Expert: Dean Gade - 1/4/2007

Question
Dear Mr. Gade:

Can you recommend a good Greek Concordance and Lexicon for Bible study?

Thanks,
Peter  

Answer
A good Concordance to start with is Strong's "Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible".  It has two drawbacks:  It is in English and and uses the King James Version of the Bible.  But..it's easily accessed and not that expensive.

A bit more difficult to find is: Englishman's Concordance Search (or Englishman's Concordance) provides a way to search for occurrences of words throughout the Bible.  But, unlike a regular concordance which is based on an English translation of the Bible, Englishman's searches for occurrences of Strong's numbers--reflecting the original Hebrew or Greek root of a word.  Thus, each Englishman's search is performed entirely in the Old Testament, for Hebrew root words, or in the New Testament, for Greek root words.

For Lexicons, I have found the Arndt Gingrich, "A Greek English Lexicon of the New Testament and other early Christian Literature" to be completely adequate especially since they show the use of the words outside the Bible as well.

If you are at all familiar with the Greek alphabet, then you could go another step and purchase "The Analytical Greek Lexicon" published by Harper & Brothers.  This consists of an alphabetical arrangement of every occurring inflexion of every word contained in the Greek New Testament Scriptures.  It is useful in determining the meaning of certain words which change according to their grammatical case.  But then you would have to have a Greek grammatical book telling of what these changes are.

AN EASIER WAY:
might be to get a good computer program which could cover at least some of these things.    
I believe that one program which I use could be very easily used by those without much or even any study in Koine Greek.   It is "PC Study Bible" produced by BibleSoft:  www.biblesoft.com