This page was migrated in July 2022 from my older website, biblicalambiguities.net. As such, it is subject to the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer and the biblicalambiguities-general-disclaimer.
24 July 2022
Strong's numbers are the scourge of online biblical discussion. In the 1800's, a man named Strong produced a concordance of the KJV, which related the various English words in the translation to the Hebrew and Greek texts by means of a system of numbers which allowed people completely ignorant of the Hebrew and Greek alphabets to "look up" the meanings of words as supplied by Strong's in a little dictionary he appended to his concordance.
Although Strong's dictionary and his numbers are no significant authority on the meanings of terms in the original languages, people constantly cite him, because he is convenient for people who wish to feel they are interacting with the original texts without putting in the required effort to actually do so.
Although there are exceptions to every rule, generally speaking, anyone who cites Strong's Concordance or uses his numbers as if they were something useful is fundamentally ignorant of the biblical languages.
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