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<!---- [[Category:Bible words and their meaning—Strong's Numbers]] ---->
Corrected link to Wenham page here.
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==Introduction==
Strong's Numbers enable people who do not know Greek or Hebrew to understand the meaning of words in the Bible.
The American Professor James Strong, born 1822-and died 1894, allocated a unique number to each word stem in the Greek New Testament and the Hebrew Old Testament. For example, if Strong's system had been applied to English, then "go" and "went" would have the same Strong's Number, because they are parts of the same verb - but "came" would have a separate number. Just to confirm, Strong's Numbers apply to Greek and Hebrew, not to English.
To find the meaning of a Bible word, there are two stages:-
It may be easiest to work on the world wide Web. For offline use, the Xiphos program can be used. The printed book, Strong's Concordance, is on sale.
Xiphos has the following statement, "Warning: If you live in a persecuted country and do not wish to risk detection you should NOT use the remote installation feature!" That probably applies may also apply to any use of the web.
==How to use Strong's Numbers—an example==
Luke 24:4 states, "two men stood by them". The obvious reading of the English is that the two were standing, that is, that the ordinary Greek verb "to stand" is used. That can be checked using Strong's Numbers, with a surprising result. Incidentally, the four accounts of the discovery of the Saviour's resurrection are discussed at the wikiChristian page "[[Resurrection of Jesus - WenhamJesus—Wenham's harmony of the four accounts of the first Easter Sunday]]".
Step (1): Googling "Lk 24:4 Strong" gives a page of the BibleHub website, and hovering on the phrase "stood by" gives the number 2186.
The information might be shown as a list or as a table.
{| border="1"
! colspan="2" | List/Table A
|-
! colspan="2" | 2186—KJV Word Usage
|-
Googling "Strong 2186 Greek" gives a page of the BibleHub website, which shows that 2186 is a composite verb "epHistemi", that is, "to uponStand". Compare the English verb "to underStand", which, in modern usage, does not relate to standing.
Googling "Strong 2186 Greek" also gives a page of the BibleTools website, which shows that 2186 is used only 21 times, almost always in Luke or Acts, and its first instance is Luke 2:9, "the angel of the Lord came upon them". The last instance in the Gospel of Luke is the current verse. That might indicate that Luke is using the verb 2186, at both the beginning and end of the gospel, of angels.
{| border="1"
! colspan="2" | List/Table B
|-
! The word 2186 is used 21 times
|-
|}
So it now looks as though the verb 2186 cannot be the ordinary verb "to stand", that 2186 may imply angels and that it certainly does not usually mean "to stand".
==Offline use of Strong's Numbers—Xiphos==
A similar free app for mobile phones is "MySword Bible" from Galaxy Store. That gives the Strong's Number look-up and also a Strong's definition for each Strong's Number.
==The printed bookPrinted books—Strong's Concordance, etc.==
[[Image:Strong_1899_p425.jpg|thumb|A page of Strong's 1899 Concordance, which also contains a list of definitions of each of the Strong's Numbers.]]
The printed book is available from booksellers. It is arranged as a Concordance, that is, an alphabetical list of the words in the English Bible. For each English word, each occurrence is listed in order of its Bible reference and is labelled with the Strong's Number of the original Greek or Hebrew word. At the end of the book is the list of Strong's definitions of the Greek and Hebrew Strong's Number word-stems.
Strong's definitions of the Greek/Hebrew numbers seem wordy and of much less use than the tables shown above. Having said that, a modern version, namely Kohlenberger JR (2002) "The Strongest Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible", Zondervan, supplements short verbal definitions with lists of counts of translations as in list/table A.
Wigram GV (1844) "The Englishman's Greek Concordance of the New Testament", Longmans, provides list/table B, in English, but is not indexed according to Strong's Numbers and therefore lacks usefulness. Some modern editions of Wigram, however, may perhaps be indexed according to Strong's Numbers.
==Quotes==
[[Category:Christian reference works]]
