Lesson 5 | Searching a Topic
Searches Gone Before Us
Searching your Bible is not something new with the invention of computers, but rather something that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. Such searches were then done by hand, of course, and compiled in concordances. Today, you will still find a non-digital collection of searches like this in a subject index of many Bibles.
Concordances, Subject Indexes, and Cross-References
con·cor·dance noun An alphabetical index of all the words in a text or corpus of texts, showing every contextual occurrence of a word. —The American Heritage Dictionary
In other words, a concordance is a series of searches gone before us.
The same goes for a Bible subject index. The approach represented by a subject index is a bit different than that of a concordance, and the number of results is much fewer, but we are still talking about someone else’s search results.
In fact, cross-references fit into this category as well. Original language-type cross-references, for example, are the result of someone searching the word behind a translation and presenting key hits from that search. These are akin to a concordance. Theme-type cross-references, on the other hand, are akin to a Bible subject index.
What’s the point? Recognizing these as searches that have gone before us doubles their usefulness to us. In addition to being presented with the actual results of such searches, we also have examples by which to learn how to search.
Why Should I Perform My Own Searches?
But if so many searches have been done for me, why learn how to do it myself? There are three reasons.
1. Searching Faster
Once you learn the skill, searching via Biblearc is far faster than looking up references in a concordance. And far faster means that you can do it far more often.
2. Searching More Exhaustively
While cross-references and your study Bible’s subject index will provide you with a selection of relevant verses subjectively chosen by the editors, a Bible search will present you with all the hits. True, this will take more time to go through, but the payoff is worth it.
3. Searching More Precisely
Finally, something that concordances, subject indexes, and cross-references cannot do is provide you with the results of word-combos and other complex searches. As we will discover later this lesson and beyond, such searches can be incredibly useful.