The Concordance

What’s In Your Bible the Concordance.

The Concordance is an amazing tool to help you study and understand the Bible.

It has every single word that’s in the Bible.

It has an English definition of every Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee word.

(Chaldee is the proper term for Aramaic)

It has every nuance as to how the word is used or what root the word stems from.

Let’s say you wanted to see how a word is used all throughout the Bible.

Let’s look up the word Whale.

There are 3 different renderings of the word Whale.

You have Whale [Singular], Whale’s [Possessive] and Whales [plural]

A portion of the verse is provided to show which verse it’s in.

To save space, the word you are searching for, in this case whale, is represented by the first letter of the word capitalized and in italics.

Then to the right, the number of the word in relation to Greek, Hebrew, or Chaldee.

Once you get that number, you turn to the back portion of the Concordance and look up the definition.

(You’ll need to know if the verse is in the Old or New testament,

If it’s in the Old Testament, you look up the Hebrew word numbers,

New Testament verses are in the Greek section.

For the word Whale in Job, we see that the word number is 8577.

We turn to the Hebrew and Chaldee section and look up number 8577.

Once you find the number it gives you the word in Hebrew letters,

then the pronunciation of the word,

then sometimes where the word stems from.

In this instance it comes from the root word as 8565. {Read it.}

CU Sometimes the stem words help, sometimes they don’t.

Going back to the initial Hebrew word tan-neem we see the definition of : a marine or land monster, i.e. sea-serpent or jackal: Dragon, sea-monster, serpent, whale.

Now we go back and see how else whale is used.

In Ezekiel 22 it uses the root word (like we read about earlier)

In Matthew 12:40 in three nights in the Whale’s belly, we look up the Greek word 2785 in the New Testament Greek dictionary.

So we go to the Greek portion in the back of the concordance and find the Greek letters and English pronunciation Key’ tos a huge fish (as gaping for prey): whale.

So the word Whale is used in both the old and new testaments the same way or definition.

Another great usage is where there’s a verse you know is somewhere in the Bible

but you only know a word or two from the verse and don’t know where it is.

Take one of the key words that are distinctive to the verse and look it up in the Concordance.

Every verse is listed in the Bible, so you can easily find it.

“What’s that verse where Jael hammered a tent stake in Sisera’s head…”

We look up stake and it isn’t there. So maybe it wasn’t a tent stake.

Hammer is a distinctive word, let’s look up hammer.

‘took an hammer in her hand and went. That’s it! Judges 4:21

Here it is,

Then Jael Heber's wife took a nail of the tent,

Ah, it was a nail not a tent stake!

and took an hammer in her hand, and went softly unto him, and smote the nail into his temples, and fastened it into the ground: for he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.

Jael’s awesome!

We could have looked up the word Tent, but a lot more references to search from than hammer.

Be careful, From my experience, online concordances aren’t always accurate.

Sometimes they’re missing words, or attribute the wrong definition to the word or wrong reference.

Or they might claim it’s a Strong’s Condcordance, but they’ve snuck in definitions from somewhere else.

In any case, It’s always good to have a hardcopy for your library. Especially when technology doesn’t work.

Strong’s is the most used standard Concordance

while Young’s Analytical concordance is more basic with less bells and whistles but has different information to where both could be used for a deeper study.

It’s said Youngs is for the Young Christian and Strongs is for the stronger Christian.

You can find them cheap at thrift stores or on Ebay.

Concordances are a very effective tool to help you

Study to Shew thyself approved unto God.