In yesterday's post, I offered you Greek students a method for garnering extra credit from your professors: Approach them on Friday and ask for extra credit if you spend the weekend finding all the hapax legomena in the Greek New Testament. Then do a simple search in Accordance, open an Analysis tab, and print! (Be sure to look tired and disheveled when you turn it in on Monday.)

Now, you Hebrew students could use extra credit too, so far be it from me to leave you out. Here's a search that is sure to impress your first semester Hebrew prof. In Hebrew, there's a class of verbs known as geminates. These are verbs in which the second and third letters of the lexical form are the same. Perhaps the most famous example would be הלל, "to praise." Why not ask your professor if you can spend the weekend putting together a list of every geminate verb in the Hebrew Bible? It sounds appropriately difficult—like the kind of thing only the most ambitious Hebrew student would attempt.

Now, to define this search, start by entering three question marks in the search entry box. The question mark, like the asterisk, is a wildcard symbol which can stand for any letter or number. Yet where the asterisk can represent any number of characters, the question mark can only represent a single character. For example, if I do an English search for love*, Accordance will find any word that begins with "love," no matter how many other letters it has: words like "loves," "loved," "lover," "lovers," "lovely," etc. If, on the other hand, I search for love?, Accordance will find only words that have a single letter after "love", such as "loves" and "lover." See the difference?

Because each question mark stands for a single character, whatever that character happens to be, entering three question marks into the search field means you want to find only three-letter words.

Now we need to specify that the third letter must be the same as the second letter. To do that, place parentheses after the third question mark. (Be sure to enter the right parenthesis followed by the left, since everything is reversed in Hebrew). Inside the parentheses, place an equals sign followed by the number 2. Your search argument should now look like this: (2=)???.

Placing parentheses after a question mark lets you specify which characters that question mark can be. For example, b?(ae)t will find "bat" and "bet," but not "bit" or "but," since we have specified that the question mark can only be an "a" or an "e." Returning to our Hebrew search, placing (2=) after the third question mark means that it can be any character, so long as it is the same character as that found by the second question mark. In other words, the second and third letters can be any letter, but they must be the same.

Now all we need to do is specify that the word we're searching for must be a verb. To do that, make sure the cursor is blinking to the right of the search argument, then choose Verb… from the Enter Command submenu of the Search menu. A dialog will appear enabling you to select specific grammatical details, but since we want to find any verbs, just click OK to dismiss the dialog. Accordance will then add the Verb tag to your search argument, and all you need to do is hit Return to perform the search.

As sophisticated as this search is, your results should be instantaneous. Now just choose Analysis from the Stats and Graphs icon to get an alphabetical list of all the geminate verbs in the Hebrew Bible, and print it out!

Just be warned: while this search may help you garner some extra credit, it may also raise your prof's expectations for you. You might find that he now treats you as a star pupil. And we all know what that means: you can probably count on getting called on more often in class!

In yesterday's post, I wrote that if you know how to search for εἰς, you're well on your way to being a searching "ace." It was an admittedly nerdy pun, since the Greek word εἰς is pronounced like the English word "ace." I'm feeling a little less nerdy today, however, since someone made the even nerdier observation that my pun only works for the artificial Erasmian pronunciation scheme as opposed to other systems!

Whether or not my joke works in your preferred system of Greek pronunciation, my point is that searching for εἰς offers a great opportunity to learn some important aspects of searching in the original languages. As I pointed out yesterday, a search for epsilon-iota-sigma actually finds both εἰς and εἷς, two words which are spelled the same but have a different breathing mark. Yet even when we included a smooth breathing mark to search specifically for εἰς, our search still gave us both εἰς and εἷς. That's because Accordance actually ignores breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and even upper or lowercase for purposes of searching.

But what if you don't want those things to be ignored? What if you really want to be able to find εἰς without also finding εἷς?

Here's the secret: whenever you want Accordance to pay attention to breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case, simply enter an equals sign (=) before the word you're searching for, like this:

Notice that with the equals sign before εἰς, the number of hits drops from 2112 to 1767. Likewise, the Analysis shows that εἰς is the only lexical form that was found, and εἷς has been excluded.

So to become an ace at original language searching, remember the lesson of εἰς: use the equals sign to make Accordance pay attention to breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case.

In my next post, we'll try to search for εἷς, and I'll give you a few more ace searching tips.

Εἰς in the title of this post is a Greek preposition which is pronounced like the English word ACE. It's an admittedly nerdy joke, but searching for εἰς helps to illustrate several important aspects of original language searching in Accordance. In other words, if you know how to search for εἰς, you're well on your way to being a searching "ace."

So if you have a tagged Greek New Testament text, open it up, select Words from the Words/Verses token, and type the letters "e, i, s." When you're finished, hit return to perform the search. Your search tab should then look like this:

Notice that we didn't have to enter the smooth breathing mark or any accents for this search to work. All we needed to do was enter the letters.

So far things have been pretty simple, but there's more to this search than meets the eye. To see what I'm talking about, click the Stats and Graphs icon (the one that looks like a bar chart just to the right of the number of hits) and choose Analysis.

An analysis window will open listing all the words that were found by our search:

Note that this search for words spelled epsilon-iota-sigma actually found two words: εἰς (with a smooth breathing mark and pronounced like 'ace') and εἷς (with a rough breathing mark and pronounced like 'hace'). These are two very different Greek words which, with the exception of the breathing mark, are spelled exactly the same way. Because we didn't enter the breathing mark, Accordance found both.

But what if we only want to find εἰς without also finding εἷς? Well, let's try just including the breathing mark in our search entry to distinguish the one from the other. The easiest way to do this is to copy εἰς from the Analysis window (the second word listed) and then paste that into the entry box of our Search tab. When you do that, you get the following result:

Do you see the difference? That's right, there isn't one. Even though we included the breathing mark in this second search, Accordance still found both of these homographs (a fancy term for words which are written the same way).

So here's the first thing you have to understand about Accordance original language searches: even if you enter a breathing mark, an accent, or a vowel point in Hebrew, Accordance totally ignores them. It's the same way with capital letters and apostrophes in English. Accordance ignores those details to give you the words that match the letters you entered.

Why would we ignore things like breathing marks, accents, vowel points, and case? Primarily because we don't want to require you to get that level of detail right in order to perform a successful search. A new student of Greek would be lost if a search failed because he or she entered a grave accent rather than an acute. Heck, even an expert in the languages might get annoyed if they had to show that level of care in entering a search argument. So Accordance simply ignores all those details unless you specifically tell it to take them into consideration. In tomorrow's post, I'll show you how to do just that. That way you'll know how to distinguish εἰς from εἷς, and be well on your way to becoming an Accordance searching 'ace.'

The other day I was researching idolatry, so naturally I started with an English Bible search for "idol." After just a few minutes of scanning the results in a Bible with Strong's numbers, I realized that there are quite a few Hebrew words translated "idol," as well as a number of other related words, such as "image," "household gods," etc. I wanted a quick way to find all the passages which spoke about idols, but how could I be sure I was searching for every relevant word?

At some point, I looked up the word "Idol" in Anchor Bible Dictionary, and was delighted to find that it listed all the relevant Hebrew words. Unfortunately, it used transliteration for the Hebrew, so I couldn't just select each Hebrew word and search for it. How then could I find every occurrence of all those words?

I decided to open a tab containing the tagged Hebrew Bible (HMT-W4), then chose Enter Lexical Forms… from the Search menu (actually, I just used the keyboard shortcut command-L). This opened a dialog listing every lexical form in the Hebrew Bible.

The first word in the article was transliterated as pesel. Ignoring the vowels, I typed p-s-l in the Go to box to scroll the word list to the appropriate section. Then I could immediately see from the English glosses which Hebrew word to click. When I clicked the word I wanted in the word list, that word was added to my list of Words to enter.

I then simply worked my way through the rest of the article in Anchor, typing the consonants of each transliterated word into the Go to box and then clicking the right word in the word list to add it my list of search terms. As I proceeded, my Select Lexical Forms dialog began to look like this:

When I finished, I simply clicked OK to dismiss the dialog and insert all the words I had selected into my search argument.

Note how Accordance automatically supplied the proper search syntax, placing my list of words inside parentheses and separating them with commas to indicate that I want to find any of these words. At that point, all I needed to do was hit Return to perform the search.

On those occasions when you need to search for a series of Hebrew words and you want to make sure you pick exactly the right ones, be sure to take advantage of the convenience offered by the Select Lexical Forms dialog.

So often we use Accordance for in depth Bible study, academic research, or to find the answers to theological questions. But you never know when it will be of use in meeting far more simple needs.

While in Israel, I had the opportunity to order necklaces for my wife and two daughters showing their names in Hebrew letters. Most tourists simply spell out a name in English and the craftsman substitutes roughly equivalent Hebrew characters, but I wanted them to have real Hebrew names where possible. That would have been easy if their names were Sarah, Rachel, and Hannah, but alas, it was more complicated than that. Thankfully, Accordance gave me everything I needed to come up with a great gift.

My wife's name is Lisa, which is derived from Elisabeth. That, of course, is a good Hebrew name, but it's a name which does not appear in the Hebrew Bible. I therefore couldn't just find Elisabeth in an English Bible and put the Hebrew Bible in parallel to get the Hebrew name. Yet Elisabeth is found in the Greek New Testament, so I searched for Elisabeth in an English Bible, put the GNT-T in parallel, and triple-clicked the Greek name to look it up in BDAG. Lo and behold, BDAG gives the Hebrew name from which the Greek name is derived (אלישׁבע).

Now that I had the Hebrew spelling for Elisabeth, I toyed with shortening the name somehow to make it more closely resemble "Lisa." But I found that doing that would make the Hebrew nonsensical. For example, the "Eli" in Elisabeth means "my God." If I dropped the "E" at the beginning of the name, I would have cut the heart out of the Hebrew name. I decided to leave it as ‏אלישׁבע and let her explain to anyone who asked that her name comes from Elisabeth.

My daughter, Bethany, also has a good Hebrew name, but like Elisabeth, it is only mentioned in the Greek New Testament. I therefore went through the GNT-T and BDAG again to arrive at ‏בית עניה.

My youngest daughter's name is Alexa, which is a shortened and feminine form of Alexander. That, of course, is a Greek name and has no Hebrew equivalent. So with her name I had no choice but to transliterate. The question was how to do it. I wanted it to be as authentic as possible, so I did a search for Alexander (which only appears in the New Testament). Triple-clicking the Greek name to look it up in BDAG would be no help here, since Alexander does not derive from Hebrew, so my best bet was to display a Hebrew New Testament in parallel and see how it transliterated the name into Hebrew. The Modern Hebrew New Testament rendered the name as ‏אלכסנדר, but the next question was how to chop this name down to Alexa. Removing "nder" was obvious, but since the necklace could not use vowel points, the question was how to render the final "a." I decided to add a final he to the end, since that consonant is often used in Hebrew to represent the "a" sound. The final result was ‏‏אלכסה. It's admittedly something of a made-up name, but I figured it was probably the most accurate way to transliterate Alexa.

Now, I readily admit that I was entirely too uptight about giving them good Hebrew versions of their names. After all, it's not as if they know many people who would look at their necklaces and tell them, "That's not how you spell that in Hebrew!" Still, I figured if I was going to give a personalized gift like this, I might as well do it right. And as with everything else I do, Accordance made it easy.

In my last post, I discussed the Hebrew workspace I use in my Hebrew Syntax class, and how you can use Accordance to enhance your Hebrew experience. In this post we'll continue working through the tabs in that workspace.

The second tab (from the left) is used to display the results of word searches. Since I'm addicted to right-clicking (old habits die hard), I use that method to do word searches within the text I'm working on. You can also use the drop down menu, or resource palette to accomplish the same task.

By clicking on the details of the search, I can quickly view the distribution of hits across the Bible. In my prefs (cmd ,), I've set it to display the Table everytime I access the details of a search. In the Table you can see that this word occurs primarily in the Psalms. In the Hits Graph, I can triple-click on the part of the graph representing the hits in the Psalms and my search results will drop down down to those hits.

The next tab, labeled 'TC', is setup to display some text-critical resources available in Accordance.

One thing I've done to save from having to re-enter the verse reference I'm working in is Tied the contents of this tab to my main BHS tab.

One could probably write an entire article on what is going on in this verse, but I'll restrict my discussion here to a brief description of the resources displayed, and in the following post I will describe how to interpret some of the data that can be mined from this workspace.

At the SBL Annual Meeting in 2007 we unveiled the Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical Manuscripts modules (see announcement here, and article on the importance of these texts here). This represents the first (and still only available) morphologically-tagged edition of the Biblical finds from Qumran. In addition, we also have the English translation, and Notes (DSSB-E).

In this tab I have the DSSB-C (a collated module of all the fragments in canonical order) displayed in parallel with the BHS text, and the LXX. Below that I have the Notes for the DSS English translation, the BHS apparatus (see the previous post for a description), and the Revised CATSS MT-LXX Parallel Database. Just like I've done with the BHS Apparatus, I have set the DSSB-E Notes module to display all Scripture refs in the DSSB-E text. By hovering over any link in the Notes, it will display the verse in the Instant Details box.

In this workspace tab you can clearly see the wealth of information that is readily accessible in Accordance. In the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls Biblical manuscripts, and the Revised MT-LXX Parallel Database, these resources are not available anywhere else. In my next post I will explain in more detail the textual features and variants of this passage using the compare text feature, and the other resources.

Over the last several months there has been a lot of discussion on our forum and here on the blog about workflow and customized workspaces (see here, here or here). Today I want to show a workspace setup that I've been using in my Hebrew Syntax class.

While there is no substitution for rolling up your sleeves and digging into the text the good 'ol fashioned way, having a wealth of resources and powerful interface at your fingertips makes it much easier (and more fun).

First, let's take a look at my main workspace, then go through some of the individual components in more detail.



This first tab represents my main workspace for reading and translating the text. On the left I have the BHS Apparatus, then on the right the BHS text itself. Below I have three English translations each for its specific approach to translation or capabilities within Accordance.

The BHS Apparatus is included in our Die Mac Studienbibel CD published in coordination with the GBS. This is the perfect companion for any Greek or Hebrew textual studies.

If you look at the Instant Details box you will notice that the text of 1Sam 1.22 is displayed, and upon closer inspection you will notice that it contains the critical sigla.



The BHS-GBS text is included in the Studienbibel CD, but does not have morphological tagging. Displaying an additional Hebrew text would add clutter and take up valuable space, to get around this I set the BHS-GBS text as the default text for the BHS Apparatus (cmd-T). Doing this enables me to display it when hovering over the verse references.

Speaking of hovering, one other great features of the apparatus is that each abbreviation or MSS symbol is hyperlinked to its description in the introduction. By hovering over it, I can read its description in the instant details box. But, there is still a minor problem...it's all in Latin. While most of it is fairly discernible, I have never formally studied Latin so I often need a bit more help. That's where the BHS Latin Key comes in. This is included with the unlock of the BHS-W4 or in any of the Scholar's packages. With a swipe and a click I can amplify from the apparatus to the dictionary to get a better understanding of what is going on in this variant, as well as an example in another text. Another option is to check the BHS Guide (William Scott's, Simplified Guide to BHS) to see if it can help explain the apparatus or accentuation of the text.

The Hebrew text pane is pretty self-explanatory. The only real customization I've done is changed the background color, and increased the size and leading to make it easier to read (all through the cmd-T shortcut).



Regarding my English texts I've chosen the ESVS because it is a more wooden translation, and has the capability to highlight the corresponding Hebrew word in the text (with our new key number highlighting feature). The TNIV is a more nuanced and contextual translation, while the JPS is written from a distinctively Jewish perspective. I have tried to keep the English texts as small as possible, and omitted the book and chapter reference so my attention is on the Hebrew text.

This is a good start at explaining my workspace and already you can see the power of our interface and some of key resources that can help you maximize your Hebrew potential.

In a future post I will continue to explain the rest of my workspace, including some of our exclusive resources which are displayed in my "TC" tab (text-criticism), and advanced search capabilities (like the INFER search).