Where are the people?

Question

Sorry if this is rather simple to many of you.

I noticed that users have very helpful tools in the Source Language window: right-click and you get quick access to ressources for:

• animals
• plants
• man made objects

Now people are at least as important as animals, and sadly I cannot find the equivalent tool.

I am aware about Categories and Semantic Domains and filters in the Biblical Terms window (for projects which have opted for “Major Biblical Terms”. I can pull those for profound research, and it means changing several settings and making it all fit the screen.

Daily team work often brings up questions about certain people, often with similar-sounding names. What about Φίλιππος in LUK 3:1, can / must we spell that name like the Φίλιππος in LUK 6:14?

I believe there are ressources already, where friendly experts have spent a lot of work, listing Biblical people/persons*. I further believe that such tools might already be present in PT8 - and we do not want to miss out on those.

Of course I can do several work-arounds. Like do a word-search in Source Language Tool via right-click and “Lemma to search list”. This will not be able to jump the chasm between Greek and Hebrew. We appreciate the search-tools in PT8, but those are in another leage from a right-click and getting an edited ressource.

Often we find a need to harmonize NT-references of OT-characters. We want to know more about the OT-person and (number of) occurrences, references etc.

This is not a feature request, just asking where such goodness might be hiding.

Thank you.

* (I am intrigued by the two entries in Semantic Domains “people” versus “persons” and would as not-native-speaker not know what to tick.)

Answer 1

You mentioned wanting to “jump the chasm between Greek and Hebrew.” I don’t believe there is currently anything that ships with Paratext which already does this, since the standard Biblical Term lists are all keyed off of either the underlying Hebrew lemma OR Greek lemma. I have been wondering whether chasm-jumping would be important to teams, so your comment here is interesting to me.

I’m not sure what’s feasible, but perhaps we could link a Greek term to its corresponding Hebrew term, yet allow the user to easily de-link it. If you or anyone else on this list considers a feature like that to be highly desirable, do feel free to submit a feature request via the Help menu.

Does anyone here know if there are any ready-made lists out there which already do this?
I’m not aware of any such list of terms, but it IS possible to manually create a custom term which will be expected/found in any verses you choose to include. To do this, make sure the Biblical Terms tool is set to your project’s list of terms, then:

1. Optionally, filter the list via the gloss (“David” in my example here).
2. Use Edit > Edit Term to inspect both the Hebrew and Greek terms, copying any useful data into a Notepad. The critical data is the list of verse references.
3. Use Edit > Add Term to create a custom term, then paste the data into it. Screenshot below.

Or, instead of step 3, it’s also possible to carefully copy the verse references from the Hebrew term into the Greek term, or vice versa. Perhaps someone on this list can tell us whether or not customizing the “official” terms is a good idea.

image.png753×472 25.2 KB

If you’re creating a custom term from scratch (i.e. not copy/pasting from existing terms), I believe the best practice in Paratext 8.0 is to (1) do so via a Lemma search from the SLT. In Paratext 8.1, it will also be possible to (2) do a lemma or sense search without having to deal with the SLT. I’m not speaking from real-life experience with either approach, so I’m not sure what pros/cons/gotchas there might be to each, but here’s an overview.

(1) In SLT, you can search either the default HEB or GRK text, or the alternative LXX or BYZ texts. I’m not sure how much time it would actually save here, but if you set your text to LXX/GRK and search for all relevant lemmas, it’s actually possible to get search results across Testaments with a single search. You can then review your search results and choose “Add to Project Biblical Terms” from the Edit menu, if you want to create a custom term.

(2) In an Enhanced Resource (coming in Paratext 8.1), you’ll be able to get search results a different way. Click an English word in the ESV, or a French word in the NBS, etc., then use Ctrl+F to search for all occurrences of that sense (or that lemma in general). Searching both the OT and NT would require two searches, with the second one using “Add To List”. (If you wanted 4 custom terms for the 4 senses of Abimelech, that would be 8 searches.)

image.png917×512 52.1 KB

In either approach, building a long list of chasm-spanning names would be a lot of work, and it might be wasted effort if/when a better solution is made available.

Comments

anon468618:

we could link a Greek term to its corresponding Hebrew term

All very good thoughts. But I am after specific people, like David, Abraham, who get mentioned in the OT and in the NT. This is normally done by a human editor, not a script or other tool. I believe I have seen paper books with such references and I was assuming such goodness is already hidden somewhere in PT. Was wondering where to find it, because somebody took the trouble for tools and animals, why not real personalities.

I am much less interested in linking terms like “farmer” in Greek and Hebrew.

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Sounds good to me! I definitely didn’t mean to imply that a tool could fully automate these linkages; just that we could perhaps provide recommended linkages between NT terms (mainly names, as you said) and OT terms which experts believe align closely with them. This would seem especially helpful when multiple people share a name, in which case a fully automated tool would be clueless anyway.

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Thank you for this very thorough and detailed response! Helped me to resolve a separate issue.

Answer 2

Working with and checking names is an important task. The category “Person” includes professions like tanner or fisherman. It sounds like you want names like Phillip or Bartholomew.
Try using the Major Biblical terms list, then making a filter for the category “Name”. The Biblical terms tool will then only display names. You can further limit the list by setting the Scripture range to only the books you are working in.

Answer 3

I stumbled across this thread, and just wanted to add that one quick and dirty way that a team finishing up the whole Bible is dealing with this is to sort the Biblical Terms tool by gloss. Then they can compare the equivalent terms across NT/OT:

image.png745×100 25.8 KB

It’s not perfect (as the glosses don’t always line up), but they have found it helpful.

Comments

Dear @jeffh, keep stumbling friend, this is a very helpful idea and input.

Firstly you have indirectly confirmed that our need is not some isolated weird thing, but that harmonizing between OT and NT is needed by other projects too.

Secondly I thank you for the actual idea of sorting that way; we will try that for sure.

Thirdly, this is an elegant and good way to address this need: So in my feature request I will not request yet another ressource (like the document on Biblical plants, or man-made-things), I will rather request that a qualified editor will have a look at the issue and will edit the glosses in such a way, that persons who are mentioned in the OT and NT will show up right next to each other (funny English; should I write “next to themselves”?) when sorted by gloss.

So all my thumbs up for your help, thank you.

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Looks like you are sorting on the English gloss. Yes that is a help, but there still are two entries for the same person. As I understand it, anon468618 was working on this problem of OT and NT names and some other Biblical terms list issues. I want to go and exercise the latest version of Paratext 9 and see where we are at on Biblical terms lists.