Review: Oxford NABRE Concise Concordance

Although Oxford University Press dropped the ball in regards to their Catholic Study Bible NABRE by not keying the reading guides to the NABRE text, they have done a fine job with the release of the The New American Bible Revised Edition Concise Concordance. Although some retail bookstores have a publication date of mid-February, I received mine yesterday from Amazon.com. This concise concordance, printed in the USA, covers all 73 books of the Catholic canon, with 40,000 references and 5,890 key words. This is not an exhaustive concordance, like the RSV edition from Emmaus Road, but it does cover the most significant words needed for "personal and professional Bible research (v)" found in the NABRE. Also, there are capsule biographies for 435 of the most prominent personalities of the Bible.

Those of you who have the original NAB Concise Concordance will be quite familiar with this product's page layout. If you are interested in seeing this for yourself, Amazon.com does preview some pages which you can see here. It comes in a hardcover edition, with glued binding. The book's dimensions, coming in at 9.1 x 6.6 x 1 inches, make it very easy to carry with you to class or Bible study.

All in all a very good and helpful Bible study tool. While not being an exhaustive concordance, which I think the NABRE needs, it certainly is more thorough than the one found at the end of the Catholic Study Bible by Oxford. It will also be an aid for those of you who use the Little Rock Catholic Study Bible, which doesn't include a concordance. Hopefully we will continue to see more study tools released that are keyed to the NABRE.