Concordance des textes de Nag Hammadi: Le Codex VII.

• Author: Good, Deirdre

The first in a new series of concordances for the Laval Coptic Library of Nag Hammadi, this volume is timely and useful, particularly in light of the paucity of concordances and indices to the entire corpus. The volume has three parts: the concordance (Coptic words, words of Greek origin, proper names, numbers, magical syllables, whole and partially reconstructed words), the entire text of Codex VII, and a complete index of Coptic and Greek word forms.

The entire project is a computerized concordance using software developed by Laval University. Since the concordance has no diacritical signs, the continuous Coptic text which follows includes superlinear strokes, diaereses, hooked letters, and editorial symbols common to editions of texts. It thus provides the reader with an opportunity to check the actual appearance of the word in the text of the codex. It is also a useful correction to an edition of Coptic texts within Codex VII lacking, among other things, morpheme dividers (J. Zandee, The Teachings of Sylvanus [Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1991]). [See previous review (ed.).]

The introduction gives an explanation in English and French of the principles by which words are identified and classified in the concordance.

For English-speaking readers of the Coptic Nag Hammadi texts, this is a landmark volume. Until the publication of the present text, anyone wanting to look up a word would need to go to the index for the edition of the codex in which the word appeared in the (Brill) Coptic Gnostic Library. A good number of the codices in this edition have been published but the series is by no means complete. Thus, if the codex (or part of it) had been published, one could learn where a word appears and the frequency of the word in that codex. The only other possibility was to consult the first edition of The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977; hereafter NHLE) in which there was an (incomplete) index. The difficulties of producing an index for this volume may be shown by the fact that the third edition contained no index at all. Thus, a single source for a word's occurrences in the entire corpus was (and is) not yet available. In the published texts, there remain questions about index forms (including occurrences of proper names in the text). With Charron's edition of...