How To Find Word Occurrences

When I started teaching exegesis, way back in the waning years of the 20th century, I required the purchase of a Greek-English concordance to the New Testament, edited by John Kohlenberger and others. I still find this book very useful and accurate, and I recommend it. Now, however, computer tools have changed the way I do much of my word study. On this page you will find some steps for locating word occurrences with a print tool such as Kohlenberger's concordance and a digital tool such as the software, Bibleworks. When the tools (and the user) are all working as they should, the results from one kind of search should be identical to the other kind.

Working with Kohlenberger

If you read Greek, you can look up a Greek word in the Kohlenberger concordance and read through all the occurrences of that word in the New Testament. Let's say you want to see where and how the word, ekklēsia, usually translated church, is used in the gospels.

1. Look up ekklēsia in Kohlenberger as you would look it up in a dictionary (you need to be able to work with the Greek alphabet to do this). You will find it on p. 241. Every word has its own number; this word is #1711.
2. Notice the number in brackets beside the word. This is how many times the word appears in the New Testament. ekklēsia, the number is [114].
3. Now, your question was how this word is used in the gospels. There is an easy answer to this. Can you find it? (What is it?)

"But I don't know Greek!"

That is a pretty easy process if you know the Greek word you are looking up and you know the Greek alphabet well enough to look up words in alphabetical order. But what if you don't know Greek? Never fear! Let's try the process again.

You want to find out where church is used in the Gospels. Kohlenberger is a Greek-English concordance that uses the NIV, so if the word, church, appears in the New Testament of the NIV, you will be able to find it, and then do a word search for other occurrences of the Greek word that church is standing in for.

1. Near the back of the Kohlenberger concordance, on pages 805-1020, is the English-Greek index to the NIV. Go there now, and look up the word, church.
2. You'll find the word on page 839. Look at the bracketed number beside the word to see how many times it appears in the NIV New Testament.
3. There are three entries under church. You see that 74 times, church is the English rendering of ekklēsia. Four times, the NIV has church where the Greek has… nothing. That's what [RPE] means: it stand for "repeated English word." See the Introduction, p. xv. One time, the word church is used in English where the Greek was plēthos.
4. This is all great, but how do you find out where this (or these) Greek words appear in the gospels? To do that, you have to look up #1711 and #4436 in the front of the book.
5. So, how many times does the word, church, appear in the gospels, and which author or authors use it? (Answer here.)

Working with Bibleworks

Luther Seminary makes Bibleworks available on all campus computers and to those who are logged in to a Home Lab account. The software is available for purchase at a discount through the Luther Seminary bookstore.

The Yale Divinity Library has several web pages of Bibleworks Software Help, with screen shots and everything!

Bibleworks is an exceptionally robust Bible study tool. The steps here demonstrate just one task it will help you with, namely starting in English and finding all occurrences of a Greek word. My instructions start you off in "Power User Mode." I do that because there are some short cuts that are possible in that mode and because there are things about Beginner and Standard Modes that annoy me.

1. Open Bibleworks, and choose Power User Mode in the popup window that appears, or by choosing it in the Search menu.
2. There are lots of windows here. Don't worry about all of them.
3. Look at the right side of the screen, about halfway down the page. You should see a box with three letters in it (KJV, NRS, NIV, or the like). This is your current display and search version. To choose a different search and display version from the one that is showing, type the three-letter code of the version into the one-line input bar beside that box with the three letters. For example, just type "NRS" and the version displayed will change to NRSV. (This is a trick you can't do in Standard or Beginner modes.)
4. To read a text in English, but find out what the Greek words are behind the English, read the New American Standard Bible (NAS). With this translation, you can mouse over any English word, and the Greek will show up in the "moving window" at the bottom left of your screen. (You can stop that window from moving every time you move your mouse by holding down the shift key.)

OK, let's try the search we were doing above with Kohlenberger. You want to know where church shows up in the gospels.

1. In Power User Mode, choose "Search," from the top menu. Then "Set search limits." In the dialog box that appears, choose the books you want to search in: the gospels only, or the whole New Testament, for example.
2. In the command line (beside those three letters identifying your search version), type NRS. Now you are searching the NRSV.
3. In the command line, type .church -- the period before the word tells Bibleworks you want to do a word (not a phrase) search. Hit the enter key.
4. Your results appear in a window above the command line. The word, church, is only in Matthew, among the gospels, and appears in Matt 16:18; 18:15, and twice in 18:17.

But wait a minute, this is not the same result as the one you got with Kohlenberger. There, you saw that ekklēsia occurred three times, not four times, in the gospel of Matthew. What's going on? The answer is that you just searched for an English word in the NRSV, and the NRSV uses church once where the Greek has adelphos, "a brother."

To search for a Greek word in Bibleworks, if you can read Greek:

1. Switch to search version BNT (Nestle Aland 27). Do this by typing BNT in the command line.
2. Type in a verse where your word is used. For example, type Matt 16:18 in the command line.
3. The upper left window will go to Matthew 16:18. In that verse you can see the word, ekklēsian.
4. Move your mouse over ekklēsian and right click your mouse. A menu will come up that has "Search on lemma" as an option. Choose this.
5. Your results appear in the results window, in the upper righthand corner.
6. If you do not want to read them all in Greek, type an English version three-letter code in the command line and the results will appear in that version so that you can read the context more quickly.

To search for a Greek word in Bibleworks, when you cannot read Greek:

1. Switch to search version NAS (New American Standard). Do this by typing NAS in the command line.
2. Type in a verse where your word is used. For example, type Matt 16:18 in the command line.
3. You will see the word church in this verse. Mouse over it. In the moving window at the bottom left, you will see <1577> (ekklesia). The 1577 is the word's Strong's concordance number.
4. Hold down the shift key and move your mouse to the Greek word in the bottom left box. Double click on the Greek word. Bibleworks will execute a lemma (dictionary form) search on the word, and you have your word list in the upper right results window.
5. Want to read those results in something besides Greek? In the command line, type in the three-letter code for the English version of your choice and read the results in English.
   

Free Internet Concordance Tools

English Only

Crosswalk has a Bible Study tool that allows you to search for an English word or phrase in several different English Bibles. For phrase searches, put the phrase in quotation marks.

Greek Only

Check out zhubert.com for multiple free tools for working with the Greek New Testament. The concordance tool will give you all occurrences of the dictionary form (lemma) of every Greek word in the New Testament.

Next: Go to the Activity Grid for links to problems that require you to study words.