In the previous article, you learned some of the ways Logos makes it easy for you to deepen your understanding of biblical words. In this article, you’ll learn how you can use Logos to search your Bible for words, people, places, ideas, discourse types, and more.
In order to search effectively in Logos, it’s helpful to understand what datasets are. Your Logos resources come bundled with many datasets, which essentially attach information to the surface text of your book, allowing you to search for all kinds of things that aren’t explicit in the text.
For example, notice how when you hover over a word in your English Bible (such as baptized in Acts 8:36), Logos displays a tooltip showing the underlying original language word and its grammatical form (you can turn this on and off in your Program Settings). Although that original language information isn’t part of the English text of your Bible, your Bible comes with a dataset that contains all of that original language information.
Here’s why understanding that you have access to many datasets with different kinds of information is important: in Logos, you can search the text itself--the actual words in your Bible or other resource (referred to in Logos as the “surface text”), or you can perform a more powerful search of one or more of these underlying datasets. These more advanced searches allow you to, for example, search for every time a biblical person is mentioned in the Bible, even if he or she is only referred to by a pronoun.
Search Without Leaving Your Bible
Inline search is the quickest way to perform a simple search for an English term. In your open Bible or other book, click the Inline Search icon , then enter your search term in the inline search box.
Learn more about Inline Search.
Search from the Context Menu
The easiest way to search for something is from the context (right-click) menu. Right-click a word, or highlight a phrase and right-click it.
The context menu is made up of two panes. In the left pane, select what you want to search for. This is where datasets come in--the left pane is populated based on the resource and its associated datasets in your Logos library. Depending on what level of Logos you own, you’ll see a range of items such as Lemma (dictionary form of a word),
Event ,
Preaching Theme ,
Grammatical Construction , and more.
The right pane of the context menu has a search section. Once you’ve picked what it is you want to search for, select the type of search you want to run. Logos includes all kinds of advanced searches. For the most part, you’ll want to run a Bible search (searches your preferred Bible), Books search (searches every resource in your Library), or All search (searches every resource and tool in your Logos installation).
After you pick your search type, the Logos Search tool will open and display your search results.
Search Tool
The Search tool is one of the most powerful features in Logos. You can run anything from a simple word search to a complicated syntactical search. Open the Search tool by clicking Search.
With a Smart Search, you can enter a question and let Logos search its entire catalog for an answer. In addition to hits from resources in your Library and from books that aren't, Smart Search also provides a Synopsis drawing on the top five results returned by your search.
Note: This feature is available in all subscription tiers.
Different searches can be refined in different ways. A Bible search, for example, allows you to customize it by:
- Resource: Pick what Bible you want to search, whether it’s a specific Bible version, a series, or your grouping of top Bibles.
- Field: This allows you to select what part of the text you want to search. For the most part, you’ll be fine leaving this set to All Bible Text. If you want to, for example, search words of Christ only, you can click All Bible Text and check the box beside Words of Christ.
- Match: Select if you want the words in your search to be found within the same verse or chapter
- Passage: Use this to set a specific range of text you want to search (for example, the Gospels). You can also enter a custom range in the Passage Find Box.
When you type a search, an autocomplete box appears with a range of search options based on your input. For best results, pick one of these.
Learn more about Books, Bible, Media, Clause, Morph, or Syntax search.
Bible Browser
The Bible Browser allows you to search the Bible not by entering search terms, but by selecting filters. The Bible Browser displays every Bible verse that matches the criteria you select. Open the Bible Browser by clicking Tools, then entering Bible browser in the Tools menu find box.
Filters you can select are grouped by categories. Each category is essentially equivalent to a dataset (discussed above). Click a category to expand it, then select the filter you want to apply. You can select as many filters from as many different categories as you would like.
For example, if you expand the People category and select Philip (evangelist), the Bible Browser will display every verse in which Philip appears.
Learn more about using the Bible Browser.