A Dictionary of the English Bible and Its Origins

Citation

Bakewell, K.G.B. (2001), "A Dictionary of the English Bible and Its Origins", New Library World, Vol. 102 No. 9, pp. 348-350. https://doi.org/10.1108/nlw.2001.102.9.348.1

“Why a dictionary?” asks the author in his introduction. His first reason provided a good introduction to a discussion by Licensed Readers of the Liverpool South Deanery on whether the Bible is literary true or riddled with untruths: the good biblical tradition of British nonconformity in which the author grew up, with a sound emphasis on the importance of biblical scholarship and a firm rejection of anything approaching bibliolatry or fundamentalism, both of which the author associated with people who had either “got on the wrong bus or not been sharp enough to alight in time and strike off in a different direction”. Other reasons included a fascination with biblical languages, biblical texts, textual transmission and the growth of the canon which the author wanted to share with everybody else and a change of climate with new Bible translations of varying quality and reliability.

The result is a fascinating guide to Bibles and people, places and events associated with Bibles, from which I learned a great deal. I was not aware, for example, of the Adulterous or Wicked Bible of 1631 in which the word “not” was inadvertently omitted from the seventh commandment (“Thou shalt not commit adultery”). Also new to me were the Breeches Bible of 1560, a popular name given to the Geneva Bible because Genesis 3:7 records that Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together and made themselves “breeches”; the Murderer’s Bible of 1795, an edition of the King James Bible in which Mark 7:27 read “Let the children first be killed” instead of “filled”; and the Women’s Bible of 1895, in which Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a review committee provided a commentary and revision of those portions of the Bible relating to women, particularly where women were conspicuous by their absence as when Sarah appears to be uninvolved in the sacrifice of Isaac or when the incidents connected with Abraham, Sarah and Hagar are presented as the story of a man rather than the story of two women. Feminism is not as new as some people think!

Among several articles which I found particularly useful are Agrapha (“unwritten things” – 256 sayings attributed to Jesus but lying outside the four canonical gospels), Apocrypha, Apocryphal Gospels, Canon (a very good two and a half page account of the development of the acceptable Biblical canon), Dead Sea Scrolls, Haplography, Scribal Changes and the articles on the various versions of the Bible and people associated with them like Phillips, Tyndale and Wycliffe.

There are useful cross‐references but also some missing ones. For example “Gospel of Thomas” has no cross‐reference from “Thomas”. My daughter would object very strongly to the cross‐reference from “King James Bible” to “Authorized Version” since she argues that all versions are authorised in some way and prefers modern versions (unlike her father!).

The author admits that the dictionary is obviously incomplete, necessarily selective, and not a final and definitive tool. I must, however, challenge the omission of two twelfth century Bibles which I have recently had the opportunity to examine: the magnificent Winchester Bible and the Lambeth Bible. Other subjects which I looked for in vain are Apocalypse, Lectionary, Pentecost and Scripture Union. I would also like to have seen something about Bibles in different dialects such as Canon Dick Williams’s Bible in Scouse, Kate Fletcher’s Old Testament and Gospels in Black Country dialect and Mike Coles’s Bible in Cockney.

An entry under “Whitby, Yorkshire” states that it is the home of an ancient monastery associated with Caedmon, who rightly gets a brief entry. As a Church of England Reader licensed to a church dedicated to St Hilda, however, I was sorry to find no entry for this saint who was the abbess of the monastery and who taught Caedmon.

In spite of any reservations which I may have, this is a fascinating book which should be available in any good reference library.