Nelson’s Concordance of Bible Phrases. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1992. 752 pp. Cloth, $19.99.
Students of the Bible will find this unique concordance very helpful. Unlike the typical concordance, which is a listing of verses in which an individual word occurs, this one lists all the verses where a particular phrase occurs. The editors have chosen 5,200 common phrases from the Bible and arranged them alphabetically according to the first word in the phrase.
The usefulness of this type of resource is readily apparent. For example, if one wanted to study the contexts of the phrase “sons of God,” with this concordance he can look up the phrase directly and find all ten occurrences of it. With the traditional concordance, the student would have to look up either “sons” or “God,” both of which appear in hundreds of verses, and do a painstaking search to find the verses where both words appear together.
Examples of some of the better-known phrases represented in the concordance are “kingdom of God,” “day of the Lord,” “Spirit of God,” “eternal life,” and “he who believes.” There is also a key-word index if only one word of the phrase is remembered.
Nelson’s Concordance of Bible Phrases will be a time-saving asset to any library.
Gregory P. Sapaugh
Flint, Texas