As a prefatory note to this post, I’ve noted before my very great appreciation for what Faithlife does through its Logos Bible Software platform. I’ve been using Logos to some extent since the early “Libronix” versions and more so for about the past 8 years. One of the feature’s I’ve appreciated about the software is the ease with which one can report any typos one finds (select text, right-click, “Report typo”). What follows is an example of one such typo that illustrates the value of reading even when we can search in a few seconds through enough material that would take years to read. (Or, it’s an example of user error in creating a search, in which case, commenters can certainly feel free to supply the corrected search syntax.) But, careful, long-time users of other software would probably be able to point out quirks of those platforms too.
If one tries a morphology search in the Nestle-Aland 28th ed. with morphology resources (either with or without text-critical siglia), “lemma:ιουδαιζω” should pop up a drop-down to select the lemma with diacritics and make the search “lemma:ἰουδαΐζω”.
Running the search, however, gets zero hits:
Hmm. The texts have ἰουδαΐζειν (“to live like a Jew, Judaize”) printed where it’s supposed to be in Gal 2:14. Searching the Nestle-Aland 27th ed. with text-critical siglia shows this text in its results list. But, both versions without text-critical siglia (with and without the McReynolds interlinear) show no results like the two NA28 resource results pictured above.
Why? There may be other reasons too, but one promising candidate looks to be that the NA28 resources and the NA27 resources without text-critical siglia have had their lemmas for ἰουδαΐζειν in Gal 2:14 tagged as “ἰουδαί̈ζω”—that is, with the second iota using two characters (one iota precombined with an acute, plus a diaresis) rather than with the precombined single character ΐ (iota precombined with both an acute and a diaresis).
The moral of the story is “yes, search, but also read, note, and remember.” What Martin Luther had to say for his own day remains salient advice and is surely much truer for our own day than it was even for his:
Since it becomes Christians then to make good use of the Holy Scriptures as their one and only book and it is a sin and a shame not to know our own book or to understand the speech and words of our God, it is still a greater sin and loss that we do not study languages, especially in these days when God is offering and giving us men and books and every facility and inducement to this study, and desires his Bible to be an open book. O how happy the dear fathers would have been if they had our opportunity to study the languages and come thus prepared to the Holy Scriptures! What great toil and effort it cost them to gather up a few crumbs, while we with half the labor—yes, almost without any labor at all—can acquire the whole loaf!1
“To the Councilmen of All Cities in Germany that They Establish and Maintain Christian Schools,” qtd. Pratico and Van Pelt, Basics of Biblical Hebrew (affiliate disclosure), §11.9. ↩
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