How to find all adjectives referred to God?

[Mendel]

Hi, can you please help me to find all adjectives referred to God in the Hebrew Bible? 

 

Thanks! 

[Robert Holmstedt]

Hello Mendel.

 

It is important to know that while some of this is quite easy in the syntax database, a good bit of the answer goes well beyond syntax.

 

While you can certainly look up cases in which an adjective modifies (attributively or predicatively) the lexemes "God, Lord," or "Yhwh," there will be many cases where such an adjective is used with a 3ms pronoun or a null pronoun, or even substantivally (e.g., "the righteous one"). The syntax database does not track anaphora (or participant reference), since this involves discourse connections beyond syntax. So the latter cases will not come back as hits in a syntax search.

 

It's interesting that when I did the attributive search -- see screenshot below -- for Yhwh (in the subject position), only two hits came up: Ps 47:3 "most high Yhwh" and 2 Chronicles 30:18 "the good Yhwh" and once in an appositive phrase (Deut 6:4 "one Yhwh"). That made sense in hindsight since Yhwh is a proper name and will rarely be modified by an adjective. But even when I used "God" (with a singular adjective) there were only two hits in the complement position ("living God" in 2 Kgs 19:4 and 19:16) and one in the subject (within a vocative "O righteous God" in Ps 7:10). It is even more interesting that when I went looking for simple null copula (verbless clauses) with Yhwh as the subject and an adjective as the complement, there were not nearly as many as I expected. The second screenshot is that search (* there appears to be something slightly broken in the syntax because the search does not find Ps 11:7 or others in which the complement comes first; I've reported this).