Very early on in life all American children learn to recite our alphabet – all 26 letters – from A to Z. But for one young American child I doubt he could have ever dreamed of an undertaking that would consume 35 years of his life surrounding our English alphabet. While the scope of his project was relatively simple the execution of it must have been a true labor of love.
An just what was the project that James Strong literally would spend almost half of his 72 years of life engaged in? Simply put he chose to alphabetize every word in the Bible. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible, compiled during the last half of the nineteenth century by Dr. James Strong, professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary, lists every word in the Bible in alphabetical order. In addition the reference and the context of every appearance of that word is given. In Dr. Strong’s original work even words such as: a, an, in, I, etc., are shown, with reference to every occurrence of them. And all of this was compiled manually, without the benefit of modern computers or other electronic equipment. Just imagine the time it must have taken (35 years) to alphabetize the over 750,000 words in the Bible.
Can you imagine if someone tried to alphabetize every word in Charles Dicken’s masterpiece novel, A Tale of Two Cities? They probably would lock them up in an insane asylum for what purpose could this ever serve. Only a crazy person would attempt such a foolish project. But the alphabetizing of every word in the Bible has still proven, 130 years after it was first published in 1890, to be a fabulous Bible study tool. Once again the Bible has proven itself to be a very unique book with a fascinating history.