{"id":45506,"date":"2019-05-01T14:01:40","date_gmt":"2019-05-01T21:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.olivetree.com\/blog\/?p=45506"},"modified":"2024-11-06T08:37:50","modified_gmt":"2024-11-06T16:37:50","slug":"esv-exhaustive-concordance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.olivetree.com\/blog\/esv-exhaustive-concordance\/","title":{"rendered":"Look Inside: The ESV Exhaustive Concordance"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We offer quite a few concordances, so you’re probably wondering what makes the ESV Exhaustive Concordance<\/a> any different? Not only do we have a video in this post, we also have a Q&A with Drayton Benner, the author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

WHAT IS IT?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The ESV Exhaustive Concordance contains more than 340,000 references connected to every verse in the Bible. This makes it an excellent tool for studying alongside the ESV translation. The ESV Bible combines word-for-word accuracy with readability, literary excellence, and depth of meaning. And this concordance is an ideal reference tool. It quickly locates particular passages and helps you conduct in-depth word studies. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Want to look inside? There’s a video<\/a> at the bottom of this post.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

WHO PUT IT TOGETHER?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Broadly, teams at Crossway and Miklal Software Solutions are responsible for producing this concordance. More specifically, Drayton Benner, James Covington, Lisa Kieklak, and Ben Thomas from Miklal did a lot of the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We got in touch with Drayton, and he graciously submitted to a Q&A. Drayton founded Miklal and serves as its president. At the University of Virginia, he studied mathematics and computer science as an undergraduate. Then, he dove into research and development work in scientific software before being drawn to Biblical Studies and Semitics. He then went on to obtain a Master\u2019s degree from Regent College in Old Testament, along with Master\u2019s and PhD degrees in Northwest Semitic Philology from the University of Chicago\u2019s Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations Department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our favorite part of Drayton’s resume is that he worked for Olive Tree remotely during the summers of 2007-2010. We were his entrance into the Bible software world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, he has a lot<\/strong> of interesting information to share! Personally, we loved hearing what makes this different than Strongs’s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A WORD FROM DRAYTON<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

How is this concordance different from a Strong’s concordance?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Drayton Benner:<\/strong> “Strong\u2019s concordance was a remarkable achievement for the nineteenth century. ESV Exhaustive Concordance<\/em> is quite similar to Strong\u2019s concordance in that both are exhaustive: they include every word of the relevant Bible translation. Then, for each word of the Bible translation, they indicate the underlying Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek word(s) being translated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition, both Strong\u2019s and ESV Exhaustive Concordance<\/em> also contain glossaries for Biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. There are, however, some differences as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, Strong\u2019s concordance was based on the KJV translation, while ESV Exhaustive Concordance<\/em> is based on the ESV translation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, our understanding of the biblical languages has improved since the nineteenth century, and these improvements are reflected in the glossaries in ESV Exhaustive Concordance<\/em> over against Strong\u2019s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Strong\u2019s concordance used numbers to organize Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek lemmas. By contrast, ESV Exhaustive Concordance uses extremely brief\u2014mostly single word\u2014glosses to organize the lemmas.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did you go about creating it?<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

DB:<\/strong> “At Miklal Software Solutions, we produced a great deal of technology for this work, allowing us to make the concordance in a very small percentage of the time required for such an effort in Strong\u2019s day. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll touch on two aspects of that technology. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote custom software that makes heavy use of natural language processing and other branches of computer science. It then allows someone to align the ESV to its source texts at an extremely high level of accuracy and consistency\u2014while still doing so very efficiently. My colleague, James Covington, did the lion\u2019s share of the work in using that software to align the texts. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our website contains more information about this text alignment software<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I would note that this same alignment data underlies other products, including Olive Tree\u2019s ESV Hebrew-English Interlinear<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Olive<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Go in-depth with this video on text alignment.<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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