=====concordance=====

This article will attempt to explain our dim view of the traditional so-called concordances. "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance" is the example used most often, due to both its popularity and its familiarity to the authors.

====Definition====
The stated intention of any Bible concordance is to act as a lexical index to the Bible. Biblical words are listed alphabetically, with indications references for each passage of the Bible where the words occur.

Concordances may be for the original languages of the Biblical books, or may be compiled for a given translation.

====History====
Let's take a very brief look at the last 800 years of concordance-making.
===Latin Concordances===
The earliest known concordance was completed in 1230, based on the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Back then, the Bible did not have verses. In fact, Biblical chapters had only recently been implemented. This is why in the previous paragraph, we mentioned references to "passages" rather than "verses".

In the period of 1250-1310, several versions were produced that included abridged quotations of sections in order to provide context. However, not every instance of a word was included. That is to say these concordances were not "exhaustive".

Prior to 1470, these concordances were few and far between, due to the fact that books were hand printed with pen and parchment. In 1470 the first mass-produced concordance was produced.

Form 1435 to 1496 a somewhat more "exhaustive" concordance was compiled, which included most nouns and verbs, and several words conspicuously missing form earlier versions.

Biblical verses were first introduced in 1545.

A 1555 concordance added proper nouns and more omitted words.
===Hebrew Concordances===
In 1448, the first Hebrew concordance was completed. This was followed by many other versions, each seeking to correct the mistakes of its predecessors.

===English Concordances===
Beginning in 1550, many concordances have appeared based on various English translations of the Bible.

It is worth noting that the intent of these books is to index English words in English Bibles. These concordances do not deal with Hebrew texts directly, but are intended to aid the reader of those texts that had already been translated from Hebrew into Greek, then from Greek into Latin, and finally from Latin into English.

Again, many versions have come and gone, most non-exhaustive, and most attempting to fix one or another percieved error from previous works.

If there is one thing that should be clear by now it is that the process of making a concordance is error-prone and quite subjective.

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]]