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This Concordance will have considerable value for some users and some value for a considerable number of users. The purpose of this review is to help each reader to determine the value the Concordance may have for him or for her.
Concordances are designed to guide readers to particular words in their contexts. While a concordance itself sheds no new light on the text, it does, by assembling everything in the text containing any one word, provide a means for finding remembered passages and for comparing closely related passages. It is of particular value for linguistic research. Concordances can be used to locate a particular statement in a text, even if the user can only remember a single word in that statement. They can be used to compare and analyze word meanings, since some words have many different meanings, and they can be used to compare and analyze any changes the author has made in word usage over the years.
A concordance is a word index. Unlike a subject index, a word index guides the searcher to the words used by the author, but not necessarily to the subjects of the work. One strength of a concordance is that it is not selective: every occurrence of a word will be given in context, with no condensation. One strength of a subject index is that it does condense information that is related, so that the user can more quickly and easily find the listings for the information he or she seeks.
Concordances are now prepared with computers. Computers can be programmed to alphabetize, count, and segregate, but they cannot be programmed to think. Therein lie both the strengths and the weaknesses of all computer-generated concordances. Their harvest yields more chaff than grain, but, as long as the two can be clearly distinguished, the concordance should be evaluated for its yield of