Why you should avoid Strong’s
Concordance
Most of us are familiar with Strong’s
Concordance. This reference work has very limited applicability, and is completely
unsuitable for in-depth Bible study. Strong’s is based on legacy
scholarship, contains inaccurate definitions, and was superseded more than 100
years ago, by far superior tools.
Strong’s takes
its Hebrew definitions from Wilhelm Gesenius’ Lexicon Manuele Hebraicum et
Chaldaicum in Veteris Testamenti Libros (1833), which was superseded by
Brown, Driver, and Brigg’s A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament
(1891-1905). By 1929, ancient Hebrew scholarship has been revolutionised by
new discoveries, and all older works were now completely redundant:
‘BDB reflected the new discoveries
in the Middle East during the latter half of the 19th century and, importantly,
the rise of new methods of the study of language: structuralism (Saussure), descriptive
(Bloomfield, et al) and comparative linguistics, that is, using other Semitic languages
to holy puzzle out of the meanings of Hebrew words and expressions.
But in his heyday of
archaeological discovery, even BDB was quickly superseded by discoveries (in
1929 and later) in Palestine, especially at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit. There,
a huge repository of clay tablets was discovered, including those using an
alphabetic writing system to record a language that is closely related to
Hebrew.
With such a wealth of new
material, Hebrew lexicography changed dramatically, with new lemmas proposed
and old lemmas dropped. Additional scholarship reassigned lemmas to specific
occurrences in the Hebrew text.
If Strong compiled his Hebrew and
Greek dictionaries and associated list of lemmas today, it would be quite a
different list, including the assignment of those lemmas to words in the text.
And Strong might not have chosen the King James Version to concord.’ (Kirk
Lowery, ‘Strong’s
Numbers & the Problem of a Universal Index.’)
Strong’s can
tell you all the various different ways a word has been translated in the King
James Version, but it offers no way of determining whether or not these
translations are accurate.
Use of Strong’s typically results
in bad study habits, such as assuming that the true meaning of a text can be
derived from a study of root words rather than their derivatives. This is incompletely
incorrect. When seeking to interpret Scripture, we must look at the contexts
first, and the words second. This is because context determines meaning. The
word alone will tell us little or nothing.
Another common error resulting
from a mistaken reliance on Strong’s is the ‘root word fallacy.’ This
occurs when a reader concludes that the meaning of a word is always from
its individual parts. One of the most well-known examples of this fallacy is
the misinterpretation of the Greek word ekklesia:
‘Ekkliesia –
One often hears that since this word is built from the preposition ek (from)
and the verb kaleo (to call) it means “the called-out ones” or something
similar.
. . . As true as it may be that
Christians have been called out of the world and into the Body of Christ or Family
of God, there is absolutely no indication that this was its emphasis or meaning
in NT times. It simply means congregation or assembly and refers to a gathering
of people, really any people, yet in the NT that group of people happens to be
Christians.
This faulty translation could in
part be due to the reader misunderstanding the nature of the Greek language used
in the New Testament. It was the common language of the day used by the common
man, and not a divine spiritual language with special spiritual leanings
particular to the New Testament.’ (‘Common
Exegetical Fallacies.’)
There is no justification for using
Strong’s Concordance today. (David J. Burke, Servants of the Lord: A
Bible Study Handbook [Bible Interpretation Series 1; Lively Stones
Publishers, 2017], 132-34)
