How to find all occurrences of any form of mitzvah in Psalm 119?

[Bret Hicks]

I am studying Psalm 119 and looking at the 8 main synonyms used for Scripture in the Psalm. I began by simply getting a list of all the words used in psalm 119 by doing the search:

 

 

[RANGE psalm 119] <AND> *

 

This listed all of the words, including 22 occurrences of hÎwVxIm (hwx) commandment

 

When I did a search for all of the uses of in Psalm 119, (using the search hwx+) it said there were only 21 occurrences. As I did a little research I discovered it was not finding Psalm 119:115. The reason appears to be that there is no suffix attached in that verse. But I can not find any way to do the search and get just the 22 times it occurs (I do not want the verbal forms, etc.) How do I do this?

 

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret

 

Sorry, I do not know how to get Hebrew in the forum obviously. The garbled words above are forms of mitsvah/mitsvot.

[Bret Hicks]

By the way, the same thing happens if I search for PQD (precepts in ESV). The original count in the concordance search of Psalm 119 was 21, but when searching for it individually it only gives 20. It does not find the occurrence in verse 128. What am I doing wrong here?

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret

[Bret Hicks]

And one more - the same thing happens when searching from aleph-mem-resh (word/promise). The concordance count was 19, but the search only yielded 18 - it was missing verse 123. Also, if I remover the condition of the suffix in the search, I then get 20 - it includes the verb in verse 57. Just for complete disclosure.....

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret

[Anon]

Bret,

 

I am a little confused about what your attempting to do. Some screen shots would be really helpful, so that I can best address your question. First off, are you searching based on the ESVS or the BHS (Hebrew)?

 

As for posting Hebrew into the forums, you can do so by either typing it in directly via OS X Language and Text, or you can copy the Hebrew in Accordance, and export it as unicode. To do this, open Accordance activate preferences ⌘,. In Greek & Hebrew, ensure that the option to export as Unicode is selected.

[Bret Hicks]

Thanks. I will try to get the Hebrew in this time and give some screen shots.

 

For my original search, I do the following:

 

[RANGE Psalm 119] <AND> *

 

This ives me a concordance count of every word in Psalm 119, so I can see which words are being used the most. This returns a lot of data, but the important part is:

 

 

(ירה) תּוֹרָה law = 25

‏(דבר) דָּבָר word, speech = 24

‏(יה) יהוה LORD, GOD = 24

‏(לא) לֹא not, Lo = 23

‏(שׁפט) מִשְׁפָּט judgment, Mishpat = 23

‏(עוד) עֵדוּת testimony, law, decree = 23

‏(צוה) מִצְוָה commandment = 22

‏(חקק) חֹק statute = 21

‏(פקד) פִּקּוּדִים precepts = 21

‏שׁמר to keep, watch, preserve = 21

(אמר) אִמְרָה word = 19

 

 

Notice

 

‏(צוה) מִצְוָה commandment = 22

 

When I right click on the word and do a lemma search to find the verses where this word occurs, Accordance generates the search

 

[sUFFIX] =מִצְוָה

 

This yields the result of 21 hits in 21 verses - 1 less than Accordance gave in the first search. To see what was missing, I did a search on the ESV for command*, which yielded 22 verses. By comparing the hits, I discovered that the search

 

 

[sUFFIX] =מִצְוָה

 

 

did not find the occurrence of the word in Psalm 119:115, which reads:

 

 

סוּרוּ־מִמֶּנִּי מְרֵעִים וְאֶצְּרָה מִצְוֹת אֱלֹהָי׃

 

 

 

Notice that occurs. Now I know it does not have a suffix in this occurrence, but if I do the search without the [sUFFIX] command (which was generated by Accordance) I still do not get 21 hits. The search

 

 

 

+צוה

 

 

 

gives 24 hits. The reason is that it adds verbs, which are not included in the original count. For example, it includes Psalm 119:4, which reads:

 

 

‏אַתָּה צִוִּיתָה פִקֻּדֶיךָ לִשְׁמֹר מְאֹד׃

 

 

Notice that it found the word, but in the verb form, which was not included in the original concordance count.

 

In the end, I would like to know how to do two things:

 

1. How do I do a search that gives me the same 22 occurrences for the lemma צוה that I get when I do the search [RANGE Psalm 119] <AND> * - no more and no less.

 

2. Again, the real thing I was searching for was the 8 synonyms used for the word of God in Psalm 119. Thus, I do not want verb form of this root (or the others). I only want the nouns. In other words, I do not want Psalm 119:4, where God "lays down precepts/commands", but I want every occurrence that speaks of all of God's "commands". How do I do this?

 

I hope this helps you understand what I am getting at.

 

Thanks for any help.

 

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret Hicks

[Anon]

Bret:

 

I see. Thanks for providing the additional information.

 

By way of review, it's good to always keep in mind the semantics of the search symbols. For example, when you place the "=" before a hebrew word (or any other language), you are asking Accordance to consider the exact form of the word. While you qualify the search by deleting [sUFFIX], you are still searching for the exact form of מצוה. To the point, the occurrence of this word is in the plural construct form—not singular.

 

Similarly, the "+" indicates to Accordance to search for roots—which could include denominatives, adjectives, etc., whose unaffected meaning is related to a core idea (this is a unique search feature in Accordance). Thus, when you include a + with a lemma, as you've done, you are going to get verbs within your results.

 

To learn more about the search symbols, copy this path, open a Finder window, and enter ⌘⇧G, and paste the path in and hit return. (file:///Applications/Accordance.app/Contents/Resources/Accordance%20Help/Default.htm)

 

Thus, to answer you question for 1, you only need to replace the * with the lemma צוה. It would look like this: [Range Ps 119] <AND> צוה.

 

I've answered your second question above, that is, remove the + from your search.

 

Hope that helps.

[mbcvida]

It looks like Psa 119.98 is not hyperlinked in the ESVS

[Ken Simpson]

Hi Bret,

 

I couldn't reproduce your issues. Can I ask what version of Accordance you are using, and what version of which text please? *Check the contactual menu item - about the text...

 

I found the results of the concordance search reproducible by tagging the root with the @[NOUN} command. This restricts the result of the lemma to all nouns...so rejecting your verbal results.

 

You can also string all the forms together and enclose them in brackets, then tag it all with an @[NOUN} command which will consolidate all 8 forms into one screen. It occurs 137 times! I have included my saved workspace which you can download and double-click to see if it's what you were looking for.

 

 

 

 

James' explanation was spot on, but i thought you might find this helpful too.

 

Since that image didn't seem to work

 

 

[NOUN]@(hrma ,rbd ,fpvm ,twdo ,hwx ,qj ,dqp ,hrwt) <AND> [RANGE Psalm 119]

 

Let's try this!

 

So - the words in the brackets should all be Hebrew text - still working out this posting stuff myself.

[Bret Hicks]

James and simmo42,

 

Thanks for the help. I do understand the basic differences in the searches, but the problem is, I am still not getting the right results.

 

James, when I do the search [Range Ps 119] <AND> צוה+ it returns two hits - verse 4 and verse 138

 

If I do the search [Range Ps 119] <AND> צוה+ it returns 24 hits - including the verb in verse 4.

 

If I do the search [Range Ps 119] <AND> צוה= it returns 2 hits, verse 4 and verse 38.

 

Thus, none of the searches returns the result of 22 hits, which I know is correct (both from the concordance count within Accordance, and from multiple commentaries that give that number.)

 

Simmo42, I am using Accordance 9.5.2, with BHS version 4.14. I try to download the latest updates whenever they are available. (By the way, I could not get your saved workspace. Safari does not recognize that url.....)

 

After playing around some more, it appears that this search works:

 

[NOUN] @צוה+ This returns exactly 22 hits - which is correct.

 

So now, I guess the question is, why can't I seem to get Accordance to generate this from the right click menu. This is the most common sort of search one would want, I would think, and it is what Accordance itself tells me is the number of hits in Psalm 119 when it does a complete concordance listing. In other words, when I tell Accordance to do the search [RANGE Psalm 119] <AND> * it returns (out of a long list)

 

 

(צוה) מִצְוָה commandment = 22

 

 

צוה to command = 2

 

In other words, it automatically separates the noun from the verb occurrences of the same root. It breaks them down as two lemmas. So when I do a lemma search on one of the noun occurrences (say the one in verse 6), I would expect it to return 22 occurrences - but it returns only 21. This does not make sense to me. I now see that I can get the result by creating a manual search [NOUN] @צוה+ which returns exactly 22 hits - which is correct. But why do I have to manually create a search? Why is this not what is found by one of the right click searches? (By the way, when I do the lemma search in BibleWorks, it returns the 22 hits - not 21 or 24.) Is there something I am missing here in the way Accordance is handling this?

 

Anything that can help me understand this a bit better is greatly appreciated.

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret Hicks

[Joel Brown]

Bret, I am coming in a bit late to the discussion. Also, I'm certainly no Hebrew scholar. However, in my BHS-W4 (4.14) I do a search for ‏מִצְוָה ‎‏ ‎[RANGE ps 119]‏ and I get the proper 22 hits. Similarly, if I search for ‏פִּקּוּדִים ‎‏ ‎[RANGE ps 119]‏ I get the proper 21 hits.

 

My guess is that the misunderstanding stems from three aspects:

1) When right-clicking on a word and doing Search For -> Lemma, it will search for the lemmas of everything selected. If you just right-click on a word without a selection, Accordance automatically gets the closest word (between spaced) which will include a suffix. Thats why the [sUFFIX] tag was being generated by Accordance. If you just select the word you desire, it will only grab that lemma instead of adding a suffix. Of course, you can always just delete the suffix tag if you didn't want it.

2) As James said, its important to remember the distinctions between +, =, and "". Since you kept trying a root search, you were not actually searching for lemmas. This is why you got other forms of the root word, even though they were entirely different lemmas. This is why my 'plain' search seems to get the correct answers.

3) I don't know all the details behind this, but often the lemma shown in Strong's texts is a bit different from the actual lemma used in the BHS-W4. A lot of this stems from the different groups that tagged each text; each has a different philosophy. Often they are similar, but sometimes they differ. For example, in the 'precepts' search, the ESVS reports the lemma to be פִּקּוּד, פִּקֻּד, while the BHS-W4 has the lemma as פִּקּוּדִים.

 

I hope this helps clarify a bit.

[Anon]

Bret:

 

Perhaps it's best if we can screen share.

 

The issue revolves around how you are using the search symbols, and your confusing the nominal form of צוה, which is מצוה, with the verbal form. If you want the 22 occurrences of the nominal form (מצוה), search for the noun, not the verb.

 

If you would like to screen share, I will message you my contact name. For the forum purposes, I did want to post an answer so that others can benefit from the thread.

[Bret Hicks]

Joel,

 

That is the problem. I was simply right-clicking on the word, so it automatically added the [sUFFIX] condition. When I highlighted the word (not including the suffix in the highlight) it correctly found the 22 occurrences.

 

I did understand the difference between the various types of searches (lemma, root, etc.) and also the nominal versus verbal forms. I was simply trying them all to see the various hits Accordance gave me. I could not figure out why it was "automatically" appending the [sUFFIX] parameter. But now I understand what was really happening. I was simply right-clicking on the word, think it would not include the suffix in the search. I guess this did not seem intuitive to me. I would think that the default would be to not care about the suffix if I am searching for a lemma. It would seem to me that most of the time people would want to know all occurrences of the lemma, whether suffixed or not (which is what the concordance count gives), or the exact inflected form of the word. So I was expecting that the right click menu was going with those options, not "lemma with suffix" and "inflected form including exact suffix". I now see that it does the same thing with prefixed prepositions as well. I will just have to remember to highlight the word minus any prefix or suffix.

 

Thanks to everyone for the help.

 

 

In Christ,

 

 

Bret