Eldin Ricks’s Thorough Concordance of the LDS Standard Works

Book Notice

Eldin Ricks’s Thorough Concordance of the LDS Standard Works, by Eldin Ricks, with Charles D. Bush, Junola S. Bush, and L. Kristine N. Ricks (FARMS, 1995)

Eldin Ricks’s Thorough Concordance of the LDS Standard Works is a far cry from the thin, pocket-size Combination Reference that missionaries carried in the 1960s. This hefty, nine-hundred-page volume “is a concordance of the LDS scriptures comparable to the James Strong Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible—a printed concordance of all occurrences of all words in the scriptural text . . . with a meaningful context phrase” (iii).

For students of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price who have no access to a computer concordance or who find computers inconvenient, inaccessible, or confusing, this hard copy is an amazing resource. It is a concordance that “can go anywhere. . . . It can be taken into the classroom by both teacher and student” (back cover).

Years in the making, the concordance represents an effort begun by Ricks in 1971, when he began inputting the standard works into computer form, using the old key-punched computer cards. Work on the project went slowly even after Chuck and Junola Bush volunteered to help. In 1992, Ricks asked his daughter-in-law Kristine Ricks to help the Bushes finish the project. Eldin Ricks died a few days later, after reiterating his wish for the completion of the concordance. The publication of this book is the fulfillment of that wish. This book is more than a tool; it is a monument of the study of the holy scriptures.

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