Canter Bridge

The review that follows was originally published in The Churchman, 1999.

THE DICTIONARY OF CLASSICAL HEBREW, Volume II: beth—waw
David J.A. Clines, editor; John Elwolde, executive editor
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press 1995 660pp £65 hb ISBN 1 85075 544 2

The modern English-speaking reader of the Old Testament floats happily in a sea of lexical tools which would have been unimaginable only a generation ago. The DCH (Dictionary of Classical Hebrew) contributes usefully to the modern upsurge of philological activity. The volume under review is the second of eight projected volumes. In all, three of these are now in print, encompassing words from aleph to tet.

The DCH breaks new ground on two fronts. The first of these concerns the sources it canvasses. The second involves its approach to assigning meaning to Hebrew words and presenting this material.

First, then, to the sources. This is a dictionary of classical Hebrew. Prior Hebrew dictionaries have usually identified themselves as lexica of the Old Testament, though this has always been understood to require rigorous attention to the field of wider Semitic language. The DCH self-consciously avoids such limits. Its editors have not wished to create a dictionary of the Hebrew language as this is encountered in the Old Testament, though the Bible necessarily remains their principal source. Rather, they present the words found in all Hebrew literature from the earliest date down to about 200 years after the dawn of the Common Era. The dictionary’s sources are four: The Hebrew Bible, leaving aside the Aramaic passages; Ben Sira; the Hebrew manuscripts from the Judaean Desert (Dead Sea Scrolls); and Hebrew inscriptions. That published editions of many of the scrolls are seeing the light during the period in which this dictionary is underway means that treatment of those sources is immediately incomplete. However, this is an unavoidable accident of history, and will surely be put right in future editions of the DCH.

Secondly, the DCH is exclusively a Hebrew dictionary. It parts company with the tradition of providing information regarding the historical development of Hebrew words. One will find in this work very few references to cognates from the non-Hebrew Semitic languages. Similarly, the editors eschew any attempt to assign particular words or forms to ‘early’ or ‘late’ stages of the language. Essentially, Hebrew is treated synchronically as a unitary phenomenon.

It is Hebrew words in their context which are the concern of this work, and these are presented in admirable detail. For example, a word like gibbor, is first identified as a masculine noun, together with its principal meaning (‘man’) and the number of its occurrences in each of the four sources. This basic information is then elaborated in greater detail, so that one finds citations of occurrences where the word designates man ‘as distinct from woman’, ‘from God’, ‘assoc. with childlessness’, etc. However, this is only the beginning. The concern with words in their context means that we are next treated to a list of occurrences where gibbor occurs in different relationships with surrounding words: as the subject of a verb, in a noun clause, as the object of a verb, in construct, in apposition to another noun, in combination with adjectives, etc.

The value of this accumulated data may not be clear to the reader who seeks only a quick, workable definition. However, the attempt to provide the reader with a variety of angles from which to arrive at his or her own conclusions yields a storehouse of information for which the student of the Bible and other Hebrew literature must be grateful. An index of English translations appears at the end of each volume.

The DCH has been criticised for jettisoning the comparative tradition which seeks to place the Hebrew of the Bible within its broader Semitic context, for its sometimes indiscriminate lists of data, and for certain inconsistencies of method and presentation. This reviewer considers that some of these criticisms are blunted if measured against what the editors have actually set out to achieve.

For the student who will own just one Hebrew dictionary, the DCH may not be the most prudent possible investment. However, used alongside the traditional Hebrew dictionaries, the DCH deserves an appreciative response from the serious student of the language who would better understand not only the Hebrew of the Biblical authors and editors, but also that of their Hebrew-writing cousins of the several centuries which straddle the beginning of the Common Era.