Alexander Cruden

Alexander Cruden (31 May 1699 – 1 November 1770) was the Scottish author of an early concordance to the Bible, a proofreader and publisher, and self-styled Corrector of the nation's morals.

Alexander Cruden was born in Aberdeen in Scotland (baptised on 8 June 1699, St. Nicholas Kirk, Aberdeen, according to recent research) and was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School and Marischal College, University of Aberdeen, and became an excellent Latin, Greek and Biblical scholar.

He took the degree of master of arts, but soon after began to show signs of insanity owing to a disappointment in love. After a term of confinement he recovered and removed to London. In 1722 he had an engagement as private tutor to the son of a country squire living at Eton Hall, Southgate, and also held a similar post at Ware.

In 1729 he was employed by the 10th Earl of Derby as a reader and secretary, but was discharged on the 7th of July for his ignorance of French pronunciation. He then lodged in a house in Soho frequented exclusively by Frenchmen, and took lessons in the language in the hope of getting back his post with the earl, but when he went to Knowsley Hall in Lancashire, the earl would not see him.

Cruden's Bible Concordance became well-known, and further editions were published after his death. It has not been out of print since 1737 and is still encountered today on the shelves of priests and biblical scholars.

There were some primitive concordances before Cruden; however, they were unsystematic, popular aids rather than scholarly tools. Cruden worked alone and produced the most consistent and complete concordance until the introduction of computerised indexing. As well as compiling occurrences, he also invented a new method of presentation, which showed the surrounding sentence rather than just the verse reference. It provided the literary context and so made the concordance significantly easier to handle for false positives.

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