You Could Look It Up (29 page)

The earliest known Bible concordance appeared around the year 1230 or 1240: Hugh of Saint-Cher, a French friar, worked with his Dominican brothers to break down the Vulgate into the
Concordantiae Sacrorum Bibliorum
. The first Hebrew concordance was begun by Rabbi Isaac Nathan ben Kalonymus in 1438 and completed a decade later; it appeared in print in 1523. There was also a Greek concordance to the original text of the New Testament, published in Basel in 1546. Life got much easier for everyone after 1545, when Robert Estienne (Robertus Stephanus) introduced numbered verses into the text of the Bible, making it possible to cite chapter and verse with precision.

English concordances began appearing during the Reformation—Protestants have always been expected to read the Bible for themselves rather than relying on the interpretation of a priest. The first printed English Bible concordance appeared in 1535, when Thomas Gibson, or Gybson, published a concordance to the New Testament. The whole Bible had to await John Marbecke’s
Concordance, That Is to Saie, a Worke Wherein by the Ordre of the Letters of the A.B.C. Ye Maie Redely Finde Any Worde Conteigned in the Whole Bible, So Often as It Is There Expressed or Mencioned
, published in 1550. Marbecke advertises the remarkable powers of this new kind of book to his royal patron: it makes it possible “that whatsoeuer sentence or worde were written in the moste sacred Bible, any man hauyng but competent learnyng, might easely turne to the originall place thereof, and that without study, although he remembred but one woorde of the sentence, whiche he desired to finde.”
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Cruden knew Marbecke and the other concordances well enough to write a detailed history of the form,
3
but he was not impressed by his predecessors’ work, and he resolved to produce his own concordance that would solve all the genre’s problems. Cruden started every morning at seven and worked nearly without interruption until one o’clock the next morning—an eighteen-hour workday every day. At this pace he finished most of the manuscript in just a year, though proofreading took more time. As one of his biographers asks, “Was there ever … another
enthusiast for whom it was no drudgery, but a sustained passion of delight, to creep conscientiously word by word through every chapter of the Bible, and that not once only, but again and again?”
4

Cruden originally planned a small octavo edition and even printed up some sample pages to work on matters of page layout, but he realized that this format was too small and eventually settled on an arrangement of his material that fit well on a larger quarto page. His
Concordance
is in three alphabetical sequences. The first contains what he calls “the appellative or common words, which is the principal part. It is very full and large, and any text may be found by looking for any material word, whether it be substantive, adjective, verb,
&c.
” The second series covered proper names in both the Old and New Testaments, with “the various Significations of the principal words, which, I hope, will be esteemed a very useful improvement, there not being any thing of this kind in the other large
Concordances
.” A reader can discover there that, for example, Abimelech means “father of the king,” and Joshua means “the Lord, the saviour.” Finally, Cruden compiled “a
Concordance
for those books that are called
Apocryphal
, which is only added that this work might not be deficient in any thing that is treated of in any other
Concordance
; those books not being of divine Inspiration, nor any part of the Canon of Scripture.”
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Cruden’s timing was bad. He dedicated his work to Queen Caroline, the wife of George III, and presented her with the first copy to come off the press, on November 3, 1737. He clearly had high expectations of a reward. But just six days later, perhaps before she had even looked at the book, Caroline took to her bed at St. James’s Palace with intense abdominal pains. Physicians thought it was colic, but she had suffered a rupture of the womb. For eleven days she suffered tremendous pain before dying an exemplary death: her last word was simply “Pray.” Cruden never got the royal recognition he desired. He did, however, live long enough to see his book reach a second edition in 1761 and a third in 1769. Three more editions would appear before the end of the century, and the
Concordance
has remained an essential reference work for English-speaking Christians to this day. New editions were appearing as recently as the 1990s.

As impressive as Cruden’s
Concordance
is, later concordances are more sophisticated, distinguishing different senses of what seem to be the same words. The English word
bow
, for example, can be either a noun (“And Jehu drew a
bow
with his full strength, and smote Jehoram”) or a verb (“thy father’s children shall
bow
down before thee”). More to the point, the Christian Bible is a multilingual work, with most of the Old Testament in Hebrew (with bits in Aramaic) and the New Testament in Greek. But most concordances index the words in a translation, and many fine shadings of meaning are lost. The word
love
, for example, appears 310 times in the King James Version, but that single English word translates nine Hebrew and ten Greek words, some of which refer to erotic love (“Come, let us take our fill of
love
until the morning”), some to lust (“she was more corrupt in her inordinate
love
than she, and in her whoredoms more than her sister”), some to brotherly love (“be ye all of one mind …
love
as brethren”), some to self-preservation (“He that
loveth
his life shall lose it”), some to compassion (“Now God had brought Daniel into favour and tender
love
”), some to divine love (“For the Father
loveth
the Son”), some to greed (“For the
love
of money is the root of all evil”). James Strong’s
Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible
(1890), probably the most sophisticated in a series of wordbooks that offer insights into the word of God, allows even those with no knowledge of Hebrew or Greek to make out the meanings of the original words by comparing all the instances of each kind of love.

And although concordances started with Scripture, the method can work with any body of text. Cruden himself applied his concordance-making technique to one of England’s greatest poets in 1741 with
A Verbal Index to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,”
the first time an English work other than Scripture got the concordance treatment. Others followed. Andrew Becket’s
Concordance to Shakespeare: Suited to All the Editions, in Which the Distinguished and Parallel Passages in the Plays of that Justly Admired Writer Are Methodically Arranged
appeared in 1787, the first of a long series of Shakespeare concordances including Marvin Spevack’s
Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare
, 6 vols., 1968–70, based on the Riverside Shakespeare. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concordances to many authors were published, and by looking at the dates when they appeared we can construct a
history of when modern writers became the subject of serious scholarly attention: Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1869, Alexander Pope in 1875, Jean la Bruyère in 1878, Dante in 1888, Robert Burns in 1889, Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1892, Thomas Gray in 1908, both William Wordsworth and
Beowulf
in 1911, Edmund Spenser in 1915, Robert Browning in 1924, Geoffrey Chaucer in 1927, Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1932, Edgar Allan Poe in 1941. And in 1872, a different kind of holy scripture was analyzed in
A Concordance to the Constitution of the United States of America: With a Classified Index, and Questions for Educational Purposes
by Charles W. Stearns.

When computers were put on the job starting in the 1970s, dozens of automatically generated concordances were published, but computers also killed off the genre. Hard-copy concordances are little used today; one can search electronic texts and get faster results than are possible by flipping back and forth in heavy books of small print. But the conjunction of concordance and text searching is significant. Our new high-tech habits let us see the old books in new lights. What is a concordance but an attempt to perform every possible full-text search in advance and to collect the results between two covers?

CHAPTER
11 ½

WHO'S WHO AND WHAT'S WHAT

Making the Cut

What determines the contents of a reference book? For some, little discretion is involved. The compiler of a table of logarithms has to make a few early policy choices—what range of numbers, what interval between them, how many decimal places—but after that the decisions are largely set. An atlas declares its scope and its scale, and then it sets to work. Other books, though, present their editors with difficult decisions about what's in and what's out.

All dictionaries, for instance, are forced to be selective. “Almost every criticism made of dictionaries,” Sidney Landau observes, “comes down at bottom to the lexicographer's need to save space.”
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There is no such thing as “unabridged”: dictionaries sold with that label, even works as extensive as the
Oxford English Dictionary
and the Grimms'
Wörterbuch
, exclude more words than they admit. They all reject a huge technical vocabulary—millions of names of chemical compounds, biological species names, the specialized jargon of many professions—and most leave out nonce (ephemeral, single-use) words, slang that has its day and rapidly disappears, trademarks, and the like. Still, they are all interested in including new words, senses, and usages when they can actually be found “in the wild.” Merriam-Webster explains that each day, its editors “devote an hour or two to reading a cross section of published material, including books, newspapers, magazines, and electronic publications; in our office this activity is called “reading and marking.” The editors scour the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words,” and so on. When they find something new, an entry goes into their “citation files,” now nearly 16 million words collected since the 1880s, and these citations are used as raw material for revised entries.

“Before a new word can be added to the dictionary,” Merriam explains, “it must have enough citations to show that it is widely used… . A word may be rejected for entry into a general dictionary if all of its citations come from a single source or if they are all from highly specialized publications that reflect the jargon of experts within a single field.”
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Most dictionaries have policies on how long a new word has to be in circulation before it earns inclusion—five years, maybe ten, maybe more—to avoid flash-in-the-pan coinages that will be forgotten before the new edition goes to press. They do their best to resist pressure to include words coined by special interests, and they draw the line at made-up words. Every working lexicographer has had the experience of being offered new words. Kory Stamper captures the tone of these “helpful” messages from readers: “Hi, I noticed you don't have my coinage ‘flabulous', which means ‘tremendously fat', in your dictionary.”
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These are offered—sometimes for free, sometimes for a modest charge—but almost always turned down with a polite form letter.

The biggest determinant of selectivity is physical space. The decision to eliminate not only encyclopedic information but also tens of thousands of obsolete words from
Webster's Second
(1934) to make room for new ones in
Webster's Third
(1961) was motivated, above all, by the determination to keep the
Unabridged Dictionary
to a single volume. In encyclopedic works, including biographical dictionaries, that usually entails brainstorming a list of candidates for inclusion, ranking them in order of “importance”—undoubtedly subjective—and cutting those that fall below a line determined by the page count.

Even online sources have limits. Wikipedia could, at least in theory, have an entry for every person in the world. But the Wikipedia community is still trying to define the criteria for inclusion. When Jimmy Wales, one of Wikipedia's founders, visited Gugulethu, South Africa, in September 2007, he created a short entry for Mzoli's Meats, a butcher shop and restaurant. A nineteen-year-old administrator nixed it twenty-two minutes later, citing number 7 of the Criteria for Speedy Deletion: it contains “no assertion of importance/significance.” This led to a dispute among the Wikipedian community, with “inclusionists” willing to tolerate any article, however trivial, that
someone might find useful, and “deletionists” determined to prevent people from dumping unprocessed facts. Wales himself was taken aback by the “shockingly bad faith behavior” of those who should “find a new hobby.”