Theocratic Aid To Kingdom Publishers

Lesson 60

EXHAUSTIVE CONCORDANCES (Part I)

In the year 1879 Robert Young published his Analytical Concordance to the Bible. It was the first exhaustive concordance, being a great advance over the hitherto popular Cruden's concordance. Young's as a truly exhaustive concordance contains 311,000 lines of quotations, listed in a single alphabetical order covering every verse in the King James Version Bible. It exceeds Cruden's comprehensive unabridged concordance by 118,000 references. (Young's literal translation of the Bible is also by this same Bible scholar.)

Robert Young gives the purpose of his work as follows: "The present work is ... designed to lead the simplest reader to a more correct understanding of the common English Bible, by a reference to the original words in Hebrew and Greek, with their varied shades of meaning . . . The predominating feature of this work is the Analytical arrangement of each English word under its own proper original in Hebrew or Greek, with the literal meaning of the same. By this means the reader is enabled to distinguish things that differ, which are frequently confounded in the English Bible."

How does Young's concordance supply a lightning reference to all the original Hebrew and Greek words of which a given English word is a translation 1 En its general alphabetical index, by giving first the English word, and then the Hebrew, Chaldee and Greek words thus translated in English. Under each such original word Young's then lists all texts in which the key English word is translated from that original word. Before each such original word Young's shows its meaning in the original language, often different from the common English translation.

The value of this can easily be illustrated. Suppose one wanted to fix the force of the word "master" in a certain scripture according to its meaning in the original tongue, say, the text at Matthew 23:10, "Be not ye cabled masters." There are upward of two hundred passages in which the word is found; but one's comparison of these passages would confuse rather than help to analyze and harmonize. Why? Because the King James Version translators used this one word "master" to represent five different Hebrew words, six pure Greek words, and one Hebraic-Greek word (Rabbí).

Young's, therefore, helps one to analyze the meaning, because the several passages in which the word "master" occurs are grouped respectively under Adón meaning "Lord", Baal meaning "owner", despótes meaning "despot", didáskalos meaning "teacher", and so on, down to that par-

ticular word kathegetés, meaning "leader", in Matthew 23:10, where it occurs twice. Thus the Bible student is able to avoid the mistake of connecting certain texts just because they contain the same English word. On the other hand, he is now able to relate certain texts because they contain the same word in the original, even though such original word may be translated by different English words in the Bible.

Reversing the process, one can find how many different ways a given original Hebrew or Greek word is translated in the English Bible. Young's concordance furnishes a special Index-Lexicon in the back of the volume both for the Hebrew and for the Greek. The Index-Lexicon contains an alphabetic list of all original words in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures spelled out in English characters. For an example take the Hebrew word ruach, commonly translated "spirit". By what English words other than "spirit" is ruach translated? In the Hebrew Index-Lexicon look up the word ruach, and note that thereunder it lists different English words, such as "air", "anger," "breath," "mind," "wind," etc. Following each of these words is a small number. All the words listed are used to translate ruach, and the number following each shows the number of times each is so used. It is noted that following "spirit" the number 232 appears, and a comparison with the other numbers shows this one to be the largest and hence "spirit" to be the most frequent translation of ruach. To find the Scripture texts where ruach is translated "spirit", look up the regular alphabetic index under "Spirit". The word ruach is also listed in italics, which indicates those words listed thereunder as of the Chaldee (Aramaic) text.

Another feature offered by Young's Analytical Concordance is that it lists the proper name of every person and of every place in the Bible. These words are listed alphabetically in the ordinary concordance along with the other words of the Bible. In this feature Young's partially serves as a Bible dictionary as it gives first the literal meaning

of the name itself, something as to the person and place, and distinguishes persons and places if there be several by the same name. Being a non-Theocratic work, however, the concordance is not always right in its comments. For example, it makes the common error of identifying Jethro as Moses' father-in-law instead of his brother-in-law. (The Watchtower, November 15, 1944) Where there are several Bible characters having the same name, Young's groups together all the texts relating to each one individually. As an example, see "Mary".

Young's also gives a separate list of all proper names and a guide to their recognized pronunciation in the English. This pronunciation differs from that given in the body of the concordance, where the pronunciation is given according to the original tongue. For instance, in the body of the concordance the names of two familiar men are hyphenated according to the Hebrew to read "Jo-nadab" and "Jo-nathan". But in the separate list of proper names at the end of the book the names read "Jon'adab" and "Jon'-athan", which latter pronunciations are the ones commonly used.

Two features remain: "Hints and Helps to Bible Interpretation" precedes the general alphabetical concordance and may occasionally give incidental help to the student, but not to make him an "interpreter"; a sketch on "Recent Discoveries in Bible Lands", by Wm. F. Albright, closes the studious work.