Accordance Lite & Logos Basic

I highly recommend Accordance Bible Software. The company prioritizes the development of original language resources and works hard to produce quality, reliable software the first time.

I no longer recommend Logos Bible Software. I loved it for years, was frustrated with it for years, and finally sold all of it I could. Logos has some wonderful people working for them — several of whom are friends — but the company’s focus and my interests parted ways. You can find my posts in their forums if you want details. I do, however, still use the software a few times a week because they have Croy’s Greek grammar, which is one of the grammars I teach from, and they also have Steve Runge’s and Rick Brannan’s and Ken Penner’s awesome work. If it weren’t for Accordance — and especially the way the program developed between versions 10 and 11 — I would probably still be using and recommending Logos.

Both Accordance and Logos have recently released free versions of their programs, and I think this is fantastic. Now, the top two Bible software companies have free versions that give the average person studying the Bible what they need most — a searchable text — and both platforms allow users to expand their electronic libraries to their hearts’ content.

When many people first consider Bible software, they just want a searchable English Bible. But they know there is this thing out there called Bible software that promises to help them in many more ways than by simply providing a searchable text. They know they will likely want more in the future, but for now they just want a free searchable text. Now, they can take that first step with either or both of the two best options. They can explore and see which one they like better, and if the time comes to expand, they will already have the two best options on their computer — or more likely their tablet and phone.

Check them out yourself:

Accordance Lite

Logos Basic

TDOT for Accordance Bible Software

The Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament (TDOT) stands out from other Old Testament lexical works in at least three important ways:

TDOT provides a responsible discussion of the etymology and ancient Near Eastern background of most biblical Hebrew words — it doesn’t just list related words (cognates).
TDOT is much more thorough than the similar New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis (NIDOTTE).
TDOT explains a word’s interpretive significance from a broader theological perspective than NIDOTTE.

The Accordance version allows one to easily access this 15 volume work and seamlessly move from text, to standard lexicons, to TDOT, and back to the text again. I will explain each of these points below.

What is TDOT?

TDOT is an English translation of the 15 volume Theologisches Wörterbuch zum alten Testament. The English translations have followed the German publications relatively quickly, unlike the New Testament counterpart TDNT, which was published in German in the 1930s and didn’t begin to be translated until the 1960s . You can see the publication information concerning the first and fifteenth volumes of TDOT below:

TDOT for background

TDOT is the best place to turn in order to find an actual discussion of a particular Hebrew word’s etymology (besides journal articles, which are not accessible to most). The standard lexicons will usually list the relevant cognates, but TDOT actually discusses how etymology is relevant for understanding a word’s meaning. And it does so in a responsible way. A word’s etymology is sometimes debated and the relevance of etymology is often maligned because of the way scholars sometimes allow etymology to skew their explanations of particular words. Etymology is important, however, and should not be disregarded all together.

For example, the NRSV mentions “ghosts” in Isaiah 19:3, but other English translations do something different here:

NRSV: the ghosts
ESV: the mediums
KJV: them that have familiar spirits

I’ve highlighted the word in Hebrew and each of the English versions below:

In this case, etymology significantly affects one’s translation. HALOT lists some related words from various languages but provides no discussion:

This is where TDOT can come to the aid of everyone from students to pastors to scholars. Below you can see the beginning of the entry for אוֹב and the etymology section in TDOT.

I highlighted three prominent views concerning the origin of the word:

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
ly discuss the ancient Near Eastern background of the word and its use in the Old Testament. The entire “ghost” article is about four pages long.

TDOT is more thorough

Compare the אוֹב articles in TDOT and NIDOTTE:

First, note the length of the sections on etymology and ancient Near Eastern background in each:

TDOT: about 1,000 words
NIDOTTE: about 150 words

Second, notice the red text in NIDOTTE pictured above. The ANE section of the אוֹב entry in NIDOTTE is essentially a summary of TDOT.

The articles on “God” provide another good example:

First, NIDOTTE only discusses the occurrences of the word in the OT, while TDOT has several sections discussing the background of the word before turning to the OT occurrences. You can see the subsections of the TDOT article in the blue hyperlinked text pictured above.

Second, the אֱלֹהִים article in TDOT is significantly longer:

TDOT: 18 pages
NIDOTTE: less than 1 page

TDOT is more diverse

TDOT is the standard theological lexicon/dictionary for biblical studies, broadly conceived, whereas most of the contributors to NIDOTTE write from an evangelical perspective. TDOT can, however, help evangelicals fill in what is lacking in the brevity of the NIDOTTE articles and can provide insight into how mainstream scholarship views the interpretive significance of individual words.

TDOT on Accordance for iOS

I do not know of another app that allows one to seamlessly and easily move from the biblical text, through various lexicons, and back to the text of scripture.

The video below (no sound, less than a minute) shows how one can use the Accordance iOS app to move from text, to preferred lexicon, to HALOT, to TDOT, and back to the text.

Conclusion

TDOT is the best place for students, pastors, and scholars to find background information on Old Testament words, and the Accordance version is the most versatile, easily accessible format in which one can access TDOT. This post focuses on the features that make TDOT stand out from other lexical works. More could be said about the way in which TDOT handles the use of words in the OT and other literature. In short, TDOT should be the first place one turns for more information than the standard lexicons provide — whether one is looking for background information or discussion of a word’s theological significance.

I did experience a few program freezes while navigating the pre-release version, and there were a few places where I could not get certain transliterated characters to display correctly though I tried several different fonts with broad glyph coverage. Accordance will likely have these bugs worked out before the resource is released or they will work out the bugs shortly thereafter. Since Accordance released the Göttingen Septuagint volumes, I and several others noted typos in the extremely complex apparatus formatting. Accordance fixed these issues promptly, and I have no reason to think they would do differently with whatever small issues users discover with TDOT.

UPDATE 3/15/16: Accordance has fixed the transliteration issues I noted. You can see what the issue was by looking at the bottom of the picture above showing the etymology section of the אוֹב entry in TDOT. The picture below shows that, less than two days after I reported it, it is fixed.

Note: Accordance gave me a pre-release copy of TDOT for a review focusing primarily on their digital production of the print work.

HB in the DSS using Accordance 11

Here is a video showing how you can use the INFER-search to find direct or indirect references to the Hebrew Bible in the DSS. The steps are the same as those listed yesterday for the NT in the Didache post. There is audio in this one. Steps:

Open a tagged Hebrew Bible, limit your search as you would like, type an asterisk and press ENTER to find all the words in the range you prefer.
Open your non-biblical DSS and run an INFER-search. You can also right-click and use the search back feature, as I showed yesterday, but that isn’t relevant for this video since I limited it to one verse in the Hebrew Bible.

NT in the Didache using Accordance 11

Here is a 2 minute video (no sound) showing how to use the INFER-search in Accordance to find potential citations and allusions to the NT in the Didache. You can open the video in a new tab by clicking in the top right of the embedded video.
The steps:

Type an asterisk and press ENTER to search a tagged NT for all the words it contains.
Open an Apostolic Fathers tagged text, limit the search range to the Didache, and run an INFER-search on the NT window.
Highlight a string of hits in the Didache, right click, and shift+click on “Search Back Linked Text” to find NT texts that contain the same words.

Martin G. Abegg on Electronic Dead Sea Scrolls

One person stands behind all electronic versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Martin G. Abegg, professor and co-director of the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute at Trinity Western University.

His name and infamous Mac computer are mentioned in almost every history of the Dead Sea Scrolls, but we wanted to give him the opportunity to tell a little of his story in his own words.

Ken Penner: When did you first start creating a database of Dead Sea Scrolls texts?

Martin G. Abegg: The database began in the Spring of 1988 when I took Prof. Ben Zion Wacholder’s Qumran Sectarian Literature course at Hebrew Union College. I had typed several extended passages into MS Word in order to more conveniently search them and realized that I should find a way to collect these and future additions. Apple’s Hypercard became my first search engine.

KP: What kind of computer equipment and software did you initially use and why?

MA: I started my grad studies in the fall of 1984 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. It was sometime early in that first semester that Steve Pfann took me down to the new computer labs on the Mt. Scopus campus. The PC and Mac rooms were next door to one another. The PC room was nearly empty but the Mac room was a buzz of activity. So armed with Steve’s home-made Masora font (see the first and second fascicles of the Preliminary Editions) I dove in. In the fall of 1987 I purchased my own Mac SE as part of a ploy launched by my Mom to entice me to move back from Israel and continue my studies in the States.

KP: What kinds of controversies did this project land you in?

MA: Nothing at this early stage. The events leading up to access to the Preliminary Concordance and the September 1991 publication with Prof. Wacholder brought a bit of controversy and have been well documented by Ed Cook (Solving the Mysteries of the Dead Sea Scrolls: New Light on the Bible, Zondervan, 1993) and Jason Kalman (Hebrew Union College and the Dead Sea Scrolls, HUC Press, 2012).

KP: How did you connect with Accordance to bring these texts to that platform?

MA: I met Dr. Roy Brown (creator of Accordance) in Nov. of 1991 at a Mexican restaurant in Kansas City while there for SBL. I had known of his “Perfect Word,” and “Mac Bible” and he was in the early stages of writing new software to take advantage of the morphologically tagged Hebrew databases that were just then becoming available. I began “tagging” my text files and working with Roy to use Accordance to search them. It was several years before we released my data. Roy invested 100s of hours as we both worked out the bugs in both my data and Accordance itself.

KP: How and when did other Bible software makers begin to publish your database?

MA: I believe Olive Tree was the first software—aside from Accordance–to license the data for the “Sectarian” data base. Followed by Logos and BibleWorks. Eventually this data became the basis for Brill’s Electronic Library publication (the second edition shepherded by BYU). And of course the DSS Concordance vol. i.

KP: What are some examples of discoveries made possible by such databases?

MA: Wow, this could be a lengthy research project in and of itself. Emanuel Tov’s work has leaned heavily on my data (e.g. Scribal Practices and Approaches). His queries about how to search for various phenomena in the data have also improved various functions within Accordance itself. Ebert Tigchelaar sends me regular corrections, so I know the tagged data is an important part of his arsenal of tools. The folk at ThWQ have indicated that I have made their work much easier. Lange and Wiegold’s recent Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Second Temple Jewish Literature used the Accordance infer function and my data to produce the Qumran lists.

KP: What has improved over the years since your database was first released?

MA: The database itself was updated rather dramatically after the publication of the first concordance to accord with DJD. Aside from that the main updatings have come on the side of the search software and the speed of computers. And of course we have moved on to the DSS Biblical mss (Accordance modules DSSB-C/M), the refuge caves (Accordance JUDEAN), and Hebrew Ben Sira (Accordance SIRA-C/M).

KP: What are the next developments you foresee in electronic DSS research?

MA: Rob Holmstedt (University of Toronto) and I developed a tagging scheme for syntactic analysis and with the help of Roy Brown have been working the bugs out of an Accordance syntax search function. With a group of TWU students I have syntactically tagged some 20 major Qumran documents. I read my first paper describing the project and initial results at IOQS in Munich this past summer. This means of searching the text promises to replace the “cherry-picking” approach to Qumran grammar and to provide us with a detailed and scientific description of Second Temple Hebrew.

Thanks for taking the time to give us the short version of this story; I’m sure you could write a book about it! We know recognition for this kind of tedious and meticulous work can be hard to come by (as you say, there’s “no honour in databases”), yet we all are the beneficiaries of this passion of yours.

DSS Software: Available Texts

This is the second post of a series in which I am reviewing the four major options for electronically accessing the Dead Sea Scrolls. The plan for this series is posted here.

Logos, BibleWorks, and Accordance all offer electronic Dead Sea Scrolls in the original languages and in translation. Brill also sells the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library, vol 3. The DSS resources offered by these companies, however, are not all created equal—the coverage of the Scrolls in each platform varies, as well as the quality of the products.

In this post I will describe exactly which Dead Sea Scrolls are available on each platform. Along the way, I will also note instances where the product pages include typos or are unclear. At the end of the post I have included a table that summarizes which texts are available in each program.

BibleWorks

BibleWorks does not have an electronic edition of the biblical DSS in the original languages. Here is what they do have:

Original Languages:

Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts (morphologically tagged)

Originally designed for Accordance, this module contains all the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical texts from Qumran. Non-biblical texts from other sites are not included. The description on the product page could, therefore, be a bit misleading:

The QSM contains all non-biblical manuscripts from what are commonly known as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Here, “Dead Sea Scrolls” is being used in the narrow sense, referring only to Qumran scrolls. Granted, the most important non-biblical texts are from Qumran, but the description could be more clear.

English Translations:

Dead Sea Scrolls English Translation Bundle: Biblical and Sectarian Texts

This bundle includes two modules: (1) a translation of the biblical DSS and (2) a translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical texts from Qumran.

Both of these translations have been published in print, as well. The translation of the non-biblical texts is that of Wise, Abegg, and Cook (print edition). This is probably the most popular English translation of the non-biblical Qumran scrolls. The translation of the biblical DSS is Eugene Ulrich’s (et al.) The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (print edition), the only available English translation of all the biblical DSS.

Logos

Logos offers three original languages DSS resources, including all the biblical DSS, and a few English translations.

Original Languages:

Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts (morphologically tagged)

Originally designed for Accordance, this module Includes all the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical texts from Qumran.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition (not tagged)

This is an electronic version of the second edition of The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition (print version). It includes all the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical DSS from Qumran and an English translation. This product is not morphologically tagged, but one can set the transcriptions so that they scroll side by side with an updated edition of Florentíno García Martínez’s highly respected The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated.

Qumran Biblical Dead Sea Scrolls (morphologically tagged)

Despite the title, this database consists of fresh transcriptions by Stephen Pfann of all the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, including Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek from, presumably, every site (i.e., Qumran and the other sites mentioned in this post). The implementation of this database is a bit unique and will be more fully discussed in the next post. This database also comes with a “Bible Reference Index,” a separate resource that lists which DSS are extant for each verse of the Bible. From the product page:

Fresh transcriptions of every biblical Dead Sea Scroll, including Greek fragments. The Logos transcriptions are substantially the same as those found in the DJD volumes, but are the result of a fresh, expert analysis that takes into account scholarly work done on the scrolls since the DJD volumes were published

As I see it, there are two issues with the description of this database on Logos’ product page:

It would be helpful to know exactly which sites are included. Scrolling through the Bible Reference Index, I see that there links to DSS from at least Qumran, Naḥal Ḥever, Wadi Sdeir, and Wadi Murabaʿat.
The product is mislabeled. It includes more than just the Qumran biblical DSS.

English Translations:

The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation

A popular translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical DSS from Qumran by Wise, Abegg, and Cook (print edition), also available in BibleWorks, and Accordance.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition

This product is listed in the “Original Languages” section and the “Translations” section because it includes both. The translation is an updated edition of Florentíno García Martínez’s highly respected The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated.

The Dead Sea Scrolls in English

This is the 4th edition (1995) of Geza Vermes’ translation of the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical Qumran scrolls. First published in 1962, Vermes’ translation has become a classic. In fact, in subsequent editions it was incorporated into the Penguin Classics series. The most recent edition is the 7th, published in 2011.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible

A translation of all the biblical DSS by Eugene Ulrich (et al.). The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible (also in print) is the only available English translation of all the biblical DSS.

Accordance

Accordance offers all the Dead Sea Scrolls in the original languages, as well as English translations of all the biblical DSS and the non-biblical scrolls from Qumran. Accordance sells these resources individually and in various combinations. So I have included an extra “Combinations” here.

Original Languages:

Qumran Non-Biblical Manuscripts (morphologically tagged)

This module, available on each of the four platforms, was originally designed for Accordance and includes all the Hebrew/Aramaic non-Biblical texts from Qumran. Accessing this module in Accordance, one is sure to have the latest edition of these texts.

Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical Manuscripts (morphologically tagged)

All the biblical Hebrew/Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls are included—from Qumran, Masada, Naḥal Ḥever, Murabbaʿat, etc. Two modules are included: one allows the user to display the biblical DSS in canonical order (DSSB-C), the other according to the manuscript numbers (DSSB-M).

You can read more about this product, including a glowing endorsement from Emanuel Tov, in The Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical Manuscript article.

Dead Sea Scrolls Greek Bible (morphologically tagged)

All the Greek biblical Dead Sea Scrolls are included. Like the Hebrew/Aramaic database, the DSS Greek Bible includes two modules: one that allows the user to display the text in canonical order (DSSGB-C), the other in manuscript order (DSSGB-M).

Judean Desert Corpus (morphologically tagged)

This module completes Accordance’s exhaustive DSS offerings, as it includes all the non-biblical, non-Qumran texts. Accordance’s Dead Sea Scrolls Resources page says that the texts can be displayed in canonical and manuscript order, but this is a typo by nature of the fact that the texts included are non-biblical.

Index of Dead Sea Scrolls Manuscripts

I could have listed this resource in a later post on secondary resources, but because Logos includes an index with their biblical DSS, I thought it only fair to include Accordance’s index here, too. From the product page:

An Index of Qumran and other DSS manuscripts, with description, paleography, dating, and bibliography, edited by Dr. Martin G. Abegg, Jr.

[UPDATE 9.16.14 to include the DSS Variant Database]

Biblical DSS Manuscript Variants

This module notes significant variants between MT and the biblical Dead Sea Scrolls. You can link it the module your biblical texts and have it follow you as you move throughout the Bible. There is nothing like this in another software. In this post, they explain:

The DSSB Variants Tool is not just intended to provide a list of variants, but a dynamic searchable database that is useful for scholarly research. This tool can be used in conjunction with biblical modules such as HMT-W4 and DSSB-C or any text that follows canonical order giving the user an immediate view of differences between the MT and the ‘biblical’ DSS. As a user scrolls through the biblical texts this tool will reveal true variations between these corpora for each verse in a separate pane or window.

Translations:

Qumran Non-Biblical Manuscripts: A New Translation

This is Wise, Abegg, and Cook’s translation of all the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical Qumran scrolls, also available in BibleWorks and Logos.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible

The translation of all biblical DSS by Eugene Ulrich (et al.), also available in BibleWorks and Logos.

Combinations:

Dead Sea Scrolls Original Texts add-on with DSS Index

This package includes all the resources listed above in the “Original Languages” section, as well as the Index of Dead Sea Scrolls Manuscripts.

Dead Sea Scrolls English Translations add-on with DSS Index

This package includes all the resources listed above in the “Translations” section, as well as the Index of Dead Sea Scrolls Manuscripts.

Dead Sea Scrolls Non-Biblical add-on

This package is a combination of the non-biblical DSS resources in the original languages and in English translation.

Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical add-on

This package is a combination of the biblical DSS resources in the original languages and English translation.

Dead Sea Scrolls Complete add-on

This package includes all of Accordance’s DSS texts in the original languages and English translation, as well as a collection of monographs on the DSS that will be discussed in a future post on secondary resources.

Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library, vol. 3

Unlike the products listed above this is not an DSS add-on to a Bible software program. This is an integrated collection of electronic texts that runs within version 7 of WordCruncher software.

The first two volumes of this series are no longer sold by Brill. Volume 1 (1997) included images of all the biblical and non-biblical DSS available at the time. Volume 2 (1999) included all the Hebrew, Aramaic, Nabatean, and Greek texts from Qumran and a selection of texts from Wadi Murabbaʿat and Naḥal Ḥever. Volume 3 replaces and updates volume 2 with a couple additions and subtractions.

Volume 3 includes all the Hebrew/Aramaic non-biblical Qumran scrolls in the original languages with full morphological tagging and search capabilities, high-resolution images of all the texts included, as well as an inventory of Qumran texts that is a 2005 revision of Emanuel Tov’s original publication in DJD 39 (2002) 27–114. The transcriptions are, for the most part, from DJD. An English translation of each text is included from either DJD, Martínez, or Wise, Abegg, and Cook. In addition, a morphologically tagged Hebrew Bible is included, as well as a module that combines the Qumran non-biblical DSS with the Hebrew Bible for morphological searches across both corpuses.

According to both the editor of volume 3 and a WordCruncher representative, the biblical Qumran scrolls (texts and images) are being prepared now and will seamlessly integrate with the non-biblical scrolls. I got the impression from the WordCruncher representative that the biblical Qumran scrolls might be ready to go by November at SBL.

Summary

Note: On certain platforms the packages that include these texts come with additional resources that are not listed in this table—Logos’ biblical DSS includes an index of extant DSS for each verse of the Bible; some Accordance combinations include a very robust index of all the DSS with description, paleography, dating, and bibliography; the DSSEL includes high-res images, an index, and more.

In the next post, I will discuss how each platform allows users to display the texts, and I will comment on the quality with which each database has been implemented.

DSS Software: Necessary Background Information

This is the first post of a series in which I will review the Dead Sea Scrolls resources available in Logos, BibleWorks, Accordance, and in Brill’s Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library. I posted my plan for the series, but if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to let me know in the comments. A little background information is necessary in order to understand the differences between the products offered by each company.

Locations

In the broad sense of the term, “Dead Sea Scrolls” is not synonymous with “Qumran Scrolls.” Many of the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered at Qumran, but not all of them. In fact, fragments of scrolls were found in at least eighteen locations: Qumran, Wadi Daliyeh, Ketef Jericho, Khirbet Mird, Ain Feshka, Wadi Nar, Wadi Ghweir, Wadi Murabbaʿat, Wadi Sdeir, Naḥal Arugot, Ein-gedi, Naḥal Ḥever, Naḥal Ḥever/Seiyal, Naḥal Mishmar, Naḥal Ṣeʾelim, Masada, and Khirbet Qazone (Ken M. Penner, “Dead Sea Scrolls” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Books of the Bible, Oxford, 2011, pp. 173-192).

The number of scrolls found at the four main locations are as follows:

Qumran: about 1,050 scrolls
Wadi Murabbaʿat: 120 scrolls
Naḥal Ḥever: over 70 scrolls
Masada: 15 scrolls

(Peter W. Flint, The Dead Sea Scrolls, Abingdon Press, 2013, p. XX)

Languages

Most of the scrolls were written in Hebrew, about 130 in Aramaic, and 27 in Greek (Penner, 174).

Two Categories

Scrolls are typically categorized as biblical or “non-biblical.” Peter W. Flint explains,

The number of biblical scrolls available to scholars is 270, comprising 252 from Qumran and 18 from other sites… The grand total of biblical scrolls is 318, of which about 300 were most likely found at Qumran. About 48 (perhaps a few less scrolls are held by private parties and will most likely be ‘on the market’ in future years. (p. 74)

About 750 of the 1,050 Qumran scrolls are non-biblical. The scrolls discovered at Wadi Murabbaʿat are mixed bag, most of those at Naḥal Ḥever are “letters and legal documents of the second century,” and at Masada 8 of the 15 scroll fragments are non-biblical (see Flint, p. 9).

“Sectarian Scrolls”

The non-biblical scrolls are sometimes further divided into sectarian and non-sectarian scrolls. Flint states,

At least half of the nonbiblical scrolls, probably more, represent texts composed by the Essene (Yahad) movement. Containing the movement’s ideology or distinctive language, these are known as the sectarian scrolls… It is tempting to neatly divide the nonbiblical scrolls into sectarian and nonsectarian groupings, but in many cases this proves unworkable since identifying sectarian content and language is often not possible. (p. 105)

With this background in mind, the next post will look at which DSS texts are available in each platform.

Complex Morphological Searches in BibleWorks 9

This post illustrates how BibleWorks 9 makes constructing complex morphological searches easy. Every search starts with a question.
The Question

In Genesis 10:19 one finds the form בֹּאֲכָה two times. Here is the verse in full:

וַיְהִי גְּבוּל הַכְּנַעֲנִי מִצִּידֹן בֹּאֲכָה גְרָרָה עַד־עַזָּה בֹּאֲכָה סְדֹמָה וַעֲמֹרָה וְאַדְמָה וּצְבֹיִם עַד־לָשַׁע

English translations usually render בֹּאֲכָה “in the direction of,” “as far as,” or “going toward.” The phrase could be literally translated “in your going”; it is the verb בוא with a 2ms pronominal suffix. The 2ms pronominal suffix is usually written ךָ- in the Hebrew Bible. Here we see the fuller form, כָה-, a form which is found frequently in the Qumran scrolls.

Recognizing this as a relatively rare form, I wondered, “How many times is the 2ms pronominal suffix spelled plene in the Hebrew Bible?” BibleWorks makes it simple to answer this question with their Graphical Search Engine (GSE).

Constructing the Search

To answer the question above, we need to find (1) every word with a 2ms pronominal suffix attached to it and (2) diplay only those instances where the pronominal suffix is spelled כָה- rather than ךָ-. With the GSE you can quickly and easily search two databases at the same time: the morphologically tagged text and the “surface text.” By “surface text” I mean the text as you see it in a print Bible.

1. In the command line of the search window, type the letters “wtm” and press “enter”; this will ensure that when you open the GSE you will be searching the morphological database of the Hebrew Bible. My tab titles (e.g., Hm*) might look a little different than yours, but that will not matter as long as you type “wtm” and press enter.

2. Click the blue magnifying glass on the toolbar to open the GSE.

3. Now that the GSE window is open, double-click on (1) the greyed-out word “Vowels” at the bottom of the screen and (2) the box containing only the letters WTM. Turning on “Vowels” will allow us to specify exactly what we want the 2ms pronominal to look like (כָה). Double-clicking the “WTM” box will open a pop-up where we will type the specifics of our search.

4. Three boxes in the window that pops up are important for our search. (1) In the “Word” box type an asterisk (*) | This tells the program that the pronominal suffix can be attached to any word. An asterisk is a wildcard. (2) In the “Morph” box type @*+*2ms* | The @ sign is the way you indicate that the symbols you are going to type correspond to Hebrew or Greek morphological tags. In each case, the asterisk means “anything.” The plus sign (+) indicates that the symbols you are going to type to the right are “secondary codes.” That is, they are morphological information about the suffix attached to the word. “2ms” specifies the person, gender, and number of the pronoun we are looking for (second person, masculine gender, singular number). (3) In the “Match the following spec in WTT” box type כָה* | This tell the program that we only want to find occurrences of the pronominal suffix where it is spelled plene. If you run the search with nothing in this box, you will get results for all words that have 2ms pronominal suffixes attaches.

5. Click “OK,” which will close this pop up window and enter your search terms into the WTM box, and then click “go.”

The results will be displayed in the search window, with the number of occurrences at the bottom. You should get 39 hits in 37 verses.

This is one type of search I don’t think Logos can do at the moment. I can say for sure that I have been a Logos user as long as I have been reading Hebrew and during that time I have not figured out a way to construct such a search in Logos. Within a day of working with BibleWorks, I constructed the search illustrated here. This is a testimony to just how intuitive BibleWorks has made the process of constructing complex morphological searches.

[UPDATE (12/18/12): See Ken Penner’s comments below. I stand corrected. You can construct this search in Logos, but not as intuitively or efficiently.]

This is the second post in a multi-part review of BibleWorks, the first post specifically dealing with BibleWorks 9. Several reviews of the software have highlighted the layout of the program and basic features (see especially Abram KJ’s fantastic review). In future posts I will be illustrating particular features of the program and discussing how BibleWorks complements Logos Bible Software. For a previous post on searching with BibleWorks see “How to Disambiguate Homonyms in BibleWorks Searches.”