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--- concordance [2024/09/25 21:21] – created ken
+++ concordance [Unknown date] (current) – external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1
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 Scholars through the centuries have been taking issue with the work done in previous generations. This includes but is not limited to the act of assigning semantic division between similar words, combining words that appear to be the same, and various other interpretive functions.
+====Problems====
+Specifically there are many problems that concordances run into. We shall examine a few of these problems with examples drawn from [[wp>Strong%27s_Concordance|Strong's Concordance]].
+===Completeness===
+Although Strong's Concordance is touted as being "exhaustive" or in other words a comprehensive list of words in the Bible, this is not actually true. Strong's is comprehensive in that it does list all English words found in the [[wp>King James Version]] of the Bible. The problem is that the King James Bible itself is not comprehensive in that it omits words that exist in the Hebrew text, but for some reason or another did not make their way into the English translation. Nobody knows why these words are missing. These words may have been dropped in the Latin or Greek translations that the English translation is based on. As a notable example, the word את (see [[at]]) appears over thirteen thousand times in the Hebrew texts. Most of these instances are ignored and not translated.
+===Incorrect Grouping===
+One of the greatest accomplishments of Strong's Concordance was to assign an ID code to each word. In this regard, it is centuries ahead of its time and it set up the Lexicon with a computer-friendly data structure.
+The idea was to give a single ID to each semantically unique "word". That is to say that if a word is spelled the same but has two obvious meanings, each meaning would get an ID. Conversely, if a particular semantic value was represented by two different spellings, each spelling would get an ID.
+There are many many many cases where this process has failed miserably. This has only recently become apparent, due to the fact that we now have databases containing both English and Hebrew versions of these ancient texts, and are able to perform comparative data analysis on the two languages side by side, along with the ID numbers.
+There are some cases where a single ID has been applied to two or more words which are spelled vastly different and do not even share a root word. FIXME give a couple examples
+There are MANY cases where multiple IDs have been assigned to a single word, even though the various instances appear to have the same semantic meaning. This particular issue is caused in large part by the fact that Strong's is indexing English words without regard for the original Hebrew. Note that this is the stated intention of the concordance. A concordance is not intended to be a semantically correct dictionary of the original language. It is merely recording each instance of the translated text with all the inherent subjective interpretation embedded by the translators.
+FIXME show a few of the more mundane examples.
+There are also cases where both of these problems apply - FIXME Start with [[heleq]]