The parentheses are added in order to point back to this part from the next part.)
3. The final portion, \1, specifies that the third letter must be the same as what was found in the parentheses (i.e., the second letter).

The @ Operator: @

The @ sign is short for ANDEQUALS and simply tells Libronix that you are looking for all the words where both x and y are true. In this case, the x is the regular expression and the y is the specified morphology.

The Morphology: WestMorph = v*

The last part of the search specifies which morphology to search (you may have several different Hebrew morphologies) and what parts of speech you want to include. In this case, we’re going to search BHS with the Westminster 4.2 morphology, and all we want to see are verbs.

Search Results and Search Analysis by Lemma

To get a complete list of all geminate verbs, you could work through all of the hits and compile your list, but there’s a much easier way. Just click the “Search Analysis by Lemma” at the top of the search results to group your search results by verb.

Then you can simply scroll through the list and see all of the geminate verbs in alphabetical order in the right margin.

If you want to learn more about what you can do with regular expression searching in Hebrew, see Vincent’s article Hebrew Regular Expression Searching.

Update: I replaced the regular expression /[\u05D0-\u05EA]([\u05D0-\u05EA])\1/ with the much simpler /.(.)\1/.

So far in our field searching series we've covered searching OT quotes in the Greek NT, the words of Christ, and footnotes and surface text. Today I'd like to look at the author field in the Theological Journal Library.

The Theological Journal Library is a massive collection of 500 journals, each containing numerous articles. I was curious exactly how many articles, so I did some calculations. I came up with 8,421 articles containing an author field, which should be most of the articles. But this number doesn't include book reviews and a few other things. Imagine trying to sort through 8,421 articles in 500 print journals to find a specific article by a specific author! Thanks to Libronix, that's an easy task. Thanks to the author field, it's even easier.

When you know who the author of the article is and perhaps not much else, you can easily locate all of the articles by that author and find the exact one you're looking for in no time. Simple use author: followed by the name of the author.

Let's say you're looking for all of the articles written by Dan Wallace, author of the popular Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics. There are a couple of ways you can go about this. It's often sufficient to use just the author's last name. So you could search for author:Wallace to find all the articles with the word Wallace in the author field. That search yields 23 hits. In this case, though, last name isn't enough to give you only articles written by Daniel B. Wallace. You'll also get some hits for articles written by Paul W. Wallace, Peter J. Wallace, and Wallace Benn.

You could try author:"Daniel B. Wallace", but that wouldn't return any hits for "Daniel Wallace" without the middle initial or "Dan Wallace." In this case, it's not an issue, since his name appears the same way in every article, but that's not the case with many authors. Walt Russell is a perfect example of this. Sometimes his name appears "Walt Russell," sometimes "Walter B. Russell," sometimes "Walter B. Russell III," and still other times "Walter Bo Russell, III."

To get the best results, you will usually not want to do a quote search. I'd recommend using the individual's last name and the shortest form of his first name followed by an asterisk. So I'd search for all Walter Russell articles with author:russell author:walt* in the same search. A search for all Daniel Wallace articles (author:wallace author:dan*) would look like this:

Not only is this a handy way to find a specific article you're looking for when you don't have a precise title, but it's also a great way to explore the writings and theology of a particular individual or build a bibliography for a biographical paper you're writing.

For more on field searching, see these previous posts:

• Field Searching: Searching OT Quotes in the Greek NT 
• Field Searching: Searching the Words of Christ 
• Field Searching: Searching Footnotes and Surface Text

Since we've been looking at some of the various fields that you can search in Libronix resources, like OTQuote, DisputedPassage, and LaterAddition in the Greek New Testament and WordsOfChrist (or WOC) in most English Bibles that include the New Testament, I figured I'd continue this little series and mention some of the other fields that you can search.

A field that most books have that you may find helpful in your searching is the footnotes field. You can search footnote text in isolation from the rest of the text of the book by using Footnote: prior to the word or phrase you are searching for (e.g., Footnote:Packer).

Footnotes usually contain more detailed information with bibliographic citations and additional sources for further study. You might find it helpful to search the footnotes of a book to find more books and articles about a topic you're studying. Not all books include a bibliography at the end, so searching the footnotes with certain key words might give you some great leads to dig deeper.

Another place this might be helpful is in the ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament. The search Footnote:NA27 turns up 151 mentions of the NA27 in the footnotes showing the places where the underlying Greek of the ESV differs from the NA27 text. If you wanted to find all the places where that variation involves θεος, for example, you could search for Footnote:θεος, which turns up 4 places where the ESV Greek text follows a different reading from the NA27 either adding or omitting θεος.

Alternatively, if you ever wanted to exclude footnotes from your searches, many of our books support a Surface field. So a search for Surface:Barth, for example, would ignore any hits in the footnotes.

To see what fields are supported for a given resources, look in "About This Resource," which you can access from the right-click menu in My Library.

You can also access "About This Resource" by clicking click Help > About This Resource with a resource opened and selected.

Here's an example of the supported fields for The Theology of the Christian Life in J. I. Packer’s Thought.

More field search examples coming soon.

I mentioned in yesterday's blog post that you can search specific fields like OTQuote, DisputedPassage, and LaterAddition in the NA27 and UBS4 editions of the Greek New Testament. Another field that you might find helpful in your English Bible searches is WordsOfChrist (or WOC for short). You can use WOC searches in most versions of the Bible that cover the New Testament.

A search for WOC:Father in the ESV yields 236 hits. If we want to see only the places that refer to God the Father (i.e., Father vs. father), we would use WOC:case(Father). We could also use WOC:exact(Father) to omit any potential references to the plural "Fathers" (perhaps at the beginning of a sentence), but in this case there aren't any so the results are the same either way. (To learn more about search modifiers like case() and exact(), see the Searching section of the Libronix Help Manual and this article on searching.)

We can then graph the results and see that by far the majority of Jesus' references to His Father occur in John.

This is certainly an important aspect of John's theology of Jesus as the Son of God. Another search of the words of Christ (woc:nostem("son of god")) shows that the only gospel that records Jesus referring to Himself as the Son of God is John.

If we search for all of the words of Christ in the ESV (WOC:*), we get 40,411 hits in 2,042 verses. If we graph the results, we get this.

This information is sure to come in handy for any serious study on the teachings of Jesus.

Did you know that you can limit your searches in the Greek New Testament to the portions that are considered by the editors to be quotations from the Old Testament? In the Logos editions of the NA27 and UBS4, we've added special tagging for all the text that appears in the print editions as quotations from the OT. In the NA27, these quotations are designated by italics, in UBS4 by bold.

Simply put the search term OTQuote: in front of the word or phrase you want to search for (e.g., OTQuote:κυριος). Libronix will limit the search to just the OT quotation text. A search in the NA27 for OTQuote:θεος, for example, yields 69 occurrences (compared to 1317 in the entire NT).

Another interesting thing you can do is find all of the OT quotations. Just run the search OTQuote:*. It yields 4662 hits in the NA27. Keep in mind that this is the number of Greek words, not the number of quotations. If we graph these results by number of hits per book, we get this.

So Acts, Matthew, Hebrews, and Romans are the top four. If we graph the results by percentage, we get these results.

The top four by percentage are Hebrews, 1 Peter, Romans, and Galatians.

By the way, there are two other fields that you can search within: DisputedPassage and LaterAddition (e.g., DisputedPassage:κυριος or LaterAddition:κυριος). Disputed passages are indicated by [single square brackets] (e.g., Gal 1:6). Portions of text that the editors consider to be later additions are wrapped in [[double square brackets]] (e.g., John 7:53-8:11).

Logos Bible Software supports many advanced search features, like Regular Expression pattern matching and field searching. I've just finished a new tutorial on the website that shows some real-world examples of how you can use these advanced search features with your morphologically tagged Hebrew Bibles. Enjoy!

The Graphical Query Editor Tutorial has been rewritten for version 3.0. Folks who have worked through the old tutorial will notice only a few significant differences, such as the use of the new Logos keyboards, and the regular expression section has been significantly revised because the syntax changed from version 2.0. There are some minor changes to the sections on field searching and reference searching. Happy searching.