Search within a search

[T. David Gordon]

I suspect the dreaded Construct window is the answer but here goes: Having searched HMT for "Torah," I would like to search the LXX to see how often it is translated with "nomos" or translated with "diatheke." So I wish to search for "diatheke" only among those HMT texts. How do I do this?

 

Thanks in advance,

 

T. David

[David Lang]

The "dreaded" Construct window? You mean the "beloved" Construct window. But whether or not you hold it in the proper affection, the Construct window is not going to help here. Instead, you need the MT-LXX Parallel tool and the Merge command. I don't know if Dr. J has done a podcast on it yet, but the old training videos cover the use of the MT-LXX here. Just click the link for the sequence entitled Using MT/LXX.

[Sean R.]

If you don't own the MT-LXX Parallel Tool, you can approximate the results you would get using it by doing the following (not very elegant, but it will give you an idea):

 

1. Search for torah in your Hebrew text.

 

2. Add the resulting verses to a new Reference List (if you are not displaying any context, you can easily do this by selecting everything in the display window and then choosing [selection: Add selection to: Reference list] from the menu; if you are displaying all context with your search results, you only need select [selection: Add marked verses to: Reference list] from the selection menu).

 

3. Go to your new reference list and change the display text to LXX.

 

4. Open a new search window/tab with the LXX as the search text.

 

5. In word search mode, choose the CONTENTS command from the search menu (Search: Enter Command: CONTENTS). When the dialog box pops up, choose your newly created reference list and press OK.

 

6. Enter the <AND> command followed by either nomos. When you hit search, you'll get 193 hits. Thus of the 223 hits of torah in the MT, around 193 of those are translated using nomos in the LXX.

 

7. Change nomos to diatheke and run the search again. You'll get 11 hits.

 

 

What's happening here is you're searching for torah or diatheke in the LXX only in the verses where torah appeared in the MT. Evidently, this isn't a perfect solution (versification differs in some instances between the LXX and MT, etc.), but you do get an idea. You'll want to purchase the MT-LXX Parallel Tool as it is an excellent resource, but hopefully this workaround helps you in the meantime.

 

Verifying the results

The weakness of this approach, however, is that it is imprecise. You really need to go through each verse to manually verify. For example, using the MT-LXX Parallel Tool, I discovered that torah is only translated in the LXX using diatheke once (in Dan. 9:13). But other words which appear in the same verses as torah are translated using diatheke (leading to the 10 false hits using my approach above). But you could easily weed out those false hits by hand checking. Using the MT-LXX Parallel Tool, I verified that torah is translated using nomos 192 times (the above method was only one hit off).

[T. David Gordon]

The "dreaded" Construct window? You mean the "beloved" Construct window. But whether or not you hold it in the proper affection, the Construct window is not going to help here. Instead, you need the MT-LXX Parallel tool and the Merge command. I don't know if Dr. J has done a podcast on it yet, but the old training videos cover the use of the MT-LXX here. Just click the link for the sequence entitled Using MT/LXX.

[T. David Gordon]

David,

 

Okay, perhaps the construct window could charitably be construed as "beloved." Thanks for the tip about MT/LXX. I did try to open the instructional video, but it stopped after the introductory words "Using MT/LXX." I'll try again and see if that works, and will probably purchase it soon.

 

Sean,

 

Thank you for your "work-around," which I'll try just to see how it works. I had already found the Daniel passage, and also 2 Chron. 25:4, where the MT has btorah Moshe, and LXX has "kata ten diatheken tou nomou," using both nomos and diatheke (I'm interested, because I believe throughout Galatians, when Paul employs nomos he means "the Gentile-excluding covenant made through Moses with the Israelites at Sinai"--or, for shorthand--"Sinai covenant", so I'm interested in seeing if others employed nomos as synecdoche for the Sinai covenant. Thanks for your help.

 

T. David