Online Concordances?
A quick question for my distinguished co-bloggers and other BLT readers: What concordances do you use and recommend, and why?
In particular, I’m looking for a unified concordance of the Greek New Testament and Old Testament that’s usable by persons without much Greek, so that I can, for example, look up a verse in the NT, and click through from the particular English word to a concordance entry for the corresponding Greek word that will cover both the NT and the Septuagint. Paul is frequently riffing on, alluding to, and quoting from the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings, and I really want to check some of his key terms in the Tanakh.
I normally use http://blueletterbible.com for its built-in concordance, but that is based on Strongs and works for either the Hebrew OT or the Greek NT. But that shows you the kind of interface I’m used to and hoping for.
Any suggestions?
BLT 
There was a great site: zhubert.com. It did everything you would want, and more. Well, it did, until the German Bible Society forced it to shut down over copyright claims.
Sadly, that is the case for most serious online Bible tools in original languages. The German Bible Society has been ruthless in pursuing copyright claims, which is why it is easier to search Shakespeare online than it is the Bible.
The German Bible Society did put up its own site
http://www.academic-bible.com/en/online-bibles/
but it requires (free) registration as a user.
I’ve pretty much given up on online Bible tools, and now use software I bought — Logos Bible Study. It has excellent concordance abilities (especially with its integration with the Perseus Digital Library containing a wide variety of ancient Greek and Latin texts), but it is pricey.
My suggestion would be look into the free E-sword software — I haven’t really used it that much, but Chuck Grantham, a frequent commenter on this site, is a serious user and he would be the person to check with for information.
I am surprised there is so little. I use BLB but it is not keyed by word to the LXX though it has the text. I developed my own data and software for the Psalms. I would look forward to some development of these tools. Mechon-Mamre has Hebrew searches – all unilingual.
Yes, I miss Zhubert too. But so much of the software is produced by complementarians and I simply refuse to use it for that reason. I do miss having a concordance for the LXX. Perhaps Kurk has a suggestion.
Victoria,
Great question for our BLT readers.
Yes, Zack Hubert ran a great site. And now, as Suzanne suspects, I do have a suggestion, actually three other suggestions:
First, Gregory Crane at Tufts University oversees the mammoth Perseus 4.0, and within the digital library there’s Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon digitized with links to the NT and to the LXX for individual phrases (all in alpha-beta order on the left hand side Table of Contents). Here’s the entry for παραβολ-ή , ἡ, (i.e., “parable”), with the definitions and links to uses in context by Aristotle, Isocrates, Plato, Polybus, Plutarch, and to the NT and to the LXX and so forth; unfortunately, the LXX links go to the ASV English or the Vulgate Latin. Soon, we hope, the LXX Greek will be added to Perseus. Until then (notice all the hyperlinked info, including the link to the LXX Ezekiel 18:2):
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=PARABOLH%2F
Second, Paul Ingram has done a fantastic job putting together Kata Pi: http://www.katapi.org.uk/index.html.
Kata Pi includes NT Greek (UBS) and LXX Greek (Rahlfs) (“Old Testament” and “Apocrypha”) and Hebrew (BHS) so much more, and different ways of viewing these, with English translations, in various ways.
The link I give below is for Ezekiel 18, and look at verses 2 & 3. Ingram allows you to read side by side the LXX (Rahlfs), Brenton’s English translation, the RSV English translation of the Hebrew (sometimes of the LXX), and the BHS Hebrew Bible version. Verse 2 here shows how “parable” appears in the LXX as παραβολὴ, as a translation of the Hebrew wordplay repetition of (מֹשְׁלִ … מָּשָׁל). You can also quickly see how at the start of verse 2, the Greek translators of the Hebrew have liberally added: Υἱὲ ἀνθρώπου, which Brenton Englishes further as “Son of man”:
http://www.katapi.org.uk/master.html?http://www.katapi.org.uk/katapiNSBunix/Lxx/LxxHBByBC.php?GB=26&GC=2
Third, Tom Moore has a website and a wiki he calls Kata Biblon. It helpfully contains the LXX (Rahlfs) and NT (Robinson-Pierpont Byzantine Textform 2005), hyperlinked to various useful places. Individual Greek phrases searched yield an instant concordance across the LXX and the NT. Moore links this concordance, then, to the Perseus Liddell and Scott Lexicon. Here’s his home page http://www.katabiblon.com/ and his practical instruction page: http://lexicon.katabiblon.com/index.php? Here’s what happens when you search for “parable,” or, rather, παραβολή.
http://lexicon.katabiblon.com/?search=%CF%80%CE%B1%CF%81%CE%B1%CE%B2%CE%BF%CE%BB%E1%BD%B4
(He also gives the Westminster Leningrad Codex for the MT Hebrew Bible, but no hyperlinking to dictionaries or to make a concordance on the Hebrew itself, none yet. Here that is: http://en.katabiblon.com/us/index.php?text=MT There’s also a Vulgata Clementina, and there’s the World English Bible and the ASV both available, sometimes viewable alongside the MT Hebrew and/or the LXX Greek.)
The great thing Crane, Ingram, and Moore are doing is making freely available a wide swath of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English literature that is both biblical and, in Crane’s case, extra biblical. (I don’t see any particular religious bias or Christian sexist or sectarian limitations – fiscal or dogmatic – in any of these three sites.)
Hope that helps some!
Every tool takes some learning – and knowledge of what not to look for with that tool. One finds work-arounds for limitations in the design. Also the data have to be verified.
In my first test on Tom Moore’s site, I searched for what I thought would be a root search, not a letter search. The word for wound – mem-chet-tsade. It got 3 hits in the psalms, two in Ps 110 and one mem enclitic with chet tsade = arrow (Ps 91). And it missed three other uses of מחץ in ps18 and 68.
BLB has the disadvantage of the Strong numbering and its detailed discernment of separate words that are really homonyms but it also has a brilliant surface design as far as it goes. I suspect its database would not allow some reports I would like to see. But equally there may be reports that I have failed to see and use within it. And its search engine does not include grammatical forms.
For letter searches Mechon Mamre is more comprehensive than anything else I have seen so far.
For learning about words, 2-letter-lookup is useful and I see it has full details as well. http://www.2letterlookup.com/ – It succeeded with the occurrences of מחץ in the Psalms.