How to Find Every Bird Mentioned in the Bible

I recently officiated the funeral service of my aunt who lived a long, fruitful life. She thoroughly enjoyed bird watching so I wanted to include in my remarks several biblical passages about birds. Knowing both the Old and New Testaments mention various types of birds, I wanted to execute a search that would find all verses referencing birds and from those results I would make my selections.

I decided the Bible Sense Lexicon would be the quickest way to locate those verses. This Logos feature, which is available in Logos 6 Gold and above, is based on the Biblical Word Senses Dataset. In a nutshell, a team at Faithlife compiled a collection of over 15,000 word meanings from Scripture and then tagged all of the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek lemmas sharing the same sense.

One of the benefits to us, as users, is we can find all occurrences of a specific sense or meaning regardless of the words used for the sense. This means I was able to easily locate all mentions of birds in the Bible which includes doves, pigeons, eagles, hens, and more!

Here’s how to do it:

Choose Tools | Bible Sense Lexicon (Remember, you’ll need Logos 6 Gold or above to access this feature) (A)

Type bird in the Sense box (B)

Press the Enter key to generate the results for the meaning bird (C)

Notice, in the body of the report on the right, that bird along with bat, hen, and wild bird (D) are four branches coming off the branch of the sense winged animal (E)

Click, in the sidebar on the left under the Relationships section, winged animal (F)

Notice the report is now built for the more general sense winged animal (G)
Click, in the sidebar on the left, in the definition area, the link Search for sense “winged animal” (H)

Notice a Search panel opens with all the verses containing the general sense winged animal which includes the more specific senses bat, bird, hen, and wild bird (I)
Click, in the Search panel, Aligned (J) to see the hits in a center column (K)

For years we’ve been able to execute English word and original language lemma searches in Logos. With those searches, though, I would have first had to identify all the specific words used for some sort of bird. Now, however, with the Bible Sense Lexicon, we can quickly locate all those words for birds because we begin our search for a meaning or sense and Logos does the heavy lifting for us!

If you don’t have Logos 6 Gold or above, now’s a great time to upgrade. During Logos March Madness, you can get 10% off your upgrade!

For additional training on the Bible Sense Lexicon and the other Logos features please check out the Logos 6 Training Manual Volumes 1 & 2 Bundle available in both print and digital.

Morris Proctor is a certified trainer for Logos Bible Software. Morris, who has trained thousands of Logos users at his two-day Camp Logos seminars, provides many training materials.