[B-Greek] Book Study Concordance of the Greek New Testament - great price
Eric Weiss
papaweiss1 at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 30 11:39:56 EDT 2004
(Post corrected to fix ? appearing in place of "fi"
and "fl")
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.
=====
Eric S. Weiss
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