The other day I did a search for the Hebrew word meaning “cast image” (מסכה). As I began looking through the results, I saw that some of these references had to do with the cast metal idols of pagan deities, while others referred to the cast images of animals, such as the golden calf. I decided to incorporate this observation into a writing project like this:
The Bible refers to cast images of deities (list of verses) and of animals (list of verses).
As you can see, I wanted to flesh out this simple sentence with two lists of verse references, so I needed an easy way to separate the results of this one search into two separate lists of verses.
The first thing I did was to go through the verses found by my search and “mark” those verses which mentioned the cast image of an animal. You can mark a verse by right-clicking it and choosing Mark Selection, or you can simply click in a verse and then use the keyboard shortcut Command-7. This will place a blue bookmark to the right of the selected verse. I used the keyboard shortcut method to quickly mark the verses referring to animals.
Note: Prior to Accordance 10, you could mark a verse simply by holding the option key while clicking the verse. In Accordance 10, this shortcut was replaced by the ability to option-click a word to open the Instant Details popover. If you’re used to marking verses by option-clicking, you’ll have a minor adjustment to make in Accordance 10.
Now that I had marked all the verses dealing with cast images of animals, I needed a way to collect those verses into a single list. To do this, I went to the Add Marked Verses submenu of the Selection menu and chose New Reference List.
This opened a new Reference List tab containing only the verses I had marked.
At that point, I simply selected all the verses in the Reference List tab and chose Reference from the Copy As submenu of the Edit window. I then pasted that list of references into the sentence I had written:
The Bible refers to cast images of deities (list of verses) and of animals (Ex 32:4, 8; Deut 9:12, 16; 2 Kings 17:16; Neh 9:18; Psa 106:19; Hos 13:2).
Now that I had a list of all the verses referring to cast images of animals, I simply needed a list of all the other verses—the ones I had not marked. I’ll show you how to isolate those verses in my next post.