Nave's Topical Bible

Orville Nave and his book

Orville J. Nave (1841–1917) was a chaplain in the United States Army in the last decades of the nineteenth century: a minister whose congregation was the soldiers he served with. In those years he worked his way through the Bible, gathering what it says on one subject after another and sorting the verses under headings. He described the finished work as the fruit of fourteen years spent studying the word of God, years he remembered as a delight that never wearied him. The book first appeared in 1896, the date the app's credit gives.

Six years earlier James Strong's Exhaustive Concordance (1890) had listed every place where each word of the English Bible occurs; the Strong's numbers in this app's Original tab go back to it. A concordance follows words. Nave followed subjects. Look up ‘faith’ in a concordance of the King James Version and the Old Testament gives you two verses, because the word occurs only twice there. Nave's topic Faith has 766 references, and 394 of them are to the Old Testament: psalms of trust, promises to lean on and stories of people who took God at his word. That is a topical Bible: Scripture gathered by meaning rather than by vocabulary, then divided into subtopics such as faith in Christ, the trial of faith and weak faith.

According to the description that comes with the app's copy, the title page claimed more than twenty thousand topics and subtopics and a hundred thousand references to Scripture. The app's data has 5,321 topics, with about 25,000 headings and subheadings under them and about 78,000 references, each of which may be a single verse, a run of verses or a whole chapter. The two largest topics are Jesus, the Christ, which points to 4,970 verses, and God, with 4,485; the smallest point to a single verse.

The text in the app is the public-domain edition in CrossWire's Bible library (version 3.0), taken from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library (CCEL). The module does not say whether it follows the first edition of 1896 or a later printing. The printed book is known for setting out many of its verses in full in the King James Version; the app's data has only the topics, headings and references, and the app shows each verse in the translation you are reading. Nave's book is still reprinted and is carried in many Bible programs; English-speaking readers have used it widely for more than a century. In this app it is the Topics section.

How a topical Bible is made

Reading the whole Bible along a single theme is far older than Nave. On the road to Emmaus the risen Jesus did just that for two of his disciples:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself.

Luke 24:27

Nave files this verse under Word of God, among the passages on Jesus opening and fulfilling the Scriptures. His book does for subject after subject what that conversation did for one.

Each topic is divided into headings, some headings into subheadings, and each line ends with its references. The headings follow a recurring pattern: general scriptures on the subject, passages that command it (‘Enjoined’), passages that show it (‘Exemplified’), named cases from the Bible's stories (‘Instances of’) and figurative uses. Faith has all of these and runs on through ‘In Christ’ and ‘Trial of’ to ‘Weak’, which simply sends you on to Doubting.

The first heading shows how Nave worked. Among its verses is Psalm 7:1, where the psalmist says no more than "I take refuge in You" (Psalm 7:1). The word faith is not there, and the Hebrew verb is chasah, to seek refuge. Nave put the verse under Faith all the same, presumably because running to God for shelter is what faith does. The original words the app lists for this topic make the same point: beside the Greek pistis, faith, stand Hebrew verbs meaning to trust and to take refuge. The Old Testament often speaks of faith in words like these.

Further down, ‘Instances of’ walks from Noah and Abraham to Jacob, Joseph, Jochebed and Moses, and many lines pair a story in Genesis or Exodus with a verse from Hebrews 11. That chapter is itself a list of instances of faith, so here Nave extends to the whole Bible something the Bible already does.

Topics come in many kinds. A person's topic, such as Abraham, is a short biography in order: son of Terah, husband of Sarah, from Ur to Haran and on into Canaan, the covenant, the birth and the offering of Isaac, Sarah's death and his own. Then come the places elsewhere in Scripture that remember him as the friend of God and a man of faith. There are places such as Jerusalem, objects from an anchor to a necklace, customs such as marriage and burial, doctrines such as Regeneration and Predestination, and virtues and sins such as Humility and Hypocrisy. A few topics are Nave's own collections: Readings, Select is a list of passages that stand well on their own, from Psalm 23 and the first chapter of Ruth to the parable of the prodigal son and 1 Corinthians 13.

Topics also point to one another. Nave added more than four thousand ‘See’ references from one topic to another. These are not cross-references between verses, which lead from one verse to a related one (that is the work of The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge). They lead from one subject to its neighbours, on the assumption that the Bible is one book whose great themes run into each other.

What it is good for, and its limits

Its great strength is gathering. A commentary goes deep into one passage and cross-references lead from one verse to the next, but a topical Bible shows you at a glance what the whole of Scripture says on a subject. Open Prayer and more than twelve hundred verses are sorted under headings such as ‘Answered’, ‘Confession in’, ‘Importunity in’, ‘Pleas offered in’ and thanksgiving before meals. The headings alone show the different strands of what the Bible teaches about prayer, and for anyone preparing a Bible study or a sermon they are an outline ready to hand.

The lists of instances are doors into the stories. Under importunity in prayer stand Jacob wrestling through the night, Moses, Elijah on Mount Carmel, the two blind men at Jericho, the Syrophoenician woman and the Roman centurion, so that stories you have read on different days are threaded on one string. It is just as useful for finding someone or somewhere the Bible mentions only once or twice.

But it was made in America some 130 years ago, from the King James Version, and both facts leave their mark. First, Nave thought and sorted in the English of the KJV. That version calls the love of 1 Corinthians 13 ‘charity’, so in Readings, Select the chapter is headed ‘Charity’. Look up Slavery and you are sent to Servant, because the KJV usually renders the word for a slave as ‘servant’. The references follow the KJV's verse numbering. Nearly a hundred headings also note a reading of the English Revised Version of 1881–1885, the new translation of Nave's day; one remarks that where the KJV has ‘owl’, the Revised Version has ‘ostrich’.

Second, the concerns of his age shaped the topics. Abstinence, Total and Prohibition speak the language of the temperance movement, a strong cause in many American churches of the time. Sanitation files the purity laws of Leviticus under carcasses, contagion, disinfection, quarantine and venereal disease, the vocabulary of modern medicine. Those laws speak first of purity before a holy God, so follow the topic's own references to Purification and Defilement too. Under Capital and Labor, the heading ‘Strife between’ cites the parable of the wicked tenants; yet when the chief priests and Pharisees heard it, "they knew that Jesus was speaking about them" (Matthew 21:45). The parable's first target was not a quarrel between owners and workers but the leaders who rejected the owner's servants and finally his son. Headings like these show the questions Nave's generation brought to the Bible; they do not settle what the text means.

Third, a topical Bible gathers verses; it does not explain them. Nave wrote no comments, only headings and references. Yet putting a verse under one heading rather than another is already an interpretation. The first instance under ‘Answered’ in Prayer is Cain: when he protested that his punishment was more than he could bear, God set a mark on him (Genesis 4:13 and following), and Nave counted that as a prayer answered. It can be read that way, though some readers would hesitate to call Cain's complaint a prayer. In Predestination, ‘Exemplified’ includes the subheading ‘In the destruction of’, which lists Eli's sons and the Hivites among others, and the topic sends you to another called Contingencies, which collects the passages where God's dealings depend on human obedience or disobedience. Nave gathered both kinds of passage and linked them, but he does not say how they fit together. Christians of different traditions have read them differently, and What is predestination? sets out the main views.

Fourth, a list lifts verses out of their setting. Under Angel (A Spirit), the heading ‘Ministrant to the righteous’ cites Psalm 91:11–12, the promise that the angels will bear you up so that you do not strike your foot against a stone, and beside it Matthew 4:6. As references they look like the same promise twice. But in Matthew 4 the speaker is the devil, quoting the psalm to tempt Jesus. Matthew Henry observes that "Satan misquoted the words" Matthew Henry, Matthew 4:6, leaving out part of the promise, and Jesus answers, "It is also written" (Matthew 4:7). Nave probably placed the verse there because it repeats the psalm, but a reader who sees only that one verse may miss who said it, and why.

Fifth, the topics are uneven. More than 2,200 of them cite three verses or fewer, most of them names of people and places mentioned once or twice. About 650 have no verses of their own and simply send you elsewhere: Devil to Demons and Satan, Bible to Word of God. At the other end, Jesus, the Christ and God run to thousands of verses.

None of this is a reason to set the book aside. It tells you what kind of book it is: an index that points into Scripture, not a substitute for it. It does its work when you go where it points and read.

In this app

Nave's index is the app's Topics tab, also on the home screen. Type a topic's name in English or Korean into the search box (love, faith, Abraham) and the matching topics appear. Below it you can switch between Map, a map of related topics from which you can open any topic's page, and List, which groups the topics by initial letter, A to Z (ㄱ to ㅎ in the Korean app), with each one's verse count.

A topic's page opens with its name and the number of verses it points to. Each verse is counted once, and a reference covering more than fifty verses is listed but not counted. Next comes a map of related topics, with lists below it headed Related topics, Original words and Key verses. Then come Nave's headings and subheadings, each line ending in its references as buttons. Tap one and the passage opens in the translation you are reading, with Read to go to that place in the reader and Study to open the study sheet on that verse. A ‘See’ at the end of a line links to the topic Nave pointed to. Related questions, at the foot of the page, lists the app's question essays that draw on the topic, and About this work, beside the credit, leads to this guide.

Related topics, Original words and Key verses are the app's additions, not Nave's. Related topics mixes two kinds of link. One is Nave's own ‘See’ references, shown on both topics whichever of them made the link. The other is topics that cite many of the same verses: where two topics share at least two verses, the app measures the shared verses against all the verses the two cite between them and keeps the eight closest. Up to six of Nave's links come first, then the topics that share verses. On Love, for instance, Nave's links to God, Friendship, Fraternity and Children come before Naomi, Widow, Commandments and Boaz. Naomi, Widow and Boaz share the chapters of Ruth that Love cites among its instances, and Commandments shares the commands to love in the Gospels and 1 John.

Original words are Hebrew and Greek words that occur in a topic's verses at least twice as often as in the Old or New Testament as a whole, and in at least three chapters; tap one to open its lexicon entry (STEPBible's Original-Language Data). Key verses are up to twelve of the topic's verses that contain the most of those words and that the topic cites most often. All three are calculated, so use them as pointers and give them less weight than the headings Nave wrote.

In the reader, tap a verse and then Study, and a sheet opens with four tabs: Original, Commentary, Cross-refs and Topics. The Topics tab lists the topics that cite the verse, those that cite that very verse first and those that cite a longer passage containing it after. In the app's data, 30,822 of the King James Version's 31,102 verses, more than 99 per cent, belong to at least one topic, and a verse has about six on average. If any of the app's question essays cite the verse, they are listed above the topics under Questions. Tap a topic and its map and lists open full screen, with Open topic page to see all of Nave's headings and references.

The Korean app shows topic names, headings and subheadings in the Korean translation, with the names of people and places as the Korean Bible spells them, and each topic's English name under its Korean one and in the list. 185 of Nave's ‘See’ references, to topics this edition lacks, have been dropped.

The search in the top bar finds topics by name and by the words of their headings: search for Syrophoenician and Faith comes up, because two of its headings name her. The installed app saves the topics with its other essentials, and Settings › Offline reading can save the Topics tab's lists with the rest of the study data. Topic pages you read appear in History, and you can bookmark them.

Reading it well

Start with a question. Ask what the Bible says about prayer, or forgiveness, or work, and open the topic; but before you tap a reference, read the headings from top to bottom like a table of contents. They map the subject and show you where to begin, above all in the large topics.

Follow the ‘See’ references. It is easy to read one topic and think you have seen everything. Open Love and you will find many verses on our love for God, for Jesus and for one another, but the heading on God's love has no verses at all, only a reference to God. Nave filed the love of God under God, where two headings, ‘Love of’ and ‘Love of, exemplified’, gather more than two hundred references. John 3:16 is there, and so is this:

And we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is love; whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in him.

1 John 4:16

So the Topics tab for John 3:16 lists God, Faith, Life and Salvation, among others, but not Love. To hear what the Bible says about love you need both topics, Love and God. What is love? draws the two together.

Read every verse in its chapter. A reference button opens one verse or a few, so when a verse matters, tap Read and take in the whole chapter. As with Matthew 4:6, who is speaking, to whom and why only become clear in context. This is truest of the instances. Under Love, the line ‘Abraham for Lot’ sends you to Genesis 14, a chapter in which the word love never occurs. It tells how Abram, hearing that his nephew had been taken captive, set out with the 318 trained men of his household and pursued the raiders as far as Dan. Nave saw love in what Abram did, and you see why the heading belongs there only when you have read the story.

Test the headings. A heading is Nave's summary, not the Bible's words, and as with Cain's complaint filed as an answered prayer, a heading can already be an interpretation. After reading the verses, ask whether the heading fits them, and whether the passage says more than the heading, or something different. Take most care with headings that carry the questions of Nave's own time, such as temperance, sanitation, or capital and labor.

Use it alongside the other helps. When a topic leads you to a verse that matters, open its Cross-refs tab (The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge) and read what the commentaries say on the passage. How these tools fit together is the subject of What a Commentary Is and How to Read One.

Read toward the whole. The danger of a topical Bible is the proof text, a verse pulled out to settle an argument; its gift is that it lets you hear the whole of Scripture on a subject.

The entirety of Your word is truth, and all Your righteous judgments endure forever.

Psalm 119:160

The aim of gathering the verses on a theme is not to find the one that suits you but to hear all that God has said about it. Try it with Prayer: take the instances of importunity, one a day, and read each story whole: Jacob at the ford, Moses on the mountain, Elijah on Carmel, the blind men by the road, the Syrophoenician woman and the centurion. By the last of them, How should I pray? will read differently. Nave's fourteen years were presumably spent in much the same way: a long walk through the whole Bible, letting Scripture throw light on Scripture.