Why Strong's isn't enough for Greek word study

2 July 2026

Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance has been the default tool for word study since 1890. It’s genuinely useful and it’s free — every occurrence is indexed, every number assigned, and the basic glosses give you a starting point.

It also has real limitations, and understanding them helps you use it correctly.

The problem with a Strong’s gloss for NT Greek

Strong’s definitions draw heavily on classical Greek sources. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek — the common dialect of the Hellenistic world after Alexander’s conquests, which diverged from classical usage in meaningful ways. Words shifted meaning, new usages emerged, and the theological vocabulary of the NT is often shaped more by the Septuagint (Greek OT) than by classical literature.

A one-line Strong’s entry can’t carry that. For a word like agape, it will give you a gloss. It won’t tell you that agape was rare in classical Greek, became important in the Septuagint as a translation of Hebrew love vocabulary, and carries that resonance into every NT occurrence. That context changes how you read the word. (For why the Septuagint matters so much here, see what the Septuagint is.)

What a full lexicon adds

The upgrade isn’t a different Strong’s number — it’s the difference between a gloss and a full lexicon entry that shows a word’s actual semantic range, with citations, across the sources where it’s used.

In the field, several lexicons do this. BDAG (Bauer’s) is the modern scholarly standard for NT Greek. Abbott-Smith’s Manual Greek Lexicon of the New Testament (1922) is Koine-focused. Mounce is more accessible for non-specialists; Thayer’s is older but widely used. And Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) is the great comprehensive Greek lexicon — it covers classical, Koine, papyri, and Septuagint usage, with the citations to back each sense. It’s more thorough than a Strong’s gloss by a wide margin, and it documents exactly the LXX usage that Strong’s under-represents.

What Scribe actually gives you

Scribe doesn’t surface Abbott-Smith or BDAG as separate named lexicons — though its base Greek gloss, TBESG, is in fact drawn from Abbott-Smith. What it puts behind a tapped Greek word, named on tap, is the full Liddell-Scott-Jones entry — far more than a one-line gloss — alongside that shorter TBESG gloss for a quick read.

Tap a Greek word on the BSB or MSB in Scribe and you get its full Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) entry, the Strong’s number, and transliteration, plus a concordance of every verse it appears in — all offline, no account. It’s the depth of a full lexicon in place of a one-line gloss.

That’s the honest shape of it: the win over bare Strong’s here is depth — a full lexicon entry — not a switch to an NT-only lexicon. LSJ is a classical-and-Koine lexicon, so you still read its senses with judgment — but you’re reading the full record of how a word was used, not a single gloss.

A note on what this requires from you

All lexical tools work better if you know at least the Greek alphabet and can recognise lemma forms. If you’re doing word study entirely through English transliterations, hold your conclusions loosely — you’re working at one remove from the text. Read multiple senses in the entry, not just the first one that confirms what you already thought.

For the full mechanics — Strong’s, LSJ and BDB, Hebrew morphology, concordance — see Greek and Hebrew word study on your iPhone, or what Strong’s Concordance is if you’re starting from the beginning. Explore the word study feature in full, and if you want reasoning on top of the lexical data, the optional AI research assistant works over the passage and its LSJ entries using your own AI key (a direct Anthropic key or OpenRouter).