A concordance allows you to search for a word, while a dictionary gives you a definition of a word. Definitions are based on how words are used, and they can sometimes be misleading. For example, Google tells us that the meaning of drown is ‘die through submersion in and inhalation of water.’ No doubt this is probably what people naturally think of when they hear the word drown. However, not all instances of the word drown mean this, as Google also tells us. The example Google pulls from Oxford Languages is “Good pizza is not eight inches thick and drowned in tomato sauce” (total agreement there).
So here’s the issue. Definitions normally only take into account some of the uses of the words. No one dies when we cover eight inches of dough in tomato sauce (though as a pizza-lover and maker myself, part of me might die at the sight of that). Definitions are also just summaries of a group of uses. Rather than relying on someone else’s description (it is notoriously difficult, by the way, to describe word uses), you can instead just go to the uses themselves. This is what a concordance gives you.
Let’s take a real example, such as the first word in the Bible is בְּרֵאשִׁית ‘in the beginning.’ When you look up this word on Blue Letter Bible, you will see four different glosses as follows:
- Beginning
- First
- Chief
- Choice part
This gives us an idea of the range of meaning, but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. What does “first” mean here? Is it referring to something like “first in line” or “first place” or “first slice of cake” or “first child”? Can the Hebrew word רֵאשִׁית be used for all those English “firsts”? And what about “chief”? Is this the “chief of a tribe” or a parent’s “chief concern” for their children?
Of course, we could ask the same questions about the other English glosses. The problem is that we don’t know without looking at how the word is actually used. That’s the kind of information we want, and that is the kind of information a concordance gives us. We can quickly read all the examples with a particular word in it and see what kind of ‘beginning’, ‘first’, ‘chief’, and ‘choice part’ the Hebrew word can refer to. Apps like Blue Letter Bible also provide a concordance, so it is super easy to search for words using all kinds of free resources. That sets us up to figure out what the word means in a particular context.
