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How do I complete this search?


Tom Castle

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I've stumbled upon a 'repeat' verse in the KJV bible. Prov. 22.3 and Prov 27.12. For some reason, this has always eluded me in the past and I've found it to be quite intriguing now. My question.. is there a way, in Accordance, to set up a search that would allow me to search the bible for other repeat verses?

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The short answer is no, not in version 7 anyway.

 

However, you can search for repeated phrases of almost any length, in theory anyway. It might take a while to do the entire Bible for a 10 word phrase, for example. You would use the Construct window, make 20 columns, each with Word *. Then put an Agree between words 1 and 11, duplicate it (option-drag) to words 2 and 12, and so on until you have 10 pairs of agreeing words. You must set the Field pop-up menu to Book, and the search will only look for repeat verses within each book (the Parallels databases give you similar verses throughout the Bible).

 

Here is my example of 5 word phrases, looking only in Psalms:

Phrase1.jpg phrase2.jpg

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Tom,

Great issue.

A great thing to remember when drudging up an inquiry on a computer, whether it's a search, a calculation, or what have you is that computers are incredibly stupid, but very thorough. The kind of search you're describing is extremely simple to understand, but it has to be written out in simple instructions, with clear parameters, for the search engine. So, to describe your search programmatically, let's say you want to find all sequences of 6 or more words that occur at least two different times in the text. For the program to conduct such a search, it would have to take the first 6 words of a text, then search for that string in the rest of the text, then take words 2 through 7 and search for that sequence in the rest of the text, and keep going.

This type of search can be done using other applications on text files. The search engine for Accordance can not accomplish this on it's own. It doesn't have a mechanism for dynamically choosing the search criteria. You could interface with an Applescript and draw up an interesting solution that could accomplish this in Accordance.

 

However, the work has already been done for you... since the Accordance engine itself can't perform this eureka... they have produced it in a module. If you have the "Old Testament" parallels module, open it up and enjoy the plunder. If not, you should get it:

 

www.accordancebible.com/modules/details.php?ID=214

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Your post is good, Joe, but I hope it doesn't cause people to miss my simultaneous post that shows how Accordance can do just that, within the limits of a book.

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If I had a dime for every time we made a simultaneous post. I started to first recommend a construct search but decided limits of the search (duplication only within a book and the maximum number of "at least this many words in a row" being 7) would not be acceptable to him.

In my construct, I added a [Within 1-99999] between the middle terms so that the results contained 7 words in sequence repeated in a book whether or not they were back to back.

It takes a long time to decipher the results, since they overlap. Here's the first few verses in the results.

 

Ex. 12.1 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt:

Ex. 12.43 The LORD said to Moses and Aaron: This is the ordinance for the passover: no foreigner shall eat of it,

Ex. 25.3 This is the offering that you shall receive from them: gold, silver, and bronze, 4 blue, purple, and crimson yarns and fine linen, goats

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Sorry, there are several errors in my previous post.

 

The picture shows a range of Genesis but the search was on Psalms.

The Construct only allows you to use 15 columns, even though many more can be seen by scrolling, so Joe is correct that a 7 word phrase is the maximum.

The search only shows adjacent phrases, because I forgot to add a WITHIN between the end of the first phrase and the beginning of the second.

 

Most seriously, there is a bug in Accordance, and it is not reliably allowing the large WITHIN numbers that are needed for this kind of search. It is giving totally different results when the WITHIN is changed, rather than just giving fewer or more hits. It keeps us humble. We will look into the bug. It won't even find your repeated verse in the KJV (though actually the Hebrew is not identical).

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Thanks to both of you.

 

Helen: Yes, I saw where the text was not identical in Hebrew. But it certainly was interesting that the KJV was interpreted as such. IT would have been great to see if there were any others. Curiosity, you know? :)

 

Joe: I do have the parallel. Of course, the parallel does list these two verses as well.

 

At any rate, it was interesting.

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