Talk:Strong's Concordance

Cruden's concordance
Wouldn't Alexander Cruden's concordance be at least as widely used as Strong's? It has been around in various forms since 1737, and was a solo effort --scruss 20:54, 3 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Interesting -- I hadn't heard of Cruden's before you mentioned it. I just did some google searching on the most popular ones: (The same searches without the "'s" at the end had similar results.)


 * "Cruden's Concordance" (1737) has 2,780
 * "Young's Concordance" (1879) with 943 hits
 * "Strong's Concordance" (1894) came up with 24,800 hits

So, it seems that Cruden's is important historically, but not as popular today as Strong's. The biggest advantage of Strong's may be that every word is assigned a unique number, which is not true for the other ones. I found a phrase that showed up on several pages, "Young’s for the young, Strong’s for the strong, Cruden’s for the crude". I don't mean to knock Cruden's concordance though, for its time it was an amazing achievement. It probably is most comparable to Samuel Johnson's dictionary -- you wouldn't want to rely upon it today, but was still an amazing achievement. Actually, maybe there should be an article on biblical concordances, distinct from the concordance article. --Arcadian 00:21, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * I'd suggest merging the page on Cruden's Concordance & Strong's Concordanceintoone that is simply called "Biblical COncordances". Then add a paragraph about Young's concordance.

I doubt that the current page on Cruden's Conrdance will ever be more than a stub. Likewise, an article on Young's concordance will neverbemorethan a stub. In a page "Biblical COncordances", one could discuss each of the major concordances in a couple ofparagraphs, then have a sub-section that contrasts them. Cruden's is used by laity, Strong's by clergy.I'm not sure who uses Young's.

Another datapoint is that other numbering schemes could also be discussed,or at least referred to. [Or would it be out of place to point to alternatives to Strong's Numbers, in this article?]

67.136.137.125 19:37, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

Numbering
So... The article states that there are 5624 Greek words in the new testament, but I do not believe that this is accurate. Indeed there are 5624 Strong's numbers for the Greek, however, only words with the same root were numbered, so &#945;&#947;&#945;&#960;&#951;&#963;&#949;&#953;&#962; appears the same as &#945;&#947;&#945;&#960;&#945;&#964;&#949;, for example--both are listed as Strong's #25 "&#945;&#947;&#945;&#960;&#945;&#969;". Even disregarding different stems for these words, however, there are not even 5624 root words, as numbers 3203-3302 are simply not used. See http://www.htmlbible.com/sacrednamebiblecom/kjvstrongs/STRINDEX.htm. I would love to change this to the proper number, but I'm not sure what it is. Raymondofrish 19:30, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I added a paragraph about the issues with number as described above. Raymondofrish 28 June 2005 15:51 (UTC)

Good catch. I did a little more googling and found this and this, which state that word 2717 is also missing, so I've updated the total to reflect that. Interestingly, this source implies that 1418 and 4452 are also missing, but since they weren't noted as such in the concordance itself, I'm inclined to interpret that as less authoratitive. However, it sounds like you're pretty familiar with the subject, and I'm just googling, so by all means if you come up with a better number, put it in. --Arcadian 28 June 2005 16:30 (UTC)

Goodrick-Kohlenberger numbers?
Should we have a little something about the Goodrick-Kohlenberger numbers? These numbers are like Strong's but are more modern. They were thought up by Edward W. Goodrick and John R. Kohlenberger for the NIV 20 years ago. - Hoshie | 15:56, 22 October 2005 (UTC)

Goodrick-Kohlenberger numbers were developed for the NIV concordance. The introduction to the NIV Exhaustive Concordance states a number of reasons why Goodrick and Kohlenberger went to the trouble of developing a new numbering system rather than use Strong's system. They say, "Advances in biblical scholarship have made it difficult if not impossible to use Strong's century old system. 1. Strong's system indexes only the vocabulary of the original-language texts that underlie the KJV. 2. Modern analysis of the biblical languages divides many words of identical spelling into two or three or more unique 'homographs' - words with the same spelling but different meanings such as the English word bow. 3. Strong mixed Hebrew and Aramaic vocabularies together. 4. Strong suffers from numerous typographical and factual errors.

Rather than patch up Strong's well worn system the editors of the NIV Exhaustive Concordance decided on a clean break and develop a new standard."

Page move?
For what it's worth, I hadn't heard of Cruden's concordance either. Anyway, is it worth moving the Strong's Concordance page to redirect to Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible?

I have never moved a page before, so I would like to know what other people think. Michael2 10:17, 10 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't think the page should be moved. In Wikipedia, the general rule is that the name of an article should be what a general reader, not a specialist, would look for.  See Naming conventions.   The current name is the best name under that policy. -- DS1953 talk  13:53, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

OK then, what about the alternative of creating a Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible page and having it redirect to the Strong's Concordance page? The reason I suggest it is because two years ago, I had never heard of Strong's Concordance itself. I bought a copy and wanted to learn about it on Wikipedia, so I typed in the full title, but it came up with nothing (I think the search engine technology was different then). To some extent, general readers wouldn't know of the Strong's Concordance title either, and assume that Wikipedia has no information about it. Michael2 10:25, 11 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Done. -- DS1953 talk 13:55, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

In modern software
It could be useful to give information of how Strong's numbers are used in modern computer software. Concordances have become useless (with computers) because computers can do searches, but the numbers are still in use in almost all Bible software. And Strong's dictionaries may be more familiar to new users than concordances.


 * Concordances are not useless. *If* you have the text of Bible in computer readable form then you can scan for text strings but a concordance will also list variations on a work, e.g. under 'burn' a concordance would also list 'burning', 'burnt', etc.  You could scan for 'burn' rather than ' burn ' but that would also turn up 'auburn', 'coburn', 'tyburn', etc.


 * A computer program, rather than a simple text search, could look for all those variants but that is in essence a concordance.


 * Also you may well not have the Bible text in computer readable form. The older translations (e.g. Authorized or King James, Revised Version) are sufficiently old as to be in the public domain but the more modern translations(e.g. Living 1971, Good News 1976, New International 1978) are all copyright.
 * FerdinandFrog (talk) 13:16, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Charles Dickens?
As a curiosity, there is a character, "Dr. Strong", in Dickens, I think it was in David Copperfield, who is compiling a dictionary of "Greek roots". I had always supposed it was an older contemporary that Dickens actually knew, but the timing seems wrong (Dickens died in 1870 or so I think). Does anyone know anything about this, is it just pure coincidence? Thanks — Wwheaton (talk) 16:49, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

A couple of suggestions
Having just read the article, here are a couple of suggestions for improving it. Cheers, Alan --A R King (talk) 06:27, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
 * The last two paragraphs sound a bit subjective, in fact they read as if someone has an axe to grind, which is fine but not in an encyclopedia or not in this way. I think style is really the issue here.
 * There is a (to me) blantant anglocentrism that should be weeded out of the penultimate paragraph: "The use of Strong's numbers is not a substitute for professional translation of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into English..." Wait a minute, who said "professional translation of the Bible" needs to be "into English"? As the most translated book in the world, English is no more than one of the hundreds (thousands?) of languages into which the bible has been and will be translated. Actually the two words "into English" are simply superfluous in the sentence, no?


 * This is the English language Wikipedia and Strong's is an English language concordance so I think talking about translating into English makes sense - I would expect a page on, say, the French language Wikipedia making a similar point about a French concordance to refer to translating into French. I suspect that when translating the original text into, again say, French that Strong's might be of limited (or even very limited) use; what is one word in English may be two, or more, in French and vice versa.
 * FerdinandFrog (talk) 13:25, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Strong and his team has made a valuable contribution over a hundred years ago. Given the limited man power and constraints of the time, they did a wonderful job. Their mashing the root word and its derivatives into one number was a meaningful compromise. However, that leads to ambiguity. What the world needs now is a Wiki-Strong numbers which removes the ambiguity. The root word would retain the Strong number, but each derivative would have a letter appended to it. Each Wiki-Strong number would have a precise definition. Where there are multiple definitions, rank choice voting would be used by contributors. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting The popular definitions would be listed first. With thousands of contributors it should not take long to create a Wiki-Strong number. On line bibles like the Blue Letter Bible could adapt quickly and make the bible more understandable. Thank you and God Bless, — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andrew M. Kameya (talk • contribs) 13:08, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Dates and edition corrections
Some clarity as to the dates of publication, and editions, etc., would be nice.

Some later additions claimed that they corrected mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, the concordance might not actually include every word of the Bible in it with references and numbers for every one....

Misty MH (talk) 19:50, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I can't figure out how to edit this from the app.... I guess I will have to wait till I get to a computer. Misty MH (talk) 19:51, 21 April 2021 (UTC)