Your One-Stop Directory to the "Good Book"

(This post is primarily intended to showcase reference sources related to the study of the Hebrew or Christian Bible. This post is not intended to endorse or promote any religion or scriptural tradition; it is merely intended as a resource to people who take an interest in such things.)

Have you ever remembered part of a Bible quote and wondered about its context?  Did you flip through page after page of your Bible in vain, struggling to track it down?  Well then, you probably didn't know about an amazing resource that you can find in just about any public library reference or religion section: a Bible Concordance.

The New Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible by James Strong, LL.D., S.T.D. is an oldie but a goodie, first published in 1890 (with this revised edition published exactly 100 years later).  It is essentially a thorough index of just about every verse of the King James Bible, with headings for the main words that appear in the verse.  You can look up all the verses that mention David by name.  You can  look up "Babylon" to find the number of that beautiful and sad historical psalm, "By the Rivers of Babylon" (Ps. 137).  (Or, if you happen to find the end of that psalm regarding the murder of infants not...so...beautiful... you will discover a very similar curse uttered in Hosea that you might never have heard before--I hadn't.  Look it up in the concordance under the heading "Infants"--it's Hosea 13:16, and bears a striking resemblance to Psalm 137.) 

And actually, it's not just the main words of each verse that get their own headings.  Words like "on" and "against" get pages and pages of references.  But words like "a," "an," and "the" are not forgotten!  They are actually given their own appendix in the book with the notation for all of the verses they appear in under subheadings for each book of the Bible!  Okay, talk about "exhaustive"! 

I haven't even gotten to the best part yet... Most entries include a four-digit number at the end of the row (far right).  This is a reference to the Greek and Hebrew dictionaries in the back of the book, so that you can look up the word, the way it is written, and its meaning!  Following this is a subject index in which you can find verses listed for each subject talked about in the Bible (in case the word you're using to define that subject isn't mentioned directly in the quote). 

There is a miscellaneous appendix with some more interesting facts and figures, including a list of prophecies in the Old Testament that are claimed to be fulfilled by the Jesus of the New Testament.  For any Bible scholar, believing or nonbelieving, or really for any scholar of Western literature, culture and philosophy, this is an essential guide to everything you could want to know about the text of the Bible.  And although I'm not sure how necessary it was to list every single instance of the word "a," nevertheless, I'm giving this my highest rating for quality.

Dewey Decimal Number: 220.5

Rating: 5Q, 3P