The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible: Classic Edition

The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament was originally written in Greek and what we have in our English Bibles is English interpretations of these languages. Anyone who has learnt a second language knows it can be difficult to accurately render what is said in one language into another especially with the Hebrew that often had many different meanings for the same word. Take 1 Chronicles 16:30 which reads "Tremble before him, all the earth; Indeed the earth has been made and it can't be moved" Some who read that will say ah, the bible says the earth doesn't spin. The word that is rendered movable here is Strong's word 4131 and when we look that up in the Concordance we find the Hebrew word means "to slip, shake, fall -- be carried, cast, be out of course, be fallen, in decay" we can see that the original Hebrew doesn't say anything about the earth spinning it says the earth can't be moved out of its place. Very few English bibles will give you that impression from their interpretation and with a book like this you don't have to blindly trust their English interpretations any more!

There are 6 sections to this book: The first is the main concordance, this section lists all the words in the bible (based on the King James Version) along with all the verses that use this word and Strong's word number for the original word. This section is index from A to Z to help you find the word you're after. The second section is an Appendix to the first section this just covers small words such as And, Are, For, etc. The Third section is the Hebrew dictionary in numeric order. The fourth section is the Greek dictionary in numeric order. The fifth section looks at the biblical law, Jewish calendars, measurements and other supplements. The sixth and last section is the topical index to the bible. This is a huge and bulky book but as it says on the back and its true "Its the Only Concordance you will every really need" This book is definitely worth the investment. It is a large and bulky book which can make it awkward to carry but it does use a reasonable sized fault that I found clear and easy to read. The information this book gives you makes its large size irrelevant and if you're a bible student you're putting yourself at a disadvantage if you don't have this book!

If you really want to know what the bible says this is definitely the book to get. This concordance is still the best selling Concordance and for good reason. One disadvantage however, this book is dated and you may want to get a supplementary title such as Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary to update it. Strong's dictionary is not like Vine's which goes into detail on the original meaning of the word. Strong's dictionary is very basic, it will give you a general idea of the word's meaning in its original language but it doesn't give you much more than that. You may want to invest in an Interlinear with Strong's numbers. I have a number of these and they allow you to go straight to the dictionary and make things faster and easier. If you have an Interlinear with Strong's numbers you can avoid the need for the King James Bible for the Hebrew/Greek dictionaries which you will probably use the most. The King James Version is used the most in the Concordance and Topic Index of the Bible.