Baker Encyclopedia of the Bible

volumes 1 & 2 A–Z

Walter A. Elwell

General Editor

Associate Editors

Peter C. Craigie

J. D. Douglas

Robert Guelich

R. K. Harrison

Thomas E. McComiskey

Assistant Editors

Barry J. Beitzel

H. Douglas Buckwalter

Walter R. Hearn

Virginia K. Hearn

James S. McClanahan

Robert L. Morrison

Stephen Taylor

R. Milton Winter

Ronald F. Youngblood

Copyright 1988 by

Baker Book House Company

Portions of the text of this volume were originally prepared by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., and have been used with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

(Revised for vol. 2)

Baker encyclopedia of the Bible.

Contents. v. 1. A–I–v. 2. J–Z.

1. Bible—Dictionaries. I. Elwell, Walter A. II. Title: Encyclopedia of the Bible.

BS440.B26 1988 220.3 88-19318

ISBN 0-8010-3447-7 (set v. 1 & v. 2)

Preface

Almost fifty years ago (1941) Alfred North Whitehead lamented the crumbling moral values of his day with the observation, “There is no doubt of it. One sees it in two obvious ways: the generation now growing up does not recognize either quotations from or allusions to the Bible; and the classical tradition is equally on the wane.” A Gallup survey conducted in 1978 showed that matters had not since improved. Although 84 percent of the general public thought the Ten Commandments are still valid, more than half could not name even five of them. When asked which of four listed statements Jesus made to Nicodemus, 44 percent did not know and 14 percent said, “Take up thy bed and walk.” More than half the general public read the Bible less than once a month or not at all.

Why is this? No doubt the increasing secularization of our society, with the attendant loss of faith in the church, is a large part of the answer, but there is more to it than that. To many people the Bible is just too hard to understand—both the language and the concepts are out of reach for them. The problem of language has largely been solved by the many modern translations that are now available. The phenomenal success of the Living Bible is testimony to the hunger that people have to read a Bible in simple, everyday language. The problem of making ancient concepts understandable to moderns is a bit more difficult. To begin with, the Bible itself was not all written at the same time, but spans at least a thousand years. Add to that the passage of the last two thousand years, and one sees the difficulty. How can concepts drawn from ancient civilizations, written in obsolete languages, in the context of cultures long dead, be made vibrant and understandable for today’s world?

This Bible encyclopedia is an attempt to solve that problem. It is designed to be a bridge between the past and the present, a mine, a source of information about those days long past that opens them up to us. It is not meant to replace the Bible; far from it. It is meant to be read alongside the Bible to clarify and illuminate the text of Scripture for the modern reader, so that its truths can ...