Bible Word Study Report Part I: Overview

I’m in a home Bible study group that is studying First Thessalonians. So I was reading it the other morning, working through the second half of chapter 2. I stumbled across the following. Note the italicised phrase:

14 For you, brothers, became imitators of the churches of God in Christ Jesus that are in Judea. For you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews, 15 who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all mankind 16 by hindering us from speaking to the Gentiles that they might be saved—so as always to fill up the measure of their sins. But God’s wrath has come upon them at last! (1Th 2.14-16, ESV)

The phrase “so as to always fill up the measure of their sins” didn’t make much sense to me. I can figure out what it might mean based on contextual clues in the ESV, but it still seems weird. So I thought I’d use Logos Bible Software 3 and the The ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament to get from the English to the Greek, and then the Bible Word Study report to understand more about the contexts in which the underlying Greek appears in the New Testament. This series of posts will hopefully help in illustrating some of these features.
First we’ll look into how to run the Bible Word Study report from the Greek if our starting point is an English text.

To get an idea of the Greek underlying the ESV translation, one just needs to consult The ESV English-Greek Reverse Interlinear New Testament, which is part of many of the Logos Bible Software 3 configurations. This reverse interlinear uses the ESV New Testament as the primary organizing line of the interlinear, and aligns the Greek text of the New Testament with each word or phrase. It also includes dictionary lookup forms of words so it is easy to look things up in Greek lexicons. Here’s a picture of verse 16, using new visual markup features to highlight the phrase in question:

From here, you can see that the English “to fill up” is a translation of the Greek ?? ??????????? and that “the measure of” is offered as clarification. To run the Bible Word Study report, all we need to do is right-click on the area where “fill” occurs. We’ll be offered a choice as to the Greek to run the report on. The code “VIAA” informs us that the second word in the group is the verb, and that’s the one we want to run the report on. So we right-click and select the appropriate word from the Bible Word Study flyout. Just like this graphic shows:

From here, just click and the Bible Word Study report will jump into action. If you have Logos Bible Software 3 already, go ahead and try it. If you don’t have Logos Bible Software 3, check out your upgrading options. For all of the features that will be discussed in this series, you’ll need to have the new Logos Bible Software 3 resources and features included in one of the following packages:

Next up: Report Header

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Written by
Rick Brannan

Rick Brannan is a Data Wrangler for Faithlife. He manages a team that creates and maintains linguistic databases and other analyses of the Hebrew Bible, the Greek New Testament, the Septuagint, and writings of the Second Temple era. He resides in Bellingham with his wife, Amy, their daughter, Ella, and their son, Lucas.

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