Full tan leather binding. Gilt edging on both boards. Spine professionally repaired with tan title plate, gilt lettering and shell emblems.

A good readable edition

A Bible concordance is an alphabetical listing of words and phrases found in the Holy Bible and shows where the terms occur throughout all books of Scripture. With cross-references for verses, concordances make it easy to understand the meaning of terms and the context in which those words are used. Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance is the most widely known and popular and includes Greek and Hebrew dictionaries for a better understanding of the original meaning. Additional concordances such as Naves Topical and Torreys Topical are valuable Bible study resources.

A Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures, generally known as Cruden’s Concordance, is a concordance of the King James Bible (KJV) that was singlehandedly created by Alexander Cruden (1699–1770). The Concordance was first published in 1737 and has not been out of print since then. Two editions of the Concordance appeared during his lifetime, 1761 and 1769. (Reference 1955 edition) Cruden’s concordance was first published in 1737, one of the first copies being personally presented to Queen Caroline on November 3, 1737. Cruden began work on his concordance in 1735 whilst a bookseller in London. Cruden worked alone from 7am to 1am every day and completed the bulk of the work in less than a year. The proofreading and layout took a little longer. His brain was occupied with nothing else, so much so that he failed to notice the diminishing stock in his bookshop and the consequent lack of custom. “Was there ever, before or since the year 1737”, writes his biographer Edith Olivier, “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?”.

Although a remarkable feat, the concordance was not entirely without error. The Times recorded that Cruden left out Buz (brother of Huz) and Sneeze (put under Neeze). In fact, the name “Chloe” was missing until a revised edition was published in 1930.

Alexander Cruden (31 May 1699 – 1 November 1770) was the Scottish author of an early concordance to the Bible, a proof reader and publisher, and self-styled Corrector of the nation’s morals. 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, they were unsystematic, popular aids rather than scholarly tools. Cruden worked alone and produced the most consistent and complete concordance until the introduction of computerised indexing. As well as compiling occurrences, he also invented a new method of presentation, which showed the surrounding sentence rather than just the verse reference. It provided the literary context and so made the concordance significantly easier to handle for false positives.

Cruden presented the first edition of his work on 3 November 1737 to Queen Caroline (wife of George II); but she died some days later without rewarding Cruden, who had to go into 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.