This Tool Will Change Your Word Studies Forever

What’s a “sense lexicon”?

The Bible Sense Lexicon ties biblical words to their senses. By “sense,” we mean the idea that a word is supposed to communicate. For example, the English word for “run” has many possible senses:

• To move swiftly by foot
• To conduct (e.g., to “run a search”)
• An act of running (e.g., to “go on a run”)

The same principle applies to words in the Bible.

The Bible Sense Lexicon has tied words in the biblical text to their senses, giving you a precise idea of what the biblical authors were trying to get across.

Example: what does “head” mean?

In Isaiah 7:9, we read that “the head of Ephraim is Samaria and the head of Samaria is the son of Remaliah.” It’s obvious that “head” is a metaphor—the nation of Ephraim cannot have a literal physical head the way a human body does. But what does this metaphor mean?

We can activate the Reverse Interlinear ribbon, but without the Bible Sense Lexicon data, we’ll just see a bunch of Hebrew words (along with anything else we choose to display here).

That’s great—if we know Hebrew. I don’t, so we’ll right-click it and run a Bible Word Study report on the lemma. (What’s a lemma? Find out here.) We’ll get a comprehensive report on the Hebrew word, how it’s used in the Bible, and lots of possible definitions!

That’s awesome: we see loads of ways this word is used in Scripture. This tool has just accomplished hours of research in seconds. But we still don’t know precisely what sense the word for “head” is used in. Does it mean “top”? “Beginning”? “Chief”? We could open up our regular lexicons and see if any one lists a specific sense for our verse in Isaiah.

Or we could see the sense in the Reverse Interlinear!

We can immediately see that the same Hebrew word is used to mean both “capital” and “leader”! So the capital city of Ephraim is Samaria, and the leader of Samaria is the son of Remaliah.

The Bible Sense Lexicon data makes the Reverse Interlinear ribbon one of my favorite tools in Logos 5. It’s a revolutionary way to cut right to a word’s sense—saving us even more time on word studies.

If you’re not using the Bible Sense Lexicon in Logos 5, you’re missing out. Get Logos 5 today—the Bible Sense Lexicon is included in Gold and higher.

Already have Logos 5? Learn to use it for richer Bible study and ministry with our educational resources.