Pericope: Scripture as written and read in antiquity

Searching the Pericope database (1)

To search the database use the multi-file searching option of a sophisticated editor like BBEdit (Apple Macintosh) or NoteTab Pro (Windows) or Emacs (Unix, Windows, Apple, but not easy to handle). Of course it is possible to search for simple sequences of characters and words with almost any word processor. More complicated searches are possible by means of so-called regular expressions, a term coined by Stephen Kleene, an American mathematician. Most people may know the possibility to search with wild cards in open Word documents. Actually this is similar to grep searching. For example, if you want to know where the sequence 7--5--2 of Masoretic accents occurs, regardless the number of characters in between, including spaces, returns and other accents, you might enter the following in the search window of BBEdit,

(?s)===.+<7>.+<5>.+<2>

(?s) makes the pattern skip the hard returns we have put into the analysis. === indicates the beginning of the annotated verse;
.+ instructs the pattern to skip one or more characters, including spaces and returns, until the pattern you are looking for is found; <...> demarcate the numbers of the accents according to the Tabula in BHS.

You might expand the search to find any sequence of 7--5--1 as well,

(?s)===.+<7>.+<5>.+<2>|(?s)&&&.+<7>.+<5>.+<1>

&&& marks the beginning of the second half of a Masoretic verse. The sign | separates alternatives. (If you do not believe there is a second half in a particular verse, search with (?s)===.+<7>.+<5>.+<1> alone.)

If you are looking for all cases where the Vulgate concurs with any manuscript of LXX, you might formulate your search pattern as follows,

LXX.+VULG

or if you would like to see the correspondences with LXXB alone,

LXXB.+VULG

 

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