Vines Expositary Dictionary

 VINE'S

COMPLETE

EXPOSITORY DICTIONARY OF OLD AND NEW

TESTAMENT WORDS

W.E. VINE,

MERRILL F. UNGER, WILLIAM WHITE, JR.

W.E. Vine's "Complete Expository Dictionary of Old & New Testament Words" published in 1940 and without copyright.

Vines Expository Dictionary

of the

Old Testament

Edited by

Merrill F. Unger, Th.M., Th.D., Ph.D. William White, Jr., Th.M., Ph.D.

CONTRIBUTORS

Gleason Archer

E. Clark Copeland Leonard Coppes Louis Goldberg R. K. Harrison Horace Hummel George Kufeldt Eugene H. Merrill Walter Roehrs Raymond Surburg Willem van Gemeren

Donald Wold

FOREWORD

The Expository Dictionary of the Old Testament will be a useful tool in the hands of the student who has little or no formal training in the Hebrew language. It will open up the treasures of truth that often lie buried in the original language of the Old Testament, sometimes close to the surface and sometimes deeply imbedded far beneath the surface.

The student trained in Hebrew will find the Expository Dictionary to be a handy reference source. But the student without Hebrew training will experience a special thrill in being able to use this study tool in digging out truths from the Hebrew Bible not otherwise accessible to him.

It is, of course, possible to be a serious student of the Old Testament without having a knowledge of the Hebrew language. English translations and commentaries are of inestimable value and have their proper place. but a reference book that opens up the language in which the Scriptures were originally revealed and recorded, and which makes them available to readers unacquainted with the original tongue, has a value that at once becomes apparent.

As the language divinely chosen to record the prophecies of Christ, Hebrew possesses admirable qualities for the task assigned it. The language has a singularly rhythmic and musical quality. In poetic form, it especially has a noble dignity of style, combined with a vividness that makes it an effective vehicle for expression of sacred truth. The ideas behind its vocabulary give Hebrew a lively, picturesque nature.

Most Hebrew words are built upon verbal roots consisting of three consonants called radicals. There are approximately 1850 such roots in the Old Testament, from which various nouns and other parts of speech have been derived. many of these roots represent theological, moral, and ceremonial concepts that have been obscured by the passage of time; recent archaeological and linguistic research is shedding new light on many of these concepts. Old Testament scholars find that biblical Hebrew can be compared with other

Semitic languages such as Arabic, Assyrian, Ugaritic, Ethiopic, and Aramaic to discover the basic meaning of many heretofore obscure terms.

But is is not enough merely to have clarified the meaning of each root word. Each word can take on different shades of meaning as it is employed in various contexts, so one must study the various biblical occurrences of the word to arrive at an accurate understanding of its intended use.

This type of research has introduced students of Hebrew to a new world of understanding the Old Testament. But how can this material be made available to those who do not know Hebrew? That is the purpose of the present work.

now the lay student can have before him or her the Hebrew root, or a Hebrew word based on that root, and can trace its development to its use in the passage before him. Moreover, he can acquire some appreciation of the richness and variety of the Hebrew vocabulary. For example, Hebrew synonyms often have pivotal doctrinal repercussions, as with the word virgin in Isaiah 7:14, compared with similar words meaning "young woman." In some cases, a play on words is virtually impossible to reflect in the English translation (e.g., Zeph 2:4?7). Some Hebrew words can have quite different--sometimes

exactly opposite--meanings in different contexts; thus the word

can mean "to

bless" or "to curse,"and can mean "to redeem" or "to pollute."

The lay student, of course, will suffer some disadvantage in not knowing Hebrew. yet is is fair to say that an up-to-date expository dictionary that makes a happy selection of the more meaningful Hebrew words of the Old Testament will open up a treasure house of truth contained in the Hebrew Bible. It can offer a tremendous boon to the meaningful study of Scripture. It cannot fail to become an essential reference work for all serious students of the Bible.

MERRILL F. UNGER

INTRODUCTION

The writings of the New Testament are based in a large measure on God's revelation in the Old Testament. To understand the New Testament themes of Creation, Fall, and Restoration, it is necessary to read of their origin in the Old Testament.

The New Testament was written in a popular dialect of an Indo-European language, Greek. The Old Testament was written in the Semitic languages of Hebrew and Aramaic. For centuries, lay students of the Bible have found it very difficult to understand the structure of biblical Hebrew. Study guides to biblical Hebrew are designed for people who can read Hebrew-and many of them are written in German, which only compounds the difficulty.

This Expository Dictionary seeks to present about 500 significant terms of the Old Testament for lay readers who are not familiar with Hebrew. It describes the frequency, usage, and meaning of these terms as fully as possible. No source has been ignored in seeking to bring the latest Hebrew scholarship to the student who seeks it. It is hoped that

this small reference book will enlighten Bible students to the riches of God's truth in the Old Testament.

A. The Place of Hebrew in History. Hebrew language and literature hold a unique place in the course of Western civilization. It emerged sometime after 1500 B.C. in the area of Palestine, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. The Jewish people have used Hebrew continuously in one location or another to the present day. A modernized dialect of Hebrew (with spelling modifications) is the official language of the State of Israel.

When Alexander the Great came to power, he united the Greek city-states under the influence of Macedonia from about 330 B.C. to 323 B.C. Alexander and his generals virtually annihilated the social structures and languages of the ancient societies that their empire had absorbed. The Babylonians, Aramaeans, Persians, and Egyptians ceased to exist as distinct civilizations; only the Greek (Hellenistic) culture remained. Judaism was the only ancient religion and Hebrew the only ancient language that survived this onslaught.

The Hebrew Bible contains the continuous history of civilization from Creation to Roman times. It is the only record of God's dealings with humanity through His prophets, priests, and kings. In addition, it is the only ancient religious document that has survived completely intact.

Hebrew is related to Aramaic, Syriac, and such modern languages as Amharic and Arabic (both ancient and modern). It belongs to a group of languages known as the Semitic languages (so called because Scripture says that they were spoken by the descendants of Noah's son, Shem). The oldest known Semitic language is Akkadian, which was written in the "wedge-shaped" or cuneiform system of signs. The earliest Akkadian texts were written on clay tablets in about 2400 B.C. Babylonian and Assyrian are later dialects of Akkadian; both influenced the development of Hebrew. Because the Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian languages were all used in Mesopotamia, they are classified as "East Semitic" languages.

The earliest evidence for the origins of "West Semitic" languages appears to be an inscription from the ancient city of Ebla. This was a little-known capital of a Semitic state in what is now Northern Syria. The tablets of Ebla are bilingual, written in both Sumerian and Eblaite. The team of Italian archaeologists excavating Ebla have reported that these tablets contain a number of personal and place names mentioned in the Book of Genesis. Some of the tablets have been dated as early as 2400 B.C. Since Hebrew was also a West Semitic language, the publication of Ebla's texts may cast new light on many older Hebrew words and phrases.

The earliest complete series of pre-Hebrew texts comes from the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit. Located on a cluster of hills in southern Lebanon, Ugarit has yielded texts that contain detailed information about the religion, poetry, and trade of the Canaanite people. The texts are dated between 1800 and 1200 B.C. These tablets contain many words and phrases that are almost identical to words found in the Hebrew Bible. The Ugaritic dialect illuminates the development of Old Hebrew (or Paleo-Hebrew). The poetic structure of the Ugaritic language is mirrored in many passages of the Old Testament, such as the "Song of Deborah" in Judges 5. The scribes of Ugarit wrote in a modified cuneiform script that was virtually alphabetic; this script prepared the way for using the simpler Phoenician writing system.

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