In my previous two posts, I've been looking at ways to do a topical study using Accordance. In the first post, we opened Nave's Topical Bible and did a search for "Love." We then followed the links under the subheading "Love of Man for God." In the second post, we manually went through each of those 65 verses, marking the ones which made some connection between loving God and keeping his commands. Once we had finished marking the relevant verses, we placed those verses in a separate reference list window for future study.
Today, I want to back up and look at how I might have automated the process of looking for verses which equate loving God with keeping his commands. Rather than reading all 65 verses and manually marking the ones which spoke of keeping God's commands, wouldn't it be easier to search those 65 verses for the word "commands"? Certainly it would.
To do this, I will add all 65 verses to a Reference List, then search those verses using the CONTENTS command. The CONTENTS command enables me to take the list of verses from one window and use them as part of a search argument in another window. If you're following along, here's what to do (I'll go all the way back to the beginning just so we're all on the same page):
- Open Nave's from the English Tools pop-up of the Resource palette.
- Search the Entry field for "Love."
- Command-click any of the verses under the heading "Love of Man for God."
- In the text window that appears, select all the verses by clicking in the text pane and choosing Select All from the Edit menu (or using the keyboard shortcut command-A).
- Add all those verses to a new Reference List by choosing New Reference List from the Add Selection To submenu of the Selection menu.
- Open a new Search window containing whatever Bible text you wish to search.
- Click the Search for Words radio button, then enter "commands", the AND command (shift-command-A), and the CONTENTS command (shift-command-C).
Note: If there is more than one valid window open, Accordance will ask you which window you want to use the contents of. Choose the Reference List window listing the verses from Nave's.
- Click OK to perform the search.
When I search the HCSB this way, I get 11 verses which contain the word "commands." Obviously, there are more than 11 verses in the whole Bible which contain the word "commands," but by using the CONTENTS command, I have restricted my search to the 65 verses Nave's listed as pertaining to the love of man for God. Think of the CONTENTS command as a way to create a custom search range out of any list of verses.
Now that I have these 11 verses, I can select them all and add them to a new Reference List which contains only verses which speak of loving God by keeping his commands.
In this post, I've shown how you can use Reference Lists and the CONTENTS command to sift through a list of verses from a topical Bible. Using this strategy, we found the 11 verses which speak of "commands" much faster than we would have using the previous post's strategy of reading through each verse and marking the ones of interest.
In my previous post, I described how to do a topical study using topical resources like Nave's Topical Bible or Torrey's New Topical Textbook. With these tools, you search for a particular topic and then follow the list of verses provided. In this post, I'll pick up where I left off and look at ways to sift through those verses to find the ones of greatest interest.
When you command-click or click and drag to hypertext to multiple verses (see previous post for more on that), you get a text window displaying each of those verses. In the example we used previously, Nave's article on "love of man for God," we get 65 verses. Let's say I want to go through these verses and find all the ones which make an explicit connection between loving God and keeping his commands. To do that, I would read through each verse and option-click the ones I want to mark. This will place a blue bookmark icon next to the verses clicked.
Once I've marked the verses I want to zero in on, I can place them in a separate verse list window by choosing New Reference List Window from the Add Marked Verses To submenu of the Selection menu. Now that I have this subset of verses collected in one place, I can place a description such as "Loving God means keeping His commands" in the Description field at the top of the window, and save it so that I can call it up again later.
Collecting verses in a reference list window enables me to interact with my search results and focus on particular connections. Now if I wanted to add a note to each of these verses, I could do so relatively quickly, without having to wade past other verses which are not relevant to this particular topic. Or, if I wanted to paste a list of references on this topic into a paper or sermon outline, I could select all the verses in the Reference List and choose References from the Copy As submenu of the Edit menu.
In my next post, I'll talk about ways you can use your reference list as the basis for other searches.
Someone on our forums recently asked for advice on how best to do a topical study and record his findings. The responses he got focused primarily on the question of whether he should record his findings in User Notes or a User Tool, but in this post I want to focus on the entire process of doing a topical study.
The first place to turn for information on a given topic is one of the resources designed for that purpose, such as Nave's Topical Bible or Torrey's New Topical Textbook, both of which are included in every level of the Library CD-ROM. Another excellent resource is The Thompson Chain Reference Bible.
When you open one of these resources and search for a given topic, such as "love," you'll get a listing of verses which relate to that topic, often organized into more manageable subtopics:
Nave's article on love has a long list of verses dealing with the "love of man for God." You can look up these verses in a variety of ways. First, you can simply drag your mouse over each reference to preview it in the Instant Details box. This is a good approach when you're looking for a particular verse and want to zero in on it quickly, but if you're wanting to read through all these passages, it's better to open them all at once.
The easiest way to do that is to command-click on any one of the references in the series. Alternatively, you can drag a selection from anywhere in the middle of the first reference to anywhere in the middle of the last reference, like this:
Either approach will open a new text window displaying all of the references in the paragraph. This makes it easy to scan through the verses quickly. If you want to see the verses in context, simply check the Show all text checkbox at the top of the window.
In my next post, I'll look at ways you can interact with the verses on a given topic.
