the Berasit Hebrew Dictionary

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.

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.

Let's take a very brief look at the last 800 years of concordance-making.

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.

In 1448, the first Hebrew concordance was completed. This was followed by many other versions, each seeking to correct the mistakes of its predecessors.

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.

Specifically there are many problems that concordances run into. We shall examine a few of these problems with examples drawn from Strong's Concordance.