Known Potential Errors Not Yet Adjusted For

There are 6 quirks of Tanach I have not yet managed to accommodate in my search program. There are the 5 quirks of the "piska" being in the middle of a possuk, and one quirk where a "sofit" letter appears in the middle of the word, instead of at its end.

There are a few verses in Torah configured peculiarly because each verse actually consists of two verses combined into one. The two parts together make up the whole verse, even though in concept the two verses could be considered logically distinct from the other, but for some reason this is how it is. (The asterisked verse in the illustration shows such an instance.)

This notation, that “there-should-have-been-a-break-between-verses-here” (between component verses), is called a “piska”. In Torah, the piska physically manifests as spatial breaks in written scripture, either as a {פ} or as a {ס}.

There are 3 piskas in Torah, and 2 more in Yehoshua. Here are their locations:

1) beraishis 35:22
2) bamidbar 26:1
3) devarim 2:8
4) yehoshua 8:24
5) yehoshua 4:1

These grammatical quirks result in two component logical segments physically occupying one verse.

When I first designed my database, it never occurred to me two component verses could be "squeezed into" one physical verse.

How woud this effect results? Suppose, for example, you seek a gematria where the result will be a whole possuk. Were any of the piska component verses also hold this value -- I’d miss it -- because I don’t test component verses. I deal only with the whole physical verse.

Ideally component verses should also be subject to individual examination.  But it’s too late to patch this up now to accommodate these possible extra contributions to search results. Even now I wouldn’t know how to design my database without overloading the program with a lot of extra code. It would horribly slow things down to check every verse -- when only 5 verses in all of Tanach have this quirk.

To this minor degree (and to the extent where these may be relevant), my search results would suffer from less than the full set of possible results.

The 6th quirk that might render a wrong result is in Yeshayahu, chapter 9, possuk 6. The first word (לםרבה) has its 2nd letter as a "mem sofit" instead of being written as למרבה.

In the meantime, rather than change the configuration of my entire database as I originally conceived it, as well as the necessary changes in code that would entail, I'd rather just "live with" this source of potential error.