What Is a Bible Concordance? (How to Use One)

What a Concordance Is—and What It Is Not

A concordance is an index, not a dictionary. It locates words; it does not define them. This distinction matters more than it might appear.

When you look up the word "peace" in a concordance, you receive a list of every verse in the Bible that contains the English word "peace" in that particular translation. What you do not receive is a definition of peace, an account of the Hebrew or Greek semantic range, a distinction between the various words translated "peace," or any judgment about which usage is most theologically significant. For those things, you need a lexicon—a biblical dictionary organized by the original-language word rather than the English translation.

The value of a concordance is that it surfaces patterns. If you want to know how a word functions across a book, an author, or the whole canon, a concordance gives you the full list of references instantly. You can then examine those references one by one, observe how the author uses the term in different contexts, and draw conclusions grounded in the full range of usage rather than a single passage.

This is also where a concordance reveals one of the persistent complexities of Bible study: one English word may translate multiple Hebrew or Greek words, and one Hebrew or Greek word may be translated into English by multiple different words. A concordance keyed to the original languages—like Young's or Strong's—makes this visible. A simple alphabetical concordance based on the English text alone does not.

A Brief History of Bible Concordances

The first known concordance of any Scripture was produced in the thirteenth century. Hugo de Saint-Cher, a Dominican friar working at the University of Paris around 1230, organized as many as five hundred Dominican friars to compile a concordance of the Latin Vulgate. It was an enormous undertaking: every significant word in the Bible indexed by hand, copied, and organized alphabetically. The project took years and required a cooperative effort that would not be attempted again at that scale until the printing press made mass reproduction possible.

Alexander Cruden (1699–1770) produced the first major English-language concordance largely on his own. His Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures was published in 1737 and indexed every word of the King James Version. Cruden was a Scottish bookseller who undertook the project as an act of personal devotion and scholarship. He worked on it for years, laboring with extraordinary care for a single person working without assistance. The concordance went through multiple editions during his lifetime and remained the standard English concordance for well over a century. Its title is somewhat misleading by modern standards—later concordances proved more exhaustive—but its importance in the history of English Bible study is difficult to overstate.

Robert Young (1822–1888), a Scottish self-taught linguist and scholar, published his Analytical Concordance to the Bible in 1879. Young's innovation was to organize entries not just alphabetically by English word but by the underlying Hebrew or Greek word. Under each English entry, he grouped verses by which original-language term they translated, so that a student could see at a glance that the English word "love," for instance, represents several distinct Hebrew and Greek words. Young's concordance also included brief transliteration and a notation of the original term's meaning. It remains in print today and is particularly valued by students who want analytical precision without undertaking full lexicon study.

James Strong (1822–1894), a Methodist theologian and professor at Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey, published his Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible in 1890 after thirty-five years of work. Strong's concordance indexes every word in the King James Version and assigns a unique number to each Hebrew and Greek word in the biblical text. These numbers—Strong's numbers—allow a reader without knowledge of the original languages to identify the specific Hebrew or Greek term behind any English word and look it up in the accompanying Hebrew and Greek dictionaries at the back of the volume. The concordance is called exhaustive because it includes every occurrence of every word, including particles, prepositions, and articles that earlier concordances had omitted.

Strong's Exhaustive Concordance became the most widely used reference tool in English-language Bible study and remains the standard against which digital word-study tools are measured.

Types of Concordances

Not all concordances cover the same ground or serve the same purpose.

Beyond these categories, concordances are also distinguished by which translation they index. A concordance built on the King James Version is not directly useful for word study when reading the English Standard Version or the New International Version, because different translations render original-language terms with different English words. Translation-specific concordances exist for the ESV, NIV, NASB, and other major versions, though they vary in the depth of their original-language indexing.

The practical consequence is that you should match your concordance to your primary Bible translation—or move to a digital tool that can work across translations simultaneously. For a comparison of the major English translations, see our guide on Bible translations.

How to Use a Concordance

The basic workflow is the same regardless of which concordance you use.

Step 1: Identify the word you want to study. Suppose you are studying Romans 5 and want to understand what Paul means by "justified." You note the English word and move to the concordance.

Step 2: Find the word alphabetically. Under "justified" you will find a list of every verse in your translation where that word appears. Each entry includes the book, chapter, and verse, along with enough surrounding text to identify the passage without looking it up.

Step 3: Read through the full list. This is the concordance doing its core job. You are now looking at every use of that word across Scripture. Notice which books use it heavily, which authors favor it, and how the surrounding context shifts from occurrence to occurrence.

Step 4: Look for patterns and ask questions. Does the word appear in similar contexts across different authors? Does it shift in meaning between the Old and New Testaments? Are there passages where its use seems distinctive or unexpected? These observations become the basis for interpretation.

If you are using an exhaustive concordance like Strong's, each verse entry will include a number in the margin linking to the Hebrew or Greek word behind that English translation. You can look that word up in the dictionary at the back of the volume to see the original term, its root, and a brief definition. Young's Analytical Concordance does the same thing differently — it groups entries under each English word by their underlying original-language term, so you can see at a glance when "justified" is translating two different Greek words.

This process does not replace lexicon study or commentary reading. It opens the door to it. The concordance tells you where to look; the lexicon and commentary tell you what to make of what you find.

The Limits of a Concordance

A concordance is a location tool, not an interpretation tool. This is worth stating plainly, because students sometimes use concordances to draw conclusions the tool cannot support.

The most common error is assuming that every occurrence of a word carries the same meaning. It does not. The Greek word sarx, typically translated "flesh," is used in the New Testament to refer to physical body tissue, to sinful human nature, to ethnic ancestry, and to human beings generally. A word study that assumes sarx means the same thing in every occurrence will produce confused exegesis. The concordance shows you all the places the word appears; the lexicon and commentaries help you determine what it means in each context.

A related error is assuming that because a word appears in two passages, the passages must be illuminating each other. This is not always the case. Word links can be meaningful—Matthew's use of Exodus language, Paul's quotations of the Psalms—but they are not automatically significant. Context, authorial intent, and canonical structure all bear on whether a verbal parallel carries interpretive weight.

Scholars have referred to this danger as "illegitimate totality transfer"—the mistake of reading the full semantic range of a word into every specific occurrence. James Barr's The Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford University Press, 1961) remains the most rigorous analysis of this problem, though it predates the digital word-study era. His argument is that meaning is determined by usage in context, not by the full range of a word's possible meanings accumulated across time.

Used within its limits, a concordance is invaluable. Used beyond them, it produces exegesis that is technically grounded and interpretively unreliable at the same time. For a full picture of what belongs alongside a concordance in a serious study toolkit, see our guide to the best Bible study tools.

Print Concordances and Digital Word Study

For most of the twentieth century, a print concordance was an essential component of any serious student's reference library. The standard setup for a pastor or Bible teacher included Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, a Hebrew lexicon (Brown-Driver-Briggs or Gesenius), a Greek lexicon (Thayer's, Bauer-Arndt-Gingrich, or the Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament by Louw and Nida), and an interlinear Bible. The concordance was the entry point that connected the others.

Digital tools have largely replaced this workflow, or rather, they have absorbed it into something faster and more integrated. A modern Bible study platform indexes the full text of multiple translations simultaneously, links every word to its Strong's number automatically, displays the original-language entry on demand, and surfaces every occurrence across the canon without requiring the student to flip between volumes. What once took twenty minutes of physical searching now takes seconds.

This has not made the underlying skills less important. Understanding what a concordance does—and what it cannot do—is essential for using any word-study tool responsibly, digital or otherwise. The display layer changes; the interpretive questions remain the same.

What has changed is accessibility. Before digital tools, meaningful engagement with the original languages required owning multiple expensive reference volumes and learning how to navigate them. Now a student with a well-designed Bible study application can move from English text to original language to lexical entry to cross-references in a single session, without prior experience with print concordances at all.

How Lumenology Supports Word Study

Lumenology is built around the kind of study that a concordance is meant to enable—moving from a word in the English text to the original language and then tracing that word across Scripture with precision.

The Word Study tool surfaces the Hebrew or Greek term behind any word in the passage you are reading, displays the Strong's number and lexical range, and lists related passages across the canon so you can see how the word functions in different contexts. It replaces the physical workflow of concordance lookup, dictionary consultation, and cross-reference assembly in a single integrated panel.

The Bible reader lets you compare multiple translations side by side, which addresses one of the core limitations of any single-translation concordance: when you can see how different translations render the same Greek or Hebrew term, the translation choices themselves become part of your study.

Research Assistant returns cited answers when you have interpretive questions—what does this word mean in this context, how have commentators understood this passage, what is the range of scholarly opinion on this term's usage? The answers are grounded in named sources rather than raw model generation, so you can verify claims against the actual reference material.

The tools are designed to support the same discipline that print concordances have always served: careful attention to the actual words of the text, in their original form, across their full canonical range. The medium is different. The task is the same.

FAQ

What is the difference between a concordance and a lexicon?

A concordance lists where a word appears. A lexicon defines what a word means. Both are organized by word, but a concordance is keyed to the English translation and provides references, while a lexicon is keyed to the original Hebrew or Greek term and provides a detailed account of its meaning, root, range of usage, and grammatical forms. In practice, you use a concordance to find where a word appears and which original term underlies it, then move to a lexicon to understand what that term actually means. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance includes brief dictionary entries that provide some lexical information, but they are not a substitute for a full lexicon like Brown-Driver-Briggs (Hebrew) or Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich (Greek).

Do I need to know Hebrew or Greek to use a concordance?

No. The design of Strong's Exhaustive Concordance was specifically intended to allow students without knowledge of the original languages to identify and look up the Hebrew or Greek term behind any English word. You do not need to read the original languages—you need to follow the number. That said, even a basic familiarity with how Hebrew and Greek work improves the quality of word study considerably, because it helps you understand why a word carries different nuances in different grammatical contexts.

Does every concordance use Strong's numbers?

No. Strong's numbers are the most widely used reference system in English-language Bible study, but they are not universal. Young's Analytical Concordance organizes entries by original-language word without using Strong's numbers. Concordances built on translations other than the King James Version may use the same numbers or may use alternative systems. Most major digital Bible study platforms have adopted Strong's numbers as a common reference layer because it allows content from different sources to be linked consistently.

Is a concordance useful if I read a modern translation like the ESV or NIV?

Yes, with the caveat that you need a concordance matched to your translation. A King James concordance will not list references correctly for an ESV or NIV reader, because the translations use different English words for the same original-language terms. ESV and NIV concordances exist and follow the same general structure as Strong's. Alternatively, digital tools solve this problem by indexing multiple translations simultaneously and linking all of them to the same underlying Strong's numbers, so you can do word study from any translation without worrying about which physical concordance to use.