[B-Greek] Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament - great price

Eric Weiss papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 30 11:29:28 EDT 2004


This comment on the Internet made me wonder if Bible
software can do what this book has assembled:

http://perso.wanadoo.es/rgomezp/weblog/archive/2004_02_15_archive

Concordance compiled with the aid of... Bible
software?

Andreas Köstenberger and Raymond Bouchoc are the
authors of the fairly recent The Book Study
Concordance of the Greek New Testament (Broadman &
Holman, 2003). This is what the blurb of the book
says:

> A New Bible Study Tool and a New Venue of Academic
Research. Aided by breakthroughs in computer
technology, The Book Study Concordance of the Greek
New Testament has compiled data in a format that has
never before been available to Bible students. The
result is a collection of twenty-seven concordances
listing every word used in the Greek New Testament in
alphabetical order book by book. Also provided are
word totals, most-frequently-used words, and words set
in relation to the New Testament as a whole. This is
an absolutely invaluable new tool for all serious
Bible students and for the scholarly community.

This mammoth work (viii/1528 pages) is based on the
electronic version of NA27 developed by the Gramcord
Institute. In the Preface, the authors state:

> The Book Study Concordance of the Greek New
Testament for the first time assembles concordances of
each of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament.
The concordance is a fresh effort, though of course
standing on the shoulders of those who have gone
before us. The textual base of the present concordance
is the electronic version of the 27th edition of the
Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece. The roots of
the words were matched with their forms based on data
developed and provided by the GRAMCORD Institute. In
this regard we would like to acknowledge the
foundational debt we owe to the previous work of the
GRAMCORD Institute. The concordances themselves were
generated by our own programs written to generate the
concordance listings from the raw GRAMCORD data.

Since Raymond Bouchoc is research scholar for the
GRAMCORD Institute, they no doubt had access to the
latest version of the tagged database, but I wonder
what kind of program is "our own programs", and why
did they not use any of the Bible software packages
currently available. Could it be that none of them had
the kind of statistical features and flexibility they
needed? Here is what H. Van Dyke Parunak had to say
about the issue of statistical analysis in his recent
review Windows Software for Bible Study (pp. 481-482):

> At first glance, it seems natural to plot
frequency statistics per chapter, but this approach
has several weaknesses. Chapters do not necessarily
correspond to the natural discourse units of the text,
either in extent (a natural unit may be wider or
narrower than a chapter) or in their limits (which may
not correspond with those of natural units). The same
can be said of fixed width windows that are
sometimes used in plots of this sort (for example,
plotting occurrences in windows ten verses wide). This
mismatch results in a profile that distorts the
actual structure of the text. A much better approach
is to let the window width change dynamically with the
distribution, an algorithm that could be easily
implemented by any of these packages. With this
refinement, plots such as these become powerful
tools for visualizing the structure of texts (...) but
these features are not visible with plots at the
chapter level. It would be even more useful if
software packages provided an option to generate a
file containing, not verse references, but the
index number of each hit in a search, together with
the number of words per verse and per chapter, so that
users could directly manipulate distributional
information in a package such as Excel or Mathematica.
A further refinement would be to let the user
define and annotate a number of fields
with each hit to capture contextual features (e.g.
direct vs. indirect or human vs. divine speech,
putative literary source), and provide a simple
flat-file database function (sorting and
searching) to help the user perform supplementary
studies.

Well, if such an algorithm "could be easily
implemented by any of these packages", I wonder why
not a single one of them has already done so!
Moreover, when I checked some of the stats given in
the book against Accordance (which happens to include
that particular database and has a pretty good
statistical analysis feature) I soon came across a few
discrepancies in the numbers. So, I would definitely
like to know a little bit more about the tools and
methodology followed by Köstenberger and Bouchoc.
Their book is a welcome addition to the field of Greek
reference tools, but I think some more information is
in order if peer-review is to be pursued consistently.


--- Mont Cessna <montc at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Eric,
> 
> In BibleWorks you can not only build frequency lists
> of all kinds, but
> you can also build your own lexicon for a book or
> author. I am pretty
> sure Accordance will do the same. I don't know about
> any others.
> 
> While I do like books, for time intensive tasks, a
> high-end Bible
> program is indispensable. 
> 
> 
> Mont Cessna, Sr.
> Harrisburg, PA
> montc at earthlink.net
> 
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: b-greek-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org
> [mailto:b-greek-
> > bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Eric Weiss
> > Sent: Thursday, July 29, 2004 2:48 PM
> > To: b-greek
> > Subject: [B-Greek] Book Study Concordance of the
> Greek New Testament -
> > greatprice
> > 
> > The other day I was studying II Peter and was
> noticing
> > the repetition of several words throughout, and
> > thought it would be really helpful to have a
> resource
> > that showed and categorized the frequencies of
> words
> > by books or authors of the NT. That's when I
> > understood the value of the recently-published THE
> > BOOK STUDY CONCORDANCE OF THE GREEK NEW TESTAMENT
> by
> > Andreas Köstenberger, but its $60 price tag had
> put me
> > off, even at a 20% discount at the seminary
> bookstore.
> > However, Overstock.com is selling it for 41% off
> for
> > $34.89 (+ $1.40 s/h), so I ordered a copy.
> > 
> >
>
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?PAGE=PROFRAME&PROD_ID=634066
> > 
> > Overstock's stock changes, so something may be
> here
> > today and not again for several weeks. I've
> ordered
> > from them before and have gotten fast service with
> no
> > problems. I don't have Bible language software, so
> I
> > don't know if what Köstenberger's book does can
> > already be done with Accordance, Bibleworks, etc.
> > 
> > =====
> > Eric S. Weiss
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > __________________________________
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> > ---
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> 
> 


=====
Eric S. Weiss




		
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