A Dictionary Of Biblical Tradition In English Literature
I'm looking at A Dictionary Of Biblical Tradition In English Literature and find it intriguing. Could some people who own the resource give me their impressions of the work?
- What do you find it useful for?
- What are its strengths and weaknesses?
- Is it comprehensive enough and are there enough Scripture citations so that I would regularly find hits when I search it for the text I'm preaching each Sunday?
Thanks!
Comments
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I own it but cant say that I have ever used it. I don't know if that helps any...
For book reviews and more visit sojotheo.com
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John Kight said:
I own it but cant say that I have ever used it. I don't know if that helps any...
It's not nothing. It tells me that at least one person hasn't found a use for it.
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I have actually used it. I find it useful for historical reasons (one of my interests is literature), but the relevance doesn't stop there. I believe there is value in understanding societies as reflected in literature. Accordingly, its strength is not that it directly provides insight into "what Scripture means" (though the excerpt below indicates that it does offer value there); instead, its strength is that it provides insight into "what Scripture meant" to great minds (and not necessarily specialists in theology or biblical studies) of the past. This can help us to understand the larger context in which we now view the Bible.
Your last question suggests another possible application, but one which I have not taken advantage of directly. In the below article on "Names of God", you may discover what you need. I hope this helps.
NAMES OF GOD The OT names of God (in addition to many descriptive epithets or appellatives) number roughly a dozen, the exact number varying with the interpretation of names which occur infrequently and in problematic passages. The common Semitic designation el, which may have to do with the idea of power, has also a longer variant, eloah or eloha, whose grammatical plural, elohim, was almost always understood as semantically singular when applied to the one God and so took a singular verb. el frequently combines with other divine names, some of which cn also stand alone—as do˓elyon, “highest”; shadday, “might” or “mountain”; and ˓olam, “duration”—while others occur only in combination, such as el roi, “God of vision,” and el berit, “God of covenant.” God’s proper and holiest name, YHWH, produces Yah by apocopation and also forms such combinations as YHWH ṣeba‛ot, “God of armies.” YHWH and ‛ehyeh appear together in Exod. 3:13–16; the latter means “I am,” and the former may be an early causative form of the same verb, thus indicating God’s creativity.
From ancient times, the special status of YHWH resulted in bans on speaking this name aloud (cf. Lev. 24:11). These strictures led the devout to substitute ‛adonay, “my lord,” for the unutterable Tetragrammaton when reading the text aloud. A Christian misunderstanding of orthographic conventions in the NT produced the corrupt form “Jehovah” in the early 16th cent., which appeared eventually in the KJV (e.g., Ps. 83:18). William Tyndale’s Pentateuch of 1530 was the first English OT translation to use “Jehovah,” e.g., at Exod. 6:3, where both the Vg and Wycliffe had incorporated the substitute adonay.
On certain occasions in the OT God revealed himself by name and insisted on the special significance of YHWH (Exod. 3:13–16; 6:3; 33:17–19; 34:6–7). The commandments (Exod. 20:7; Deut. 5:11) forbade misusing the sacred names, which became clues to God’s character through their association with divine attributes (Exod. 34:6–7) and activities (Amos 4:13; Jer. 33:1–4). Belief in the power of names lies behind the stories of the name changes of the patriarchs (Gen. 17:5, 15; 32:27–30; Num. 13:16) and helps account for the inquisitiveness of biblical characters about the names of God and his messengers (Judg. 13:17–18). This belief also helped establish the great popularity of theophoric propositional names such as Elijah (eliyah, “my God is Yah”).
The Jewish fascination with divine names is directly reflected in the NT and early Christian literature: the hallowing of God’s name in the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9; Luke 11:2), e.g., has parallels both in the OT (Ezek. 36:23; Ps. 96:2) and in the Qaddish or rabbinic doxology. Christian baptizing, prophesying, healing, exorcising, and performing miracles were all “in the name of Jesus” (Matt. 28:19; Acts 4:7–10), and believers called on his name in prayer and repentance, for forgiveness and salvation (Luke 24:47; John 16:23–24). The Gk. Iēsous is also the LXX name for Joshua, which in Hebrew (yehoshua‛˓) means “YHWH saves,” or “YHWH is salvation,” as reflected in Matt. 1:21. Christos, which translates mashiaḥ, “anointed” (“Messiah”) in the LXX, remains a title in some passages (Matt. 26:63), but in others (Acts 3:6) is used almost as a name for Jesus. Tradition eventually found as many as 200 names and titles for Jesus through the energetic application of OT prophetic and messianic terminology to him. In the NT itself Jesus has more than 40 names and titles.
The great force of the rules against pronouncing YHWH caused the rabbis to develop a rich and elaborate vocabulary of nearly 150 substitute names for God. Speculation on secret names of 12, 42, 45, and 72 letters was a favorite cabalist theme, and the relation between divine names and attributes became a regular problem for Jewish philosophers from Saadiah Gaon onward. Meanwhile, Origen and earlier exegetes had amalgamated Jewish and Christian onomastics by interpreting the “sign” (the Hebrew letter tau, whose primitive form was written like an “X”) of Ezek. 9:4 (cf. Rev. 7:2; 14:1; 22:4) as the initial letter (chi, whose shape is also an “X”) of Christos and as a cross. The chief transmitter to the Middle Ages of early Christian analysis of Hebrew divine names was St. Jerome in his Hebraicae quaestiones in libro Geneseos and related works, while the Divine Names of pseudo-Dionysius (commented on by numerous subsequent authorities such as Aquinas and used, e.g., by the English author of The Cloud of Unknowing) started an independent line of mystical philosophizing deeply influenced by Proclus and other Neoplatonists. Among medieval Jewish commentators, Maimonides insisted that all the names save YHWH were really veiled references to God’s actions which revealed nothing of his essence. In the late 15th cent. Pico della Mirandola and Johann Reuchlin inaugurated a tradition of Christian Cabala, one of whose central preoccupations was to derive christological and Trinitarian meaning from the Hebrew names of God. Readers of Marlowe’s Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus discover that part of the conjuration of the devil Mephistopheles by the apostate theologian Faustus is a degradation of the Tetragrammaton: Faustus makes his incantations, observing, “Within this circle is Jehovah’s name / Forward and backward anagrammatized, / The breviated names of holy saints …” (1.3.8-10).
The earliest recorded English poem, Caedmon’s miraculous hymn of praise recorded by the Venerable Bede in his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, is made up of a series of formulaic names of God. Later in the Anglo-Saxon period, in Cynewulf’s Christ II, many lines consist of or contain epithets for God. Some of these expressions are borrowed out of pagan sources (e.g., þeoden, “chief”) while others are specifically biblical names or epithets (e.g., Lamb, Physician, Teacher, Sun) or “christianisms” (e.g., godbearn, “God’s Son”; gaestsunu, “Spiritual Sun”).
An English law of 1605 banning profane use of divine names may account for substitutions of terms like “the High’st” for “God” or names of the Trinity in Shakespeare’s plays (e.g., All’s Well That Ends Well, 4.2.24); that some of these substitutions call to mind rabbinic usage is coincidental and entirely explainable in terms of ordinary Christian vocabulary. Milton, on the other hand, was a learned enough Hebraist to discuss the Hebrew names of God at length in De Doctrina Christiana, where he gave special attention to the plural elohim, to “Jehovah” and its pronunciation, and to the application of divine names to the Son and other beings (Complete Prose Works, Yale ed. [1973], 138-39, 148-49, 226-33, 250-64, 697-98). Certain passages in Paradise Lost are explicable in terms of his learned interest in the divine names: in PL 8.349-451, after Adam has linked his knowledge of the animals with his having named them, he asks God, “by what name, for thou above all … Surpassest far my naming, how may I adore thee. …” only to have his “presumptuous” question left unanswered (cf. Gen. 32:29; Judg. 13:17–18); and in PL 12.310-12, 457-58 “Joshua whom the Gentiles Jesus call” bears the “name and office” of him “who shall quell the adversary Serpent” and be “exalted high Above all names in heav’n” (cf. Phil. 2:9–11). William Cowper expresses his extensive interest in the Hebrew names of God in his contributions to the Olney Hymns written with his pastor, John Newton. Among these hymns, “Jehovah-Jireh, The Lord Will Provide—Gen. 22:14” (1.6), “Jehovah-Raphi, I Am the Lord That Healeth—Ex. 15” (1.14), “Jehovah-Nissi, the Lord My Banner—Ex. 17:15” (1.17), “Jehovah-Shalom, the Lord Send Peace—Jdg. 6:24” (1.22), “Jehovah-Shammah—Ezek. 39:25” (1.72), and “Jehovah-Jesus” (2.38) are Cowper’s.
Blake, who lacked Milton’s erudition yet managed to teach himself a little Hebrew, treated the divine names more idiosyncratically and bound them closer to the fabric of his thought. He knew and criticized the Jewish prohibition on pronouncing YHWH (Milton, 1.11.13-14); he recognized the problematic relationship between the divine names and God’s attributes or perfections (Four Zoas, 7b.274; A Descriptive Catalogue, in Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes [1957], 571); and he understood that Shadday meant “almighty” and that elohim was a plural which could refer to heathen gods (Ghosts of Abel, ed. Keynes [1957], 780-81). Four of the seven members of his “Seven Eyes of God,” a theological progression loosely based on Zech. 4:10 and Rev. 5:6, bear divine names: Elohim, Shaddai, Jehovah, and Jesus. In Finnegans Wake Joyce’s Shem has a name which means “name” and also reminds one of the Shema (Deut. 6:5), but Shem is “always blaspheming” like his creator, who played on the divine names throughout the Wake: “jehovial oyeglances”; “Weh is me, yeh is ye!”; “… yav hace not one pronouncable teerm that blows … to signify majestate.”
See also NAME; TAU.
Bibliography. Chepin, A. “The Names of God in the Church Fathers and in Old English Poetry.” Studia Patristica 9 (1966), 525-31; Copenhaver, B. P. “Lefèvre d’Etaples, Symphorien Champier, and the Secret Names of God.” JWCi 40 (1977), 189-211; Hartmann, F., and L. I. Rabinowitz. “God, Names of.” EncJud 7, 674-85; Lagarde, P. de. Onomastica Sacra (1887); Marmorstein, A. The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God: I, The Names and Attributes of God. Jews’ College Publications, no. 10 (1927); McVeigh, D. M. “Coleridge’s Doctrine of the Imagination and the Enigmatic Name of God.” Religion and Literature 17 (1985), 61-75; Summerfield, H. “Blake and the Names Divine.” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 15 (1981), 14-22; Taylor, V. The Names of Jesus (1953).
BRIAN P. COPENHAVER
Jeffrey, D. L. (1992). In A Dictionary of biblical tradition in English literature. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans.0
