How to Use a Concordance to Actually Understand Scripture

If you've spent any time around people who take Bible study seriously, you've probably heard the word "concordance" come up. Maybe in a class, maybe in a book recommendation, maybe from someone who clearly had access to a set of tools you didn't. And if you nodded along without quite knowing what they meant — you're not alone.

A lot of believers carry a vague sense that a concordance is something they should probably know how to use but don't. And because it sounds technical, it keeps getting deferred. It goes on the list of things that are "for serious Bible students," which is code for "not for me right now."

That's a shame, because what a concordance actually does is simple, and what it opens up is significant. This is a plain guide to what it is, how to use it, and why it changes how you read.

What a Concordance Actually Is

A concordance is an alphabetical index of every significant word in the Bible, with a list of every verse where that word appears.

That's it. At its most basic, a concordance is a word-by-word index of Scripture. You look up a word — say, "peace" — and it gives you a list of every verse in the Bible that contains the word "peace." You look up "rest," and you get every verse that uses the word "rest." Alphabetical, comprehensive, exhaustive.

The most well-known print concordances — Strong's and Cruden's are the two most referenced — go further. Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, for example, assigns every word in the original Hebrew and Greek a number, and the concordance cross-references those numbers. So when you look up "peace" in English, you can trace it back to the Hebrew word shalom (which carries overtones of wholeness, completeness, flourishing — not just the absence of conflict) or the Greek word eirēnē (which carries its own particular New Testament weight). The English word becomes a door into the original.

You don't need to know Hebrew or Greek to use a concordance. You just need to be curious about a word and willing to follow it around.

Why Tracing a Word Through Scripture Is So Powerful

Here's the thing that makes concordance work genuinely exciting: the Bible is a unified library, and the same word carries meaning across the whole of it.

When Paul says in Philippians 4:7 that "the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus," he's using a word — eirēnē — that the Greek-speaking world already understood. But he's writing in a tradition that also carried shalom — the deep Hebrew concept of comprehensive flourishing that runs through the Psalms, through Isaiah, through the prophets' visions of what the coming Kingdom would look like.

When Isaiah 26:3 says "You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you," the word "peace" there is shalom — doubled, in fact. "Perfect peace" in Hebrew is shalom shalom. The doubling is an intensifier, meaning complete and total wholeness. That's the background against which Paul writes.

And then John 14:27, where Jesus says "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you" — now the word is doing something specific. He's distinguishing His peace from the Roman concept of peace (which was imposed through conquest and power) and offering something different entirely.

Follow one word through a concordance and you're suddenly doing biblical theology without knowing it. You're watching a concept develop across centuries, languages, and contexts. And when you come back to a familiar passage, you're reading it against a much richer background than you had before.

A Step-by-Step Walkthrough: The Word "Rest"

Let me walk through a practical example. Take the word "rest."

Step 1: Look it up. Open a concordance — or use a Bible app or website with concordance features — and search for "rest." You'll get a long list of verses. Don't be intimidated by the length. You're not reading all of them today. You're exploring.

Step 2: Notice the patterns. Scan the list. Where does "rest" show up most? You'll notice it clusters in a few places: Psalm 23 ("He leads me beside still waters; He makes me lie down in green pastures" — rest as restoration), Exodus 33 ("My presence will go with you and I will give you rest" — rest as divine presence), Hebrews 4 ("There remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God" — rest as eschatological promise), and Matthew 11:28 ("Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest" — rest as invitation from Jesus).

Step 3: Read the verses in context. Take one cluster and read it fully. Hebrews 4 is particularly rich. The author builds an argument around three layers of "rest": the rest that the Israelites forfeited in the wilderness (Psalm 95), the rest that Joshua gave them in the land (which the author says was not the final rest), and the rest that still "remains" for the people of God. Rest becomes a theological category — something God has always been offering and people have always been missing or moving toward.

Step 4: Compare them. Now go back to Matthew 11:28. "Come to me and I will give you rest." What rest is Jesus offering? You've just read Hebrews 4. You now know that "rest" in this tradition is not just physical relaxation — it's the condition of dwelling securely in God's presence, the state the Israelites missed, the thing Hebrews says "remains." Jesus is using a loaded word and claiming to be the one who finally delivers it.

That's not complicated Bible study. That's what happens when you follow a word through a concordance for thirty minutes.

How Logos Makes This Even More Powerful

Print concordances are valuable. But digital tools have made this kind of word study dramatically more accessible.

Logos Bible Software is worth knowing about here because it was built specifically for this kind of work. When you're reading a passage in Logos, every word is interactive. You hover over or click a word, and it immediately shows you: the original Greek or Hebrew term, the dictionary definition, where else that exact word appears in Scripture, and what major commentaries and lexicons say about it.

What used to require owning a shelf of reference books and doing a lot of manual cross-referencing now happens in about two clicks. The concordance functionality is built directly into the reading experience — it's not a separate lookup you have to go do. You're in the text, you encounter an interesting word, and the tool pulls back the curtain on it immediately.

The original language access is particularly valuable. When you're reading Paul's letter to the Philippians and you hit "peace," Logos immediately surfaces the Greek eirēnē, the Strong's number, the lexical entry — all without you having to leave the passage you're in. You can follow a word through its biblical uses without losing your place in the text you were reading.

There are free and paid tiers. If you're just starting to explore, the free base package gives you access to meaningful resources — more than most people use. As your study deepens, you can expand the library. But the basic concordance and word study functionality is there from the beginning.

If you've been reading the article how to actually study the Bible and looking for concrete tools to add to that practice — a digital concordance like Logos is the most direct upgrade you can make to how you read.

A Few Practical Starting Points

If this is new territory, here are some words worth tracing as a first exercise. Each one rewards the kind of cross-Bible attention a concordance makes possible.

"Redeem" / "Redeemer" — starts in Ruth and Boaz (the kinsman-redeemer as a legal-social concept), runs through Isaiah's declarations ("your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel"), and arrives at Paul's language of redemption through Christ. The legal background makes the New Testament usage come alive.

"Covenant" — traces the whole story of God's relationship with humanity. The Noahic covenant, the Abrahamic, the Mosaic, the Davidic, the new covenant of Jeremiah 31 and the letter to the Hebrews. One word, one storyline, hundreds of verses.

"Holy" — from Leviticus's exhaustive holiness code to Isaiah's "Holy, holy, holy" to 1 Peter's "be holy, for I am holy." The concept develops and transforms in ways you don't see until you trace it.

Start with a word you already know and care about. Follow it. See where it goes. The Bible has been talking to itself all along — a concordance is just how you start hearing the conversation.