Wednesday, April 13, 2022

David J. Burke (Christadelphian), "Why you should avoid Strong’s Concordance"

  

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 Strong’s is based on legacy scholarship, contains inaccurate definitions, and was superseded more than 100 years ago, by far superior tools.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from Wilhelm Gesenius’ Lexicon Manuele Hebraicum et Chaldaicum in Veteris Testamenti Libros (1833), which was superseded by Brown, Driver, and Brigg’s A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1891-1905).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But in his heyday of archaeological discovery, even BDB was quickly superseded by discoveries (in 1929 and later) in Palestine, especially at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit.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)