Bible Concordance

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Title page of a Bible concordance by Wenzel Niederwerfer , 1734

A Bible Concordance is a list of all or all of the important words in the text of the Bible , at least with an indication of the place where they were found and, conveniently, also with a description of the respective context .

Such a concordance is used for the study of the Bible in order to simplify the examination of parallel passages and the vocabulary of the respective Bible text.

Latin Vulgate

Bible concordances were first drawn up for the Latin Bible text of the Vulgate , the first complete concordance from 1230 (in use from 1239) under the leadership of the Dominican Hugo von St. Charo († 1236) in the Jacobin monastery in Paris , who was responsible for the identification of the chapters by Stephen Langton († 1228) and supplemented this by dividing the chapters into seven, a citation system that was retained until the introduction of today's verse counting by Robert Estienne .

While Hugo's inventory only offered a brief concordance with job details but without the context of the cited passages and was therefore later referred to as Concordantia brevis , other Dominicans added quotes from the respective text passages in the years up to 1252, thereby creating the so-called Concordantiae maximae . This inventory, which is very voluminous because of the lavish length of the quotations, was revised again by Konrad von Halberstadt († around 1363) and the contextual quotations were shortened to a less extensive edition, which became known under the title Concordantiae maiores .

Vulgate

Caused by theological discussions at the Council of Basel , the Dominican Johannes von Ragusa († 1443) had various collaborators in the 15th century again create a partial concordance, which was limited to the "dictiones indeclinabiles" and in 1496 by Sebastian Brant together with the Concordantiae maiores was published in print.

These medieval and early modern concordances of the Vulgate formed the starting point for the numerous printed and repeatedly adapted concordances up to the more recent times, which were only replaced by the electronically based concordance of the Benedictine Bonifatius Fischer , printed in 1977 in Stuttgart by Frommann-Holzboog in five volumes . Fischer created his edition by entering the critical text of the Stuttgart edition of the Vulgate (2nd edition 1975) including the entries in the critical apparatus on 8-channel punched tape and using the word forms developed by Roberto Busa  SJ for his Index Thomisticus (and expanded in Tübingen for this purpose) “Lexicon Electronicum Latinum” reduced to the basic lexical forms. To avoid transcription errors, the text was recorded twice and compared automatically. The computer work was carried out in the Center for Data Processing at the University of Tübingen with the help of programs from which the Tübingen system of word processing programs TUSTEP arose .

Hebrew text

The first concordance of the Hebrew text was drawn up between 1437 and 1447 by the French philosopher and theologian Isaak Nathan ben Kalonymus from Arles , who called his work Meïr Natib (Illuminator of the Way) and wanted to provide an aid for theological discussions with Christian theologians and Jewish apostates to find the scriptures needed for the argument more easily. Isaak Nathan followed the example of the Vulgate and its concordances by adopting the order of the books in the Vulgate and their chapter and verse division, a novelty in the Jewish treatment of the Hebrew Bible text. His Concordance was first printed in Venice in 1523 and then in an edition revised by Johannes Reuchlin and supplemented with Latin explanations in 1556 in Basel . An edition of the Franciscan Mario di Calasio († 1620), who worked as a Hebrew teacher in Rome and was the confessor of Pope Paul V, was published posthumously in 1621 in Rome, expanded to include an Aramaic concordance and subject and name indexes . A similar, more thorough revision by the Basel Protestant and Hebrew professor Johann Buxtorf the Elder († 1629) was published after his death in 1632 by his son and successor Johann Buxtorf the Younger († 1664) in Basel, and subsequently revised and trained several times by others then the basis for the comprehensive revision by Julius Fürst (Leipzig 1840). The Concordance by Salomon Mandelkern (Leipzig 1896, shorter edition Leipzig 1900) is based on a critical revision of these predecessors .

Two versions of a concordance of the Masoretic text, which the poet and philologist Elijah Levita wrote in Italy in the first half of the 16th century and (in the 2nd edition) Sefer Sichronot (Book of Remembrance), have survived independently of Isaac Nathan and are only handwritten. called. The first, completed between 1515 and 1521 and now in the Munich State Library , he dedicated to the Cardinal of Viterbo, Egidio da Viterbo , and the second he completed in Venice in 1536 . It is now in the Paris National Library .

Old Testament Greek text

A concordance to the Greek text of the Septuagint and the New Testament is said to have existed in Rome as early as the end of the 13th century, but nothing of its text has survived. The first Concordance of the Septuagint, supplemented by Hebrew word equivalents, was published in 1607 by Conrad Kircher († 1622) from Augsburg in Frankfurt, and a second edition was published in Wittenberg in 1622. In a polemical dispute with Kircher, the Dutchman Abraham van der Trommen ("Trommius"; † 1719) published a concordance of the Septuagint in Amsterdam in 1718 , which also included the versions of Aquila, Symmachus and Theodotion from the Hexapla of Origen and based on preliminary work by the Dominican Bernard de Montfaucon († 1741) supported.

These older works were replaced in 1892-1897 by the great Oxford Concordance by Edwin Hatch and Henry Redpath , which includes not only the Septuagint and the versions of the Hexapla but also the Old Testament Apocrypha, also cites Hebrew equivalents and in 1900 a supplement was added to proper names .

Greek text of the New Testament

After Erasmus von Rotterdam first published the Greek textus receptus of the New Testament in print in 1516 , the Augsburg school principal Sixtus Birken (Xystus Betuleius; † 1554) created a concordance with the help of his students, which was printed in Basel in 1546.

Further concordances followed by Henri Estienne (Paris 1594) and Erasmus Schmid (Wittenberg 1638), then in the 19th century by Karl Hermann Bruder (Leipzig 1842) and - now based on the critical texts by Konstantin von Tischendorf and Brooke Foss Westcott and Fenton John Anthony Hort  - by William F. Moulton and Alfred S. Geden (Edinburgh and New York 1897). In 1978, on the basis of the textus receptus and all critical editions, the Concordance by Kurt Aland and in 1980 the Computer Concordance of the University of Münster appeared.

The Synoptic Concordance to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke (Synoptic) shows not only the references and the references to the Greek keywords from the Synoptics, but also the respective parallel passages. This shows whether the respective synoptic parallel contains the key word or not. Edition: P. Hoffmann, T. Hieke, U. Bauer, Synoptic Concordance, 4 volumes, Berlin / New York 1999–2000.

See also

Modern Bible Concordances in German

  • Zurich Bible Concordance: Complete. Word, name and Index of numbers for the Zurich Bible translation; Including the Apocrypha / Editing by Karl Huber and Hans Heinrich Schmid . Published by the Church Council of the Canton of Zurich. Vols 1-3, 1969-1973, ISBN 3-290-11335-3 .
  • Elberfeld Bible Concordance: Biblical register of words, numbers and names. 10th edition. Brockhaus, Wuppertal 1991
  • Calwer Bible Concordance or complete biblical word index. - unchanged photomechan. Reprint of the 3rd edition from 1922, 4th reprint, Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart 1983, ISBN 3-7668-0355-7 .
  • Great concordance with the Luther Bible . Special edition with an appendix on the new spelling, 1st edition 2001, Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-7668-3735-4 .
  • Thöllden, E .: Bremen Biblical Hand Concordance. Brunnen, Giessen 2014, ISBN 3-7675-7750-X .
  • Schierse, Franz Joseph: New Concordance on the Standardized Translation of the Bible . 1st edition. Patmos, Düsseldorf 1996, ISBN 3-491-71106-1 (revised by Winfried Bader. Also: Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, ISBN 3-460-32272-1 ).
  • Comprehensive Concordance on the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures , Watchtower Bible and Tract Society , 1989

Web links

Wiktionary: Bible Concordance  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sacrorum bibliorum vulgatae editionis concordantiae Hugonis Cardinalis OP. New edition after Franciscus Luca provided by Hubertus Phalesius. Suffering 1677.
  2. ^ Wilhelm Ott: Capturing and correcting texts on punched tape. Experience with preparing the Latin Bible text for the computer . In: Electronic Data Processing 12, 1970, pp. 132-137.
  3. ^ Wilhelm Ott: 30 years of literary and documentary data processing at the University of Tübingen - 80 colloquia: more than just two anniversaries . From the minutes of the 80th colloquium on the application of electronic data processing in the humanities at the University of Tübingen on November 18, 2000
  4. ↑ Thomas Hieke: Art. Concordance , in: Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart , 4th edition, 4 (2001) 1599.