The Anchor Bible Dictionary

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1992 by Lawrence S. Cunningham

For the past month or so the six thick volumes of the Anchor Bible Dictionary (ABD) have sat on the edge of my desk giving me intense pleasure in their heft and solidity. Reference books are a joy to one whose mind is as promiscuous as mine, so I would reward myself each time an odious but necessary task was finished by a dip into the ABD's pages ad libitum. That would permit me to read an article and follow up with the suggested cross references and having turned to them go on to their references, etc. One could pass a few leisurely hours browsing in this fashion.

Thomas Aquinas may think that curiosity springs from laziness, but my notion is that it is a safe and sane remedy for busyness. At any rate, the ABD has 6,000 entries written by 1,000 contributors who turned in, roughly, 6 million words. The list of contributors reads like a "Who's Who" of biblical scholarship. Honesty compels me to admit to not having read all the entries but I have browsed through each volume with some small degree of thoroughness.

The editorial preface tells us that the ABD reflects the current interests of biblical scholarship. There is a decided tilt toward essays of interest to social historians; thorough entries on archaeological sites; expanded coverage of articles on books outside the canon (scroll literature; Gnostic texts; pseudepigrapha, etc.). Conversely, the editors felt no need to duplicate the work of other reference works with exhaustive word studies like those found in standard volumes like that of Kittel.

My first attempt to find something in the ABD rather alarmed me. For reasons too complicated to explain, I wanted to read about games or sports in the Bible but no such entry existed under either term (one finds "games" in the one-volume Harper's Dictionary of the Bible) nor was there an entry under "dice" or "lots" or "running" or "racing" or "wrestling" or anything else I could think of that would help.

There are other oddities of this sort. The article on "sex and sexuality" makes no mention at all of the New Testament. There is an entry on biblical scholarship in Japan but none on such scholarship, say, either in India or Africa (India itself merits a short article; Africa does not get an entry as such). The entry on "iconography and the Bible" seems strangely uninterested in the New Testament (although there is a good entry on early Christian art and architecture where iconography features rather prominently in the body of the article).

These were small disappointments compared to the terrific things I did discover, rather serendipitously, like the article by Marvin Pope on euphemism and dysphemism in the Bible (there are plenty of both) with a concluding section on sanitizing strategies used over the centuries on biblical language. That led me to the section on "humor and wit" which turned out to have separate long entries on humor in Egypt and Mesopotamia (the latter culture may have had professional jesters) as well as the Old and New Testaments.

It should come as no surprise that in a reference book of this size, major topics get extended treatment. The entries on essential biblical places as well as the books of the Bible get authoritative treatment by leading scholars. The history of Israel from the period before the monarchy until after the Babylonian exile takes up fifty pages of double columns with references to about sixteen other articles that flesh out and advance that history. Significant cities and institutions (e.g., Corinth or the temple in Jerusalem) receive exhaustive treatment accompanied by useful schematics, maps, etc. One notes in passing, probably due to financial considerations, that there are few illustrations and none in color.

In the same volume as "Jerusalem," "Jesus Christ" gets twenty-three pages followed by lengthy articles on the quest for the historical Jesus, the actual words of Jesus, the teachings of Jesus, and an extremely interesting article on the worship of Jesus and how that worship related to Jewish monotheism. The latter article would be a useful first reading, for example, for any beginning theological student who would be inclined to argue for a full-blown doctrine of the Trinity or who expected too refined a Christology in the New Testament.

By and large, however, some issues of interest to the theologian are not prominent in the ABD although the two articles on God in the Old and New Testament are panoramic and helpful. There are long articles on hermeneutics and the history of interpretation but, surprisingly, nothing on "inspiration" (not even prophetic inspiration; one does find a subsection on "prophetic experience" in the large entry on "postexilic Hebrew prophecy" and a few paragraphs on inspiration at the end of the article on "canon") or "inerrancy" or "fundamentalism." One does find an entry on "ecstasy" which is a good deal more satisfactory than the very disappointing and perfunctory one on "mysticism and the Bible" by the same contributor. Again, one notes the oddity of an article on "prayer" in early Judaism but none on prayer in the New Testament or in early Christianity. Conversely, there is a wonderfully full article on early Christian worship but none on Judaism.