A Bible concordance is an index of every word in the Bible and every verse where that word appears. Instead of searching by book and chapter, you search by the word itself — "faith," "shepherd," "redeem" — and the concordance hands you every verse in scripture that uses it. To use one, pick the word you want to trace, look it up, and read through the list of verses it returns; if the concordance includes Strong's numbers, you can also use those to check whether the same English word translates one Hebrew or Greek word every time, or several different ones.
What is a concordance, and why would you need one?
Most people go looking for a verse the wrong way around. They half-remember a phrase — "something about a shepherd," "the one about being still" — and try to guess which book it's in. A concordance flips the search: instead of starting from the book, you start from the word, and it tells you everywhere in the Bible that word shows up.
This turns out to be one of the most useful habits in Bible study, for a reason that has nothing to do with just finding a lost verse. When you look up every occurrence of a word like "rest" or "wisdom," you start to see how that word gets used across very different books, by very different authors, in very different situations — and that range teaches you far more about the word's actual meaning than any single verse could on its own.
What is Strong's Concordance?
Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, compiled in the nineteenth century, indexed every word in the King James Version and assigned each Hebrew or Greek original word a reference number — what people now call a Strong's number. That numbering system is what lets you do something a plain English concordance can't: it lets you see when two different English words in your Bible actually translate the very same original word, or when one English word is quietly translating several different Hebrew or Greek words depending on the context.
For example, the English word "love" in the King James New Testament translates more than one distinct Greek word, each with a different shade of meaning — agape, phileo, and others. A concordance with Strong's numbers is what lets you tell them apart, because it shows you the original word behind each occurrence, not just the English gloss.
How to use a concordance, step by step
1. Start with the word, not the verse. If you're trying to find a half-remembered verse, pick the most distinctive word you remember from it — not "God" or "love," which will return hundreds of results, but something more specific like "shepherd" or "renew."
2. Look up the word and scan the list. A good concordance will show you a short snippet of each verse the word appears in, so you can scan quickly rather than opening every single reference.
3. If you're doing a word study, read every entry, not just the one you're looking for. This is the real payoff of using a concordance. Say you're studying the word "wait" as it's used about waiting on God — Isaiah 40:31 talks about those who "wait upon the LORD." A concordance search on "wait" will show you dozens of other places the same word appears across the Psalms and Prophets, and reading through them builds a much fuller sense of what that waiting actually looks like in scripture than one verse alone can give you.
4. Check the Strong's number if the meaning matters. If two verses use the word "love" but you want to know whether they're using the same original word, follow the Strong's number for each to the lexicon and compare. This single step resolves a huge number of "but doesn't the Bible also say..." confusions, because it shows you when English translation has quietly merged two different original words into one.
5. Read the verse in context before you draw a conclusion. A concordance is a finding tool, not an interpreting tool. Once you've found the verses, go read each one — and ideally the paragraph around it — before deciding what the pattern means.
A worked example: tracing "shepherd"
Say you want to study how the Bible uses the image of a shepherd. A concordance search on "shepherd" turns up Psalm 23:1 — "The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want" — alongside Old Testament passages where God's people are described, often critically, as sheep without a shepherd, and New Testament passages where Jesus applies the image directly to himself. Reading through the full list in order, rather than jumping straight to the one verse you already knew, shows you that the shepherd image isn't a single isolated metaphor — it's a thread that runs through the whole of scripture, used consistently to describe how God leads, protects, and is responsible for his people.
That's the difference a concordance search makes over a single remembered verse: you go from one verse to a pattern, and the pattern is where the real understanding sits.
Is Strong's Concordance accurate?
Strong's numbering system is a widely trusted reference tool and has been the backbone of English-language word study for well over a century, but it's worth understanding what it does and doesn't claim to do. It tells you which original Hebrew or Greek word underlies a given English word in the King James Version, and it gives a brief definition of that word — it doesn't settle every question of nuance, and serious word study still benefits from reading the commentaries alongside it, since a single-word definition can't capture everything a term means across different contexts.
When a concordance search surprises you
One of the most useful moments in using a concordance is when it turns up far more results than you expected, or results in places you didn't anticipate. Search "rest," for instance, expecting mostly Old Testament results about Sabbath observance, and you'll also find Jesus's invitation in Matthew 11:28 — "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" — sitting in the same list. Read that verse next to the Old Testament Sabbath passages rather than in isolation, and a pattern appears: rest in scripture isn't just a weekly practice, it's consistently tied to God's own character and to an invitation, not just a rule to keep.
That kind of surprise is exactly what a concordance is good for and a single memorized verse is not. Reading verses in isolation tends to flatten them into individual, disconnected ideas. Reading every occurrence of the same word tends to do the opposite — it shows the idea developing and repeating across a much longer stretch of text than any one passage could show on its own.
A second worked example: distinguishing similar English words
Concordance work becomes especially valuable when English uses one word for what were originally two different concepts. Take "know." In English, "know" covers everything from knowing a fact to knowing a person intimately. A concordance search on "know," combined with checking the Strong's numbers behind each occurrence, shows that Hebrew and Greek frequently distinguish these senses with entirely different words — a distinction the English translation alone doesn't preserve. Without that check, a reader can miss an intended emphasis simply because English collapsed two separate original words into one.
This is the specific, practical reason a concordance with Strong's numbers is worth the extra step over a plain word-search tool. A plain search only tells you where an English word appears. A concordance with Strong's numbers tells you whether those occurrences are actually the same word underneath — and when they're not, that's often exactly where the deeper meaning of a passage is hiding.
Where to go next
Once you've found your verses, the lexicon will show you the original Greek or Hebrew behind any word, and cross-references on the verse itself will point you to other passages that develop the same idea. If you'd rather browse by subject than by word, the topic pages group relevant verses together for you.
--- FAQ ---
Q: What is a Bible concordance and how do I use it? A: It's an index of every word in the Bible and every verse it appears in. Search by word rather than by book, scan the verses returned, and read each one in context to understand how that word is used across scripture.
Q: What is Strong's Exhaustive Concordance? A: A nineteenth-century concordance that indexed every word in the King James Version and assigned the underlying Hebrew or Greek word a reference number, letting readers trace the original-language word behind any English word.
Q: How does a concordance work? A: You look up a word, and it returns every verse in the Bible that contains that word, typically with a short snippet of surrounding text so you can identify the verse you want.
Q: What do Strong's numbers mean? A: Each number corresponds to a specific Hebrew or Greek word. Two verses that use the same English word can have different Strong's numbers if they're translating different original words — and the number lets you tell the difference.
Q: Is Strong's Concordance accurate? A: It's a long-trusted and widely used reference for identifying the original-language word behind an English translation, though like any single-word definition it works best alongside fuller resources such as a lexicon or commentary for nuance.
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