How to Use Strong's Concordance for Scripture Study -- A Practical Guide

In 1890, James Strong -- a professor of exegetical theology at Drew Theological Seminary -- published an exhaustive concordance of the King James Bible that indexed every word in the English text and assigned a unique number to every Hebrew and Greek word behind it. That numbering system, now universally known as Strong's numbers, has become the most widely used reference tool in lay biblical scholarship. You do not need to read Hebrew or Greek to use it. You need only a number and a willingness to look beneath the English surface. More than a century after its publication, Strong's Concordance remains the single most accessible entry point into the original languages of the Bible.

The system is straightforward. Every distinct Hebrew word in the Old Testament receives a number prefixed with H (for Hebrew), and every distinct Greek word in the New Testament receives a number prefixed with G (for Greek). H1 is "av" (father); H7225 is "reshit" (beginning) -- the root of bereshit, the first word of Genesis. G26 is "agape" (love) -- the word that defines God's nature in 1 John 4:8. G3056 is "logos" (word) -- the term John uses for Christ in the prologue to his gospel. Once you know a Strong's number, you can look up every verse where that same Hebrew or Greek word appears, regardless of how the English translators chose to render it. This is where the real power of the system lies: not in the definition of a single word, but in the pattern that emerges when you trace that word across the entire biblical text.

Here is a practical example. Suppose you are studying John 3:16 -- "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son" -- and you want to understand the word "loved." Looking it up in Strong's, you find it is G25, "agapao," the verb form of agape. The definition tells you it means to love in a moral, social, or principled sense -- distinct from "phileo" (G5368), which describes affectionate friendship, and "eros" (not used in the New Testament at all), which describes romantic or passionate love. Now search for every occurrence of G25 in the New Testament. You find it in John 14:21 ("He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me"), in Romans 8:28 ("all things work together for good to them that love God"), and in 1 John 4:19 ("We love him, because he first loved us"). The same word -- agapao -- connects all of these passages into a single theological thread about the nature of divine love and the human response to it. Without Strong's numbers, these connections are invisible to the English reader.

To use Strong's Concordance effectively, follow these steps. First, identify the English word you want to study and the specific verse where it appears. This specificity matters because the same English word in different verses may translate different Hebrew or Greek words. "Love" in John 3:16 (agapao) is not the same word as "love" in John 21:15 where Jesus asks Peter "lovest thou me" and Peter responds with phileo rather than agapao -- a distinction that many scholars believe carries significant narrative weight. Second, look up the Strong's number for that specific word in that specific verse. Third, read the lexical entry for that number, which will include the word's definition, its root derivation, and its part of speech. Fourth, use the concordance to find every other verse where the same Strong's number appears. This cross-referencing step is where the study bears the most fruit.

The concordance is especially valuable for the Old Testament, where a single Hebrew word often spans a wider semantic range than its English translations suggest. Take H7225, "reshit." The King James Version translates it as "beginning" in Genesis 1:1, "firstfruits" in Exodus 23:19, "chief" in Job 40:19, and "principal" in Proverbs 4:7. These four English words seem unrelated, but they all translate the same Hebrew term -- a word that means the first, the best, the chief, the starting point. When Proverbs 4:7 says "Wisdom is the principal thing," the Hebrew says wisdom is the reshit -- the beginning, the firstfruits, the chief of all things, the bereshit of the good life. Seeing the connection to Genesis 1:1 transforms a proverb about wisdom into a cosmological claim: wisdom is where everything begins. That connection is available to anyone with a Strong's number and the patience to follow it.

There are, however, important pitfalls that every student should understand. The most common mistake is treating Strong's definitions as complete and final. Strong's lexicon provides concise glosses, not exhaustive definitions. The entry for G26 (agape) is a paragraph; scholarly lexicons like BDAG (Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich) devote pages to the same word, discussing nuances, disputed meanings, and contextual variations that Strong's does not capture. Strong's is a doorway, not a destination. It tells you which word to investigate; it does not tell you everything about that word. Treat it as the first step in your study, not the last.

A second pitfall is the assumption that one Strong's number always equals one meaning. Languages do not work that way. H1285 (berith, covenant) carries different connotations in Genesis 15 (God's covenant with Abraham), in Exodus 19 (the Sinai covenant), and in Jeremiah 31 (the new covenant). The word is the same, but the context shapes the meaning. Strong's numbers connect you to the word; context connects you to the meaning. Always read the surrounding verses, the broader passage, and ideally the entire chapter before drawing conclusions about what a word means in a specific instance.

A third pitfall, particularly relevant for Latter-day Saint students, is forgetting that Strong's indexes only the King James Bible. It does not cover the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, or the Pearl of Great Price. Words in those texts that correspond to biblical Hebrew or Greek (such as "atonement," which derives from a complex theological and linguistic history involving both H3722/kaphar and G2643/katallage) must be traced through the biblical text first and then applied by analogy. The Book of Mormon was translated into King James-style English, which creates linguistic connections to the KJV, but those connections are to the English translation rather than to the underlying Hebrew and Greek. This distinction matters for careful study.

Digital tools have transformed how Strong's Concordance is used. In Strong's era, looking up a word required a physical concordance -- a volume of over 1,700 pages. Today, the same lookup takes seconds. The Interlinear Reader on this site places the Strong's numbers directly beneath each word of the biblical text, so you can see the original language mapping in real time without flipping to an appendix. The Word Explorer lets you search by Strong's number and see every occurrence in a single view, with context and cross-references. And individual Strong's entry pages (like /strongs/H7225 for reshit) provide the lexical definition, the root derivation, and a list of every verse where the word appears. What took hours in 1890 takes minutes now.

Strong's Concordance is not a substitute for learning Hebrew and Greek, but it is the best tool available for readers who want to go deeper without enrolling in a seminary program. It bridges the gap between the English reader and the original text with a system that is simple, consistent, and universally recognized. Every serious student of the Bible should know how it works. And every student who uses it will find that the scriptures are more interconnected, more precise, and more theologically rich than any single translation -- even one as magnificent as the King James Version -- can convey on its own.