Theological Dictionary

Theological Dictionary and King James Bible

Introduction to Theological Dictionary

Words are important, even the smallest ones. The comedian Demetri Martin said in one of his routines, “Have you ever noticed that filler words, like ‘sort of,’ are such harmless things to say? It doesn’t really mean anything. But after certain words, ‘sort of’ means everything. Like after ‘I love you,’ or ‘You’re going to live,’ or ‘It’s a boy.’”

Most dictionaries catalog the current usage of words, while biblical dictionaries catalog the “biblical” or past usage of terms. But not all dictionaries are identical or serve a similar purpose. Zondervan recently released a revision of The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology. The first edition was edited by Colin Brown (1975-78, 86) and Moisés Silva has updated and restructured the book.

Rather than reviewing the entire five-volume set, I will seek to answer two questions about the dictionary. First, how is this dictionary different than other dictionaries? Second, how should one use it? To illustrate my points, I will use the entry under Βασιλεύς (king, ruler) as my example throughout.

What is a Theological Dictionary?

What is a theological dictionary? Essentially this volume seeks to bring linguistic (words) and encyclopedic (things) data together in one volume. Not only does the volume discuss the meaning of words, but it also includes historical and contextual information on the concept.

For example, NIDNTTE gives not only the linguistic information for the word “king, ruler,” but also historical and contextual data concerning kings in Greek Literature (GL), Jewish Literature (JL), and New Testament Literature (NT). In the NT section, the dictionary first provides statistics of the use of Βασιλεύς in the NT, and then has a section entitled “Kingship in the NT.” This latter section describes how kingship is designated and employed in the New Testament, not focusing solely on the word usage, but also a theology and development of kingship.

One other distinctive about this volume is worth noting under this section. The first edition grouped terms according to concepts, but this volume placed the words in alphabetical order. Yet, they did not want to lose the strength of emphasizing related concepts and semantic domain considerations, so the revised edition also has a grouped “list of concepts” at the beginning of each volume.

Under the entry for Βασιλεύς there is a line that shows the following:

Concepts: Dwell, Dwelling; Ruler

Therefore if one turns to the list of concepts section at the beginning of the book, “Βασιλεύς” is contained under each of those headings. The concept “Ruler” has some of the following Greek words listed under the category: ἀνθύπατος, ἂρχων, δεσπότης, δυνάστης, ἡγεμων, θρόνος, κεφαλή, etc.

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