Finding Numerals in the Old Testament

Written by: Sean Boisen

Somebody who knows where i work wrote to ask if there was a way to get a list of all the numerals used in the Old Testament (two, twice, etc.). The answer’s yes, and it’s not hard: but since my first response was overly complicated, i wanted to try again and put the results out for others.

The background: i’m using Logos 4, Syntax Search, with the Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis (henceforth AF). If this is new territory for you, you’ll want to start by getting some background from Mike Heiser’s tutorial videos here: the syntax videos are currently down near the bottom.

So here are the steps:

• Open the Search panel, and select Syntax
• Set the search to All Passages in Hebrew Bible: Andersen-Forbes Phrase Marker Analysis
• Click on Query to create a New Syntax Search
• In the new panel, click on Add Search Terms here and select Segment. You’ll also want to check Show Details at the top of the panel.
• On the right side of the Panel, open up the Parts of Speech section, and in the Morph Specification type “@N?[NO]” (or select  the corresponding items from the pop-up: part of speech = Noun, Noun Family = numeral and ordinal). You can then click on Search to run this (i got 7128 results), and click through the results
• You might want to refine this search in several ways:
  • Limiting the scope to a particular book
  • If you have a deeper understanding of syntax, you may want to elaborate the search specification to only include particular contexts
  • Adding Semantics=Quantity removes two results, which was a little surprising, but i didn’t take the time to figure out which ones

This post originally appeared on Blogos