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Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is the tool that helped me find the verses in the preceding posts about Biblical Hebrew. It’s merely a study tool–like a hammer if you’re a carpenter.

Strong's Concordance of the Bible. A study tool to help you locate English words and their original Hebrew and Greek.

Strong’s Concordance of the Bible. A study tool to help you locate English words and their original Hebrew and Greek. You don’t need to buy the book; you can consult it online.

Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance, like Dr. James Strong, its author, comes under more or less heavy criticism in certain theological circles. Make no mistake about it; you’ll read a fair bit of negativism about this duo, I have. And I agree, just as you can smash your fingers with a misplaced hammer blow, so can you be misled by misusing Strong’s concordance.
(Origin of the Universe chapter 3.5)

On the other hand, a carpenter wouldn’t go anywhere without a hammer and knows that it’s an integral part of their toolkit. Just like one needs training and experience in the use of a hammer, so it is with Strong’s. However, you’ve got to have the right trainer and the correct apprenticeship.

There are other concordances/tools available for Bible study, and they all have their positive and negative points like hammers and putters. I have chosen Strong’s because it is one of the oldest and because it is simple to follow for Bible students not acquainted with Hebrew or Greek. In saying it’s simple to use, I don’t mean that Strong’s is simplistic in its approach. Many detractors don’t know how to use Strong’s revealing its full potential in helping students progress with their Bible study.

Now, if you just happened to click on a link that brought you to this page, you might very well be wondering what this is all about. I would suggest that you take a few moments (it won’t take long) and go back to the beginning of this section by reading, in order: Why Theology?Sacred Books, The Bible and Biblical Hebrew. That overview will give you the outline to put you at ease and allow you to follow along with the development of this vital subject.

From now on, we’re going to get very practical, not only showing how to use Strong’s exhaustive concordance but how to dig for Bible understanding. Frankly, the two books: Inventory and Audit of the Universe and the beginning of this book, Origin of the Universe, give the overview and are essential to understand why we have no alternative but to broach the Biblical Hebrew of the Bible. Do you disagree? OK, then please show me where we are going to find answers to the big questions in life. Where is coherent completeness? That’s your challenge.

Dr. James Strong

Dr. James Strong was born in New York in 1822 and settled in Flushing, where he built, organized and became president of the Flushing, NY railroad. He was also deep into Theology and Divinity. He taught for some three decades and was Professor of Exegetical Theology at Drew University in Madison, NY, then known as Drew Theological Seminary, before he died in 1894. You can read a short but interesting article about his varied life achievements hereHis ultimate contribution to Bible study, as an etymologist, studying words and their meaning from the context, is Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance.

It’s Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance that I’ve made accessible online for Bible Study. The work Strong accomplished was terrific, considering there were no computers in his day; we owe him a great deal. He SEARCHED and GATHERED ALL English words in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible (translated in 1611) in the Old Testament that had the SAME HEBREW origin. Same for the New (Greek) Testament.

Another way of putting this is: Strong made a list of ALL the unique Hebrew words in the Hebrew Bible. There are some 8600 such Hebrew words. He and his team then went through the entire King James Bible, and for EACH English word, they found its Hebrew origin and tied/associated it with one of the approximate 8600 Hebrew words. He did the same for the Greek, which has about 5000 words in the New Testament.

For ease of reference, he attributed a number to each original language word: from H1 to H8675 in Hebrew and G1 to G5625 in Greek. Now, people who don’t speak these biblical languages can locate any word in English in the Bible and then quickly find and study the corresponding Hebrew and Greek original words.

So, what you have essentially, is a Hebrew word from the Old Testament manuscripts followed by ALL the translations the King James translators attributed to each display of the word in the KJV. By using the online concordance, you can quickly and easily find:

  1. ALL the English translations assigned to any ONE of the 8600 Biblical Hebrew words
  2. The verse location of ALL these English words. That means you can find and read every verse where this unique Hebrew or Greek word is in the Bible.
Bottom image shows Strong's annotations and KJV translations for Hebrew word 7225

The bottom of the image shows Strong’s annotations and the King James Version translations for Hebrew word 7225 (reshiyth).

What a humongous task, but it is a precious ongoing legacy to aid Bible study. In essence, you have access to the Hebrew and Greek original languages. There’s nothing like studying something FIRSThand rather than an imitation or copy or even an interpretation.

In the above example of H7225, we see its translation in the statement in the beginning, and we see its relation to H7218, which means head, as we discussed in key 3 of mastering Biblical Hebrew. In the next post, I’ll show you how to access a Bible concordance and verify this yourself.

Strong’s Definitions—Notes—Annotations

There are some reflections on the Hebrew and Greek word Concordance, but these are few and far between in comparison to the vehemence one can find concerning Strong’s definitions. These definitions for each Hebrew and Greek word are quite limited in length and scope. I would say they are rather simplistic. Many modern, especially online, concordances add additional information from various other sources to beef up and maybe diminish Strong’s definitions.

No theological work, be it the King James Translation of the Bible or Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance or any other is perfect. Each has its positives and negatives. However, if we want to make progress, then we need to learn how to make the best use of the best, but imperfect, tools available to us.

In my course 7 Keys to Master Biblical Hebrew, a Study Method to Unlock Bible Meaning, there’s information devoted to Strong’s Concordance, where I develop some positives and negatives. In online video courses, I’ll be further explaining the pros and cons of Strong’s Concordance and especially how to use it to aid Bible study while being aware of its quirks.

For now, keep in mind what Strong’s Concordance is NOT. It is NOT theology, the study of Theos, God. It does not give any new knowledge; it reveals no truths, does not layout any religious concepts, draws no theological conclusions. All it does is organize words based on their roots and gives some guidance notes which we can analyze.

I will conclude by saying that I’m using Strong’s so that visitors know I’m not doing my translations or using my own words; this is a 3rd party. James Strong, just like the one hundred translators of the King James Bible, is criticized like all other authors, for his authenticity and orientation. But the fundamental question is, are they honest and truthful in what they render? Are they trying to be accurate and faithful to the original? These are works done in the late 1600s and 1800s. That’s long before a lot of scientific information about the nature of the universe, the nature of humans, neurons, and the mind was around.

Today, some 300-400 years later, despite their weaknesses, outweighed by their strengths, both the KJV translation and Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance are considered mainstays in the quest to understand and unlock Bible meaning.

How to Unlock Bible Meaning – Using Biblical Hebrew with No Fuss

This blog post is an excerpt from chapter 3.5 of Origin of the Universe

 

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