Six Searches in Logos 10

It’s been hard to pick a favorite feature upgrade that shipped with Logos 10, but the new simplified searching has to be one of my favorites!

In previous versions of Logos, I found searching confusing. There were curly brackets { } and angled brackets <>. If I wanted to find every time Jesus is called the “word,” my search would have to be word ANDEQUALS <person Jesus>. If I wanted to search for the word light within resources that had John 1:1-14 as a milestone, I had to use light WITHIN {Milestone <John 1:1-14>}. I’m a student of the Bible, not a computer programmer. I bought Logos to help study the Word, not learn complex search queries.

Let’s go over six searches I think everyone should know in Logos and how Logos 10 has made them easier!

1. keyword:value

This makes so much more sense to me! Instead of using brackets to search, I’m using keyword value.

person:God. person:Jesus. place:Bethlehem. thing:Water. thing:Sandal.

This makes quick work of finding people, places and things in the Bible.

2. Preaching Themes

A great dataset in the text are the preaching themes.

Right-clicking on a passage reveals the context menu and within that context menu are all of the preaching themes available about that passage.

Need to find a passage on the family? preachingTheme:Family.

What about passages on hope? preachingTheme:Hope.

Using these preaching themes will open up searching the text in Logos!

3. IN Operator

Psalm 5:2 refers to God as “My King and My God.” When I want to find all the places God is called King, the IN operator with the simplified search makes it easy!

king IN addressee:God

You could search king IN person:God to see a varied return from this list!

4. IN Operator With Preaching Theme

Let’s put the last couple of searches into practice.

Acts 2:38 (NASB) — 38 Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

In this verse, the Holy Spirit is mentioned in the context of baptism. Let’s do a search to see if there are any other times the Holy Spirit is connected with baptism.

person:”Holy Spirit” IN preachingTheme:Baptism

5. Milestones

A Milestone is a specific range within Logos. bible:”Revelation 13″ will any reference to any verse in Revelation 13 in your library. When we use this as a milestone search, we can easily search words within resources, primarily commentaries and lexicons, to find the information. This probably sounds more difficult than it is! Let’s put it into practice.

I recently studied Revelation 13 and came across a commentary that mentioned the monster from the sea as a reference to the leviathan (Job 3.8, 41.1, Ps 74.14, 104.26, and Isa 27.1). With the new simplified search, finding the word leviathan in the milestone of Revelation 13 in resources became a snap!

leviathan IN milestone:”Revelation 13″

This is the kind of searching that can take your library in Logos from a reading library to a reference library. It becomes your personal research assistant and brings everything to you!

6. Search Templates

Maybe you still feel overwhelmed when thinking about searching in Logos! If that’s the case, Logos has you covered with Search Templates. Both the books search and Bible search panels have search templates.

These templates are the perfect solution for searching through the Bible. Need to find every time Jesus talked to the Pharisees? What about passages that talk about love but not faith? What about verses where Moses and Elijah are mentioned together? Logos gives you search templates that do the heavy lifting for you!

Searching Made Easy

One of the things I love about Logos Daily is the community for Logos Bible Software users. These are some of my favorite ways to search the Bible and library, but I’d love to hear in the comments how you are searching the Bible and your library.

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