Bible words and their meaning—Strong's Numbers

Bible words and their meaning—Strong's Numbers
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CONTENTS

Introduction

Strong's Numbers enable people who do not know Greek or Hebrew to understand the meaning of words in the Bible.

The American Professor James Strong, born 1822 and died 1894, allocated a unique number to each word stem in the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. For example, if Strong's system had been applied to English, then "go" and "went" would have the same Strong's Number, because they are parts of the same verb - but "came" would have a separate number. Just to confirm, Strong's Numbers apply to Greek and Hebrew, not to English.

To find the meaning of a Bible word, there are two stages:-

(1) Look up the verse in a version of the English Bible which has every word labelled with the Strong's Number of its original Greek or Hebrew word. That gives the relevant Strong's Number.

(2) Look up that Strong's Number. There will be a definition of the Greek or Hebrew word. Also, there will be a list of all Bible verses which include that Strong's Number - and a table of usual English translations, with the number of times each occurs.

It may be easiest to work on the world wide Web. For offline use, the Xiphos program can be used. The printed book, Strong's Concordance, is on sale.

Xiphos has the following statement, "Warning: If you live in a persecuted country and do not wish to risk detection you should NOT use the remote installation feature!" That may also apply to any use of the web.

How to use Strong's Numbers—an example

Luke 24:4 states, "two men stood by them". The obvious reading of the English is that the two were standing, that is, that the ordinary Greek verb "to stand" is used. That can be checked using Strong's Numbers, with a surprising result. Incidentally, the four accounts of the discovery of the Saviour's resurrection are discussed at the wikiChristian page "Resurrection of Jesus—Wenham's harmony of the four accounts of the first Easter Sunday".

Step (1): Googling "Lk 24:4 Strong" gives a page of the BibleHub website, and hovering on the phrase "stood by" gives the number 2186.

Step (2):-

Googling "Strong's Greek 2186 Biblestudytools" gives the information that, in the King James Version, 2186 is translated "to stand" 6 times but "to come", instead, 10 times (excluding miscellaneous items). Likewise, in the New American Standard version, "to stand" is used only 6 times out of 21.

The information might be shown as a list or as a table.

List/Table A
2186—KJV Word Usage
Translation	Count
come upon	6
come	4
stand	3
stand by	3
miscellaneous	5
Total	21

Googling "Strong 2186 Greek" gives a page of the BibleHub website, which shows that 2186 is a composite verb "epHistemi", that is, "to uponStand". Compare the English verb "to underStand", which, in modern usage, does not relate to standing.

Googling "Strong 2186 Greek" also gives a page of the BibleTools website, which shows that 2186 is used only 21 times, almost always in Luke or Acts, and its first instance is Luke 2:9, "the angel of the Lord came upon them". The last instance in the Gospel of Luke is the current verse. That might indicate that Luke is using the verb 2186, at both the beginning and end of the gospel, of angels.

List/Table B
The word 2186 is used 21 times
Luke 2:9: "lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord" Luke 2:38: "And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord," Luke 4:39: "And he stood over her, and rebuked the fever; and" Luke 10:40: "much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care" Luke 20:1: "and the scribes came upon him with the elders," Luke 21:34: "and so that day come upon you unawares." Luke 24:4: "behold, two men stood by them in shining" Acts 4:1: "and the Sadducees, came upon them," Acts 6:12: "the scribes, and came upon him, and caught him, and brought" Acts 10:17: "Cornelius had made inquiry for Simon's house, and stood before the gate," Acts 11:11: "immediately there were three men already come unto the house where" Acts 12:7: "behold, the angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined in" Acts 17:5: "gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house" Acts 22:13: "unto me, and stood, and said unto me, Brother Saul," Acts 22:20: "I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death," Acts 23:11: "following the Lord stood by him, and said, Be of good cheer, Paul:" Acts 23:27: "have been killed of them: then came I with an army, and rescued him," Acts 28:2: "every one, because of the present rain, and because of the" 1 Thessalonians 5:3: "then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child;" 2 Timothy 4:2: "Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke," 2 Timothy 4:6: "the time of my departure is at hand."

So it now looks as though the verb 2186 cannot be the ordinary verb "to stand" and that it does not usually mean "to stand".

Offline use of Strong's Numbers—Xiphos

Xiphos is a free-distribution computer Bible system for Windows, UNIX and Linux. It supports Strong's Numbers. It can be downloaded onto a computer for later use when the internet is unavailable. Downloads are from https://xiphos.org/

After installing Xiphos:- At the Module Manager, download the Bible versions required, including KJV and KJVA. Also download appropriate dictionaries: anything re: Strong, and the Morphological items. (And, among commentaries, Scripture Quoting Scripture and Treasury of Scripture Knowledge are useful.) Then go to the Maintenance menu option (you may need to click on the "fullSize" symbol (the square) near the top right hand corner of the module manager) and index all the downloaded items. At the main Xiphos window, open KJVA at a New Testament book, put the cursor in the main (Bible text) pane and right-click, then select, for ModuleOptions, everything. That is, to add Strong's numbers and/or morphology to the module, rightclick | ModuleOptions and click on the options wanted.

To search for Strong's numbers (to see all occurrences of a number in the Bible), go to advanced search, make sure ordinary tab has "lucene" selected, go to "attribute" tab, select "Strong" (and select all the right-hand-side tickboxes) and search for "lemma:G1234" (greek) or "lemma:H1234" (Hebrew). (Sometimes needs any initial zero, sometimes needs its absence.)

More information at https://xiphos.org/manual/originallanguage.html .

A similar free app for mobile phones is "MySword Bible" from Galaxy Store. That gives the Strong's Number look-up and also a Strong's definition for each Strong's Number.

Printed books—Strong's Concordance, etc.

A page of Strong's 1899 Concordance, which also contains a list of definitions of each of the Strong's Numbers.

The printed book is available from booksellers. It is arranged as a Concordance, that is, an alphabetical list of the words in the English Bible. For each English word, each occurrence is listed in order of its Bible reference and is labelled with the Strong's Number of the original Greek or Hebrew word. At the end of the book is the list of Strong's definitions of the Greek and Hebrew Strong's Number word-stems.

Strong's definitions of the Greek/Hebrew numbers seem wordy and of much less use than the tables shown above. Having said that, a modern version, namely Kohlenberger JR (2002) "The Strongest Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible", Zondervan, supplements short verbal definitions with lists of counts of translations as in list/table A.

Wigram GV (1844) "The Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New Testament", Longmans, provides list/table B, in English, but is not indexed according to Strong's Numbers and therefore lacks usefulness. Some modern editions of Wigram, however, may perhaps be indexed according to Strong's Numbers.

Links

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