The project of
producing a comparative concordance to the Arabic Bible and the Qur'an was begun in 1982. The Arabic texts
of the Van Dycke Bible were typed into the computer and corrected seven times in the course of ten years. In spite of the utmost care that was taken in correcting typing mistakes we cannot guarantee their complete absence. The same applies to the Arabic text of the Qur'an. All we can say, in all humility, is that our version of the Qur'an in Arabic has far less mistakes than most versions available today on electronic media. The completely vowelled text of the Qur'an has been available to us since 1989.
After having secured the Arabic texts of the Bible and the Qur'an (together containing more than 500,000 words) we first proceeded to produce a complete, alphabetically ordered list of Arabic words
used in these texts. This was achieved using the program dBase III plus developed by Ashton Tate. The printout of this alphabetical word list (involving more than 85,000 words) together with the respective Biblical and Qur'anic references for each word constituted the first version of the Comparative Concordance to the Bible and the Qur'an (CCBQ-1). It was completed in February 1993 and comprised 1,800 pages.
Next we undertook the first step towards producing a grammatically ordered comparative concordance. Towards this end we determined the grammatical root for each word in the word list. This task was
completed in 18 months. The result was version 2 of the comparative concordance (CCBQ-2), which contained the same information as in version 1 only that the words of the Bible and the Qur'an were no longer listed
alphabetically but were grouped according to the grammatical root
from which they were derived. This way one had the different words associated with a certain root all neatly together in one uninterrupted set of pages. Version 2 was finished in October 1993 and comprised more than 5,000 different Arabic roots.
The next step was to produce a complete morphological analysis for each word of the Bible and the Qur'an. This enormous task was completed in October 1994 to produce version 3 of the concordance (CCBQ-3):
a morphologically ordered, comparative concordance to the Bible and the Qur'an comprising more than 6,400 pages.
During this work on the concordance we were able to detect a significant number of mostly minor
typing mistakes (more than 10,000 in number) in the texts of the Bible and the Qur'an that we were using. These were corrected to produce an updated version of these texts (the version of 1995). Based on these
electronically corrected texts we then proceeded to revise the concordance again. This resulted in the next two versions of the comparative concordance:
Version 4
(CCBQ-4) was finished in Jauary 1996 and contained a morphologically ordered comparative concordance to the Bible and the Qur'an including only references
and no text excerpts for each Arabic word. This opus of 1,872 pages was distributed in very limited quantities in the Middle East. You can find it on this internet site under the appropriate directory.
Version 5
(CCBQ-5) that is also made available to the public on this internet site essentially contains the same information (also listed in the same order) as version 4. However, each word is not only followed by the references where it is used in the texts but in addition lists an excerpt of the verse for each reference. This
concordance with text excerpts also contains the complete morphological analysis for each Arabic word of the Bible and the Qur'an. The production of the 14,334 pages of this version was completed in May 1997.
Currently we are working on version 6 of the comparative concordance (CCBQ-6). In addition to the morphological analysis of each word in the Arabic Bible and the Qur'an we are providing a (local)
syntactical analysis, an English transliteration and a literal translation
into English. Based on this work we hope to provide not only a more detailed analysis for each Arabic word in the Bible and the Qur'an but also an English version of the comparative concordance and an interlinear version of the Arabic Bible and the Qur'an. We intend to make these available to the general public on this internet site upon their completion.
More than 20 persons (most of them experts in the Arabic language) from 5 different European and Middle Eastern countries have colaborated in this project for more than 15 years now. For security reasons no names can
be mentioned here.
If you find any mistakes in any of the texts that we present here we would be very much obliged if you could pass on this information to us so that it can be corrected in the next
edition.
Please send your messages to:
