Every good student of God’s holy Word must have certain tools and resources in their library. One of those tools is a concordance. Enter the ESV Exhaustive Concordance published by Crossway.
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What is a Concordance?
A concordance is an index of words that are found in the Bible. It lists biblical words alphabetically, indicating every single place in the entire Bible where that specific word is used. For instance, let’s say that one is interested in doing a study on the topic of love. Just as you would in a dictionary, you can turn to the “L” section of the concordance and find the term “love” as listed alphabetically. One could then see a list of every single place in the Bible that the term “love” is found.
A concordance is an excellent resource for word studies and for quickly finding particular verse in the Bible! If you want to be better equipped and resourced to study well, then I highly recommend a concordance.
ESV Exhaustive Concordance
The ESV Exhaustive Concordance utilizes the English Standard Version (ESV) of the Bible, a word-for-word translation that is exceptionally accurate and readable (my personal translation of choice, if you can’t tell). There are nearly 14,000 different words found in this amazing resource! Think about that for a second: every single occurrence of 14,000 words is found in this book. That is more than 340,000 entries! Even the word “and” is found in this concordance, with 40,291 entries (and yes, every single one of those entries is listed!).
There is also a Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek glossary in the back of the book. Does using a concordance sound confusing to you? Are you wondering what to do with the glossaries in the back of the book, or what to make of the subscripts? No worries! There is a brief, yet very helpful, introduction that explains how to use this concordance.
As you can imagine, that means this is a big book, and it comes in at 1500 pages. It is certainly an impressive piece of work. It is a beautiful hardcover book with a simple and eloquent design on the cover. The paper is very nice quality Bible paper. Of course there is going to be some “ghosting” (you’re able to see through the paper depending on the lighting), but that is quite minimal. The font is very small (as all concordances are), but that is due to the sheer amount of information in this book! If the font were to be bigger, it would easily exceed 2500 pages and would probably break your bookshelf.
This is a beautiful, useful, helpful, easy-to-use resource that is an excellent tool for every student of God’s Word! The best part is that it’s a companion tool for the ESV translation, the English translation that I recommend more so than any other translations available today (not that there aren’t other good English translations available today, but I believe this to be the best in terms of readability and accuracy). For these reasons, I highly recommend the ESV Exhaustive Concordance to you. You won’t regret adding excellent tools to your library such as this!
Disclaimer: My thanks to Crossway Publishers for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. The opinions expressed are my own.
Matt became a joyful follower of Jesus at the age of 21. He is very grateful to be a husband to Lindsey, and a father to four boys. He is an ordained minister (teaching elder) in the PCA. He previously served as a pastor of biblical counseling and is currently a corporate chaplain in southern Delaware. Matt received his Master of Divinity degree in Biblical Counseling from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary and holds an advanced certification in biblical counseling from the Association of Biblical Counselors. In his free time, he loves playing with his boys, traveling with his wife, and reading (and buying!) books.
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