Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance

What Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is

Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is a complete index to the words of the King James Bible, paired with a numbering system that assigns every underlying Hebrew and Greek word a unique number and a brief dictionary entry. You look up an English word and find every verse where it appears in the KJV; next to each occurrence is a number that points to the original term behind it, and the dictionaries in the back tell you what that term means. "Exhaustive" is literal — even small words are indexed — which is what lets you locate any verse from a single remembered word.

James Strong, a professor at Drew Theological Seminary, directed a team of more than a hundred contributors and first published the concordance in 1890. The original has long been in the public domain, which is why it is free on study sites and built into nearly every Bible app; later print editions — "The New Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible" — correct and modernize the layout while keeping the numbering intact. More than a century on, the Strong’s number remains the common address the rest of the English-language study ecosystem uses to refer to an original-language word.

Why everyday readers still rely on Strong’s

The single biggest reason Strong’s outlasted its rivals is the number. A plain concordance can tell you where a word appears; Strong’s also gives every original Hebrew and Greek term a stable, unique address. That turned the concordance from a lookup tool into a foundation other tools could build on — once a word has a fixed number, a dictionary like Vine’s can key its entries to it, an interlinear can link to it, and a Bible app can let you tap a word and jump straight to it. The numbering is the quiet standard that lets all those resources talk to one another.

For a reader with no training in the original languages, that standard is what opens the door. You do not need to read the Greek or Hebrew alphabet to use Strong’s — you start from the English word in the King James text, follow it to its number, and from that number reach the original term and a definition. It is the difference between being locked out of original-language study entirely and being able to take a first, careful step into it from the English you already know. For more than a century that on-ramp is exactly what readers have valued.

The exhaustive index: find any verse from a single word

The core of the book is the concordance itself: an alphabetical list of the words in the King James Bible, and under each word, a line for every verse where it occurs with a snippet of the surrounding text. Because it is exhaustive, the index includes even minor words, so a reader who remembers only a fragment of a verse can run the memorable word down to its occurrences and find the passage. For generations this was the fastest way to locate "that verse about…" without a search box, and it is still how the printed volume earns its place on a shelf.

What sets Strong’s apart from an ordinary concordance is the number printed beside each entry, tying the English word to the specific original term it translates in that verse. That means the index does double duty: it locates the passage and, at the same time, hands you the doorway into a word study. The reader who comes to find a verse often leaves having noticed that two English words share one Greek original, or that a single Hebrew term runs through a whole passage — the kind of observation the numbering makes visible at a glance.

The numbering system: the address the whole ecosystem uses

Every Hebrew word gets a number in one sequence and every Greek word a number in another, each pointing to an entry in the dictionaries at the back of the volume. The genius of the scheme is its stability: the number for a given original word does not move, so it can serve as a permanent reference that other works cite. This is why Vine’s Expository Dictionary, the free interlinear sites, and the word-study panels in most Bible apps are all "keyed to Strong’s" — they use his numbers as the shared vocabulary for talking about original-language words.

This sounds like a small bookkeeping detail. In practice it is the reason an 1890 reference is still everywhere in 2026. A reader can find a Strong’s number in a print concordance and carry it into Blue Letter Bible, Bible Hub, or a Bible app to pull up every occurrence, the interlinear, and a fuller lexicon — all anchored to the same number. The numbering is the seam that stitches a century of separate tools into one continuous study workflow, which is a feat no rival concordance ever managed.

The Hebrew and Greek dictionaries: a working gloss, not a lexicon

Behind the index sit two dictionaries — one Hebrew, one Greek — where each numbered entry gives the original word, a transliteration, a note on its derivation, and a short definition. These are meant to give a reader a fast, working sense of what a term means in the moment, without leaving the lookup. For the common question "what is the actual word here, roughly?" they answer quickly and well, which is why so many readers treat the back-of-book dictionaries as the payoff of the whole reference.

It is also where the tool has to be used with care. Strong’s entries are brief glosses written in the late nineteenth century, not the detailed, cited, context-aware entries of a modern scholarly lexicon like BDAG or HALOT. They tell you a word’s general range, not its precise sense in the verse in front of you — and context, not the gloss, decides that. Used as a first step that points toward fuller resources, the dictionaries are invaluable; used as the final word on a passage, they can mislead a reader into over-reading a single verse.

Pricing

Where Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance falls behind

Brief glosses, not a full lexicon. The back-of-book dictionaries give a quick working definition, but they are not the detailed, cited entries of BDAG, HALOT, or TDNT. A reader doing serious exegesis will outgrow them quickly and need a modern lexicon — Strong’s is a finding aid and a first step, not the deep reference for settling a difficult word.

Keyed to the King James text. The index and the numbers are built on KJV wording, so a reader working in a modern translation has to use an edition keyed to that translation or map the words across. The free sites and many apps handle this for you, but the underlying concordance assumes the King James Bible, which is friction for readers who never use it.

Dated scholarship. Strong’s was published in 1890, and the study of biblical Hebrew and Greek has moved a great deal since. The numbering is timeless because it is just an addressing scheme, but the definitions reflect their era and should be checked against current scholarship rather than treated as the last word.

Invites over-reading. Because a number cleanly links an English word to an original term, it is easy to assume the term’s whole range of meaning applies in every verse. It does not — context determines the sense. The concordance gives you the word; the discipline of letting the passage decide its meaning is on the reader, and the book cannot do that thinking for you.

The print volume is unwieldy. An exhaustive index of the whole Bible runs to well over 1,500 dense pages, which is exactly why most readers reach for the digital form. As a desk reference the print edition is thorough but heavy, and the experience of scanning columns is one the searchable digital versions simply do better.

Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance vs. Vine’s Expository Dictionary vs. Blue Letter Bible

Different jobs, same shelf. Strong’s is the index and the numbering — it finds every occurrence of a word and gives each original term a stable address with a brief gloss. It is unmatched for locating a verse and for anchoring a word study to a number the rest of your tools recognize. At free (or around $20 in print) it is the foundation, and most serious lay readers use it constantly without thinking about it.

Vine’s Expository Dictionary is the explainer, not the index. Where Strong’s tells you which word and where it appears, Vine’s tells you what the word means and how it is used, in readable prose, arranged by the English word and keyed to Strong’s numbers. The two are natural partners: Strong’s finds the occurrences and the number, Vine’s explains the meaning, and many readers keep both within reach.

Blue Letter Bible is the free digital workstation that folds both in and adds the wiring. It layers Strong’s numbers, multiple translations, interlinears, lexicons, and commentaries into one site, so a single tap shows you what a paper Strong’s plus a paper Vine’s would take several lookups to assemble. If you want the breadth and the cross-linking for free, it is the more powerful pick; Strong’s remains the standard it is built on. Many readers use the free Strong’s data inside a tool like Blue Letter Bible and never touch the printed book at all.

Alternatives to Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance