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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