Abingdon's Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible - (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1980)

Abingdon's is the best edition of Strong's famous concordance of the Bible. This is a good tool for thoroughly exploring the King James Version of the Bible, but it is not a good tool for serious study of the Bible itself. The NRSV Concordance would be the best choice for an English-only concordance of the entire Bible. For a New Testament concordance, the Word Study Greek English New Testament (WSGENT) would be the best choice. For the Old Testament concordance, the best choice would be The Hebrew-English Concordance to the Old Testament by John Kohlenberger & James Swanson (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998).

Using WSGENT has the following advantages over using Strong's Exhaustive Concordance or Young's Analytical Concordance.

1. WSGENT is based upon a much more reliable Greek text of the New Testament; therefore it does not include references to words that were not in the original texts, even though they appeared in the KJV.
2. In each concordance listing WSGENT includes all occurences of a single Greek word. Strong's and Young's list all occurences of a single English word with a notation of the Greek word from which it was translated, but finding all listings of a single Greek word would be a very tedious and distractive process. Strong's and Young's enable you to conveniently look up what you already know of the KJV English translation, but they do not enable you to conveniently explore the original text. The WSGENT makes it very easy in English to do exhaustive word studies of the original Greek text.
3. Each Concordance listing is also cross-referenced with the page number of the associated Greek word definition in the following definitive lexicons: Greek-English Lexicon (Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich), Greek-English Lexicon (Louw and Nida), New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology (Colin Brown, 4 volumes), and Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Kittel, 10 volumes), all of which are also outstanding resources, and all of which provide much more accurate and thorough English explanations of the Greek words.

Contained in this edition of Strong's Concordance are the following sections:

1. Main Concordance [with Strong's numbers used to identify each Hebrew and Greek word]
2. Main Concordance - Addenda [words missed in the original edition of Strong's]
3. Appendix to the Main Concordance - Giving references, by chapter and verse, to all the passages in which a few unimportant particles of very frequent occurrence are found
4. A Key-Word Comparison of Selected Words and Phrases in the King James Version with Five Leading Translations [RSV, NEB, JB, NAS, NIV]
5. A Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary of the Old Testament - A concise dictionary of the words in the Hebrew Bible [with Strong's numbers used to designate each Hebrew word]
6. A Greek Dictionary of the New Testament - A concise dictionary of the words in the Greek Testament [with Strong's numbers used to identify each Greek word]