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Searching for references to other books. (Proverbs)


paulnystedt

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Just wondering if anyone could help me. I am looking to do an exhaustive search of all the times that authors reference Proverbs, specifically in the New Testament. I would also like to do this in the Old, but am particularly interested in the New. I would like to see all the times that references to Proverbs are made throughout the Bible. Is there anyway I can search this? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I hope this is possible. Thank you!

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A couple of directions to go with this: neither may catch all possible allusions/references, and both will throw some "false positives":

 

-Open a resource like the NET Notes, set the first search token for Scripture and type Proverbs in the box. Click on the + symbol to the right of the search entry box to add another search field. Set the left-most token to AND, then set the search field token to Reference, and type Matt-Rev in the search entry box on that line. You will have to manually comb through the results to see if they are all allusions/references, but that gives you a place to start. Other Reference tools, especially Study Bibles, may prove helpful here. You could also use one of the Cross Reference modules, but that will give you a slew of "false positives."

 

-Use the INFER command. I'm a little rusty on the ins and outs of that one. I may have time to mess around with it today and get back to you, but you can also read about it in the Help files. This Google search pulls up several relevant blog entries and one paper on the use of the INFER command. WIth INFER, you will get the most accurate results if you are comparing "original" language texts. I put "original" in quotes here because to compare NT use of OT material with INFER, you will have to work with the LXX, not the BHS/BHT. But I think you can still get potentially helpful results using an English or other modern language text.

 

EDIT: Several of the links in the Google search I listed don't seem to work, mostly to older blog posts.

Edited by Lorinda H. M. Hoover
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A couple ways I think of off the bat, and there may well be other ways to do it (maybe even better ones than what I suggest below):

 

1. Have you tried the INFER command? You could use it to find wording similarities between texts showing in two different tabs (New Testament in one tab and Proverbs in the other, in this case). There's a good overview here in the help files. There is still interpretation and sifting required on your part, of course.

 

2. If you're looking for a more ready-made list (which will also be subject to interpretation and manual analysis), you could search through a Bible notes or cross-references module that you have. It depends on what you have, but to take just one example, you could search NA28 Crossrefs (if you have it) using the "Scripture" search field (not "Reference") for "Proverbs." There are various ways to view the hits., i.e., if you want a bar chart showing distribution through the NT, you can find that through the analytics feature, and/or you can just use move through the results to look at each one.

 

3. You could look through the OT/NT Parallels tool.


UPDATE: Ha! Our posts (Lorinda's and mine) crossed paths, it seems.

Edited by Abram K-J
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Yeah. Good minds think alike. :)

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I was just about to say the same thing! :) (Seriously)

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So I skimmed this blog post, and it's pretty easy:

 

Open a text search tab (I chose to work in Greek, and opened LXX1); set the search mode for verses and search for Proverbs

Open another text search tab (in my case the NA27-T; if you are working in English, chose the same translation you used for the Proverbs tab)

Set the search mode for words, go to the Search menu, choose Enter Command, and choose INFER from the list. You will be asked to chose an "INFER" tab. Choose the one where you searched for Proverbs; You can tweak the other settings if desired, or simply click OK. [You can also select the INFER command by pressing Command-Shift-I (on a Mac) or using the contextual menu]

 

Once the search runs, you can check our your results. You can select a hit phrase, and then choose "Search Back Linked Text" to see where it occurs in Proverbs.

 

Lorinda

 

 

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Searching the OT in NT Parallel for Proverbs is the quickest way to see the parallels in the NT, though you cannot extract the results as a list.

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