Add Hebrew phrase with different word orders to Biblical Terms

Question

The phrase “the word of the LORD was to” is a common formula introducing a message God gives to a prophet. I would like this phrase in Biblical terms, but it has several variations:

and-was word LORD DO-marker
word LORD was DO-marker
word LORD which was DO-mark
and-was word LORD by

I would love to have a single search string that captures exactly this set, but excludes everything else. One issue is the variable position of was (before or after “word LORD”). Another is the possibility of “which”. Finally, there’s the problem that sometimes the text says “the word of the LORD came by (the hand of)”, so the expression can use either “by” or the direct object marker.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

viverechristus, so are you wanting to search the Hebrew text and get a list of all the verses, or are you wanting to do this in the Biblical terms tool? The Biblical terms tool does not support complex searches, but it should be possible to search the Hebrew text using the Source Language tools and get a list of all the verses where any of these combinations occur.

Comments

Ideally I would like to create a single Biblical term for all the instances of “the word of the Lord came/was to” in its various instantiations. I’m think I could gather all the references using a series of searches, then create a Biblical term based on one of those and add the additional references that I want. I’ll give that a try, anyway.

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viverechristus,

You should be able to create a new Biblical term like the one you describe, manually edit the verses where it occurs in the Source language text if needed, then use the wildcards as anon421222 suggested to get your renderings to match. Can you generate a list of all the verses where this “word of the Lord” phrase occurs? I fairly certain that I could build a search in Paratext SLT to do it, but you could use Bibleworks, Logos or whatever other program that you are accustomed to making complex syntax searches with.

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This worked for me. I generated the list of references independently of the Source Language search tool, and pasted it into the Add Biblical Term tool.

Answer 2

The Help topic “Guide: Tools > Biblical Terms: Edit > Edit renderings” talks about how to use wildcards for Biblical Terms renderings. Does the asterisk work for Biblical terms? If not, you probably need to consult someone who can write a Regular Expression that might do what you want to do.