Working with an New Testament or Old Testament apparatus can be a difficulty and frustrating experience for many. Even after you’ve mastered all the text critical notations (or scroll over them in your Bible Software for a quick definition) you’re still left to make sense of the variant reading.

Though the main text has morphological data that you can rely on for translation, the readings within the apparatus lack this information. This is particularly frustrating for those of you that use the Göttingen Septuagint. The vocabulary of the LXX is more diverse than the NT, making it much less likely that you are familiar with the words under consideration.

This, however, isn’t an insurmountable problem within Logos. Let’s look at Jonah 1:4 in the LXX:

I’ve highlighted the word συντριβῆναι, which means “to break into pieces, to crush” in the clause “and the ship was in danger of breaking into pieces.” When I check the Apparatus I in the Göttingen text, I find the following:

Instead of reading, “and the ship was in danger of breaking into pieces” some manuscripts read “and the ship was in danger διαλυνθηναι.”

While I could take an educated guess that διαλυνθηναι comes from διαλυω and simply look the word up in my lexicon to test my theory, I could take a different approach. Simply right click on the word in Logos, and you get the following menu:

Logos automatically  runs a search for the morphological information and definition of the word in Perseus’ database:

I find that the word is used in the same way (aor pass inf) as συντριβῆναι and that its definition is something like “part asunder.” Now the phrase can be translated, “And the ship was in danger of parting asunder,” or something to that effect.

While this is a relatively simple example and one that doesn’t have too much bearing on the meaning of the text, the tool itself has proven invaluable to me as I’ve conducted my research in the LXX and other texts for that matter.