Alexander Cruden - Concordance

Concordance

Cruden's Bible Concordance became well-known, and further editions were published after his death. It has not been out of print since 1737 and is still encountered today on the shelves of priests and biblical scholars.

There were some primitive concordances before Cruden, however these were unsystematic, more popular aids rather than scholarly tools. Cruden worked alone and produced the most consistent and complete concordance produced before the introduction of computerised indexing.

As well as the more scientific defensible method of compiling occurrences, he also invented a new method of presentation, which showed the surrounding sentence rather than just the verse reference, this provided the literary context and so made the concordance significantly easier to handle, as the reader did not have to constantly flip back to the Bible only to find the reference was an irrelevant match.

Cruden presented the first edition on November 3, 1737 to Queen Caroline (wife of George II). However, she died some days later without awarding Cruden any reward for his work, so Cruden had to go into personal debt to finance the printing.

The second edition of the Concordance was dedicated to King George III and presented to him in person on 21 December 1761. The King awarded Cruden £100 for his efforts. The third edition was published in 1769. After the slow success of the first edition, the second and third made Cruden considerable profit.