You Could Look It Up (28 page)

The information presented in the dictionary proper is heterogeneous. Some entries are very short, hardly more than cross-references: the
whole of the entry for
Lahem
reads “Ce mot est mis pour
Bethléem
”—“This word is used for
Bethlehem
.” Others are long: the entry for
grace
fills columns. There are also entries on classical mythology: Hercules, for instance, is explicitly mentioned nowhere in the Bible, but Calmet noticed the ways the scriptures invoke the Greek hero in their treatment of Joshua, Samson, and Moses. Marginal notes provide the biblical citations and the Hebrew words.

Virtually all the personal names in the Bible were given an entry, ranging from a few words for Sobab (
“fils de David & de Beth-sabée”
—son of David and Bathsheba) to many pages for Adam (
“le premier homme créé de Dieu,”
the first man created by God), Moses, David, Mary, Jesus (
“fils de Dieu, vrai Messie, Sauveur du Monde,”
son of God, true Messiah, savior of the world), John the Baptist (
“précurseur de nôtre Seigneur J
ESUS
-C
HRIST
,”
forerunner of our Lord Jesus), and the Apostles. Locations, too, were covered in detail, with learned entries on Sodom, Judea, and Bethlehem. Entries like
déluge
(flood) and
sabbathum
go on for pages, often with elaborate calendrical calculations trying to pin down when events occurred. The entry for
croix
(cross) covered the ancient practice of crucifixion, with illustrations of various ways of crucifying criminals and learned citations to John Chrysostom, Aelius Lampridius, Cyprian, Gregory Nazianzus, Titus Livy, and a dozen others. But not merely the central symbols of Christianity were covered—anything in the lives of biblical figures was fair game. There are entries on elephants and scorpions, synagogues and troglodytes, athletes and fountains. Essays usefully illuminate practices like
simonie
(simony) and viticulture, and even worthwhile articles on sandals and trumpets are included. Calmet was careful, though, to avoid controversy. He was a devout Catholic, and his dictionary was therefore rigorously orthodox. The entry for
heresie
is loaded with contempt for those who stray from Church teaching: it contains nothing but impeccable Catholic doctrine, supported by dozens of marginal citations to provide the scriptural authority for every assertion.

Like his commentary, the Bible dictionary went through a series of expanded editions and translations, and it remained a standard work of biblical investigation well into the nineteenth century. Calmet went on to write a history of his native Lorraine, the
Histoire ecclésiastique
et civile de la Lorraine
(1728), and his learning and piety were rewarded with a series of ecclesiastical postings. Pope Benedict XIII even wanted to make him a bishop, but he rejected the offer. He died in Paris in 1757.

Calmet’s dictionary was outward looking: it moved from the religious text to the world at large. Whether he was discussing Old Testament juniper bushes or tracing the history of the Caliphate, he started with the original Scripture and then looked to the real world beyond it.

Other religious reference books, though, are focused not on the real world but strictly on the text itself. Dictionaries of the sacred languages, such as Santes Pagninus’s
hoc est, Thesaurus linguæ sanctæ, siue lexicon Hebraicum
(
Thesaurus of the Holy Language, or Hebrew Lexicon
, 1575) and William Dugard’s
Lexicon Græci Testamenti alphabeticum
(
Alphabetical Lexicon of the Greek Testament
, 1660), are linguistic rather than historical. And one of the great reference books, Alexander Cruden’s
Complete Concordance to the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament
(1738), points not from words to world, but squarely at the words themselves.

Cruden’s title page includes a motto from the Book of John, “Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me,” and his book really is about a new way of searching the Scriptures. The work is titled a
Concordance
, and it opens with a definition of this newfangled reference genre that he suspected some of his readers might not understand: “A Concordance,” Cruden explained, “is a Dictionary, or an Index to the
Bible
, wherein all the words, used thro’ the Inspired Writings, are ranged alphabetically, and the various places where they occur, are referred to, to assist us in finding out passages, and comparing the several significations of the same word.” Such a book was certain to be useful, he wrote, because it “tends so much to render the study of the holy Scriptures more easy to all Christians.”
1

A concordance is an index—a comprehensive, or nearly comprehensive index—of words. A short passage from the Bible, Ecclesiastes 1:4–7, shows how a concordance works:

4. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. 5. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. 6. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. 7. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full: unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

The passage is eighty-one words long, but because some (
and
,
the
,
generation
,
rivers
) are repeated, there are just fifty-four different words:

abideth, about, according, again, all, also, and, another, ariseth, arose, away, but, circuits, come, cometh, continually, down, earth, ever, for, from, full, generation, goeth, hasteth, he, his, into, is, it, north, not, one, passeth, place, return, returneth, rivers, run, sea, south, sun, the, they, thither, to, toward, turneth, unto, whence, where, whirleth, wind, yet

Some of these words are duplicates of a sort:
ariseth
and
arose
are both forms of
arise
;
come
and
cometh
,
return
and
returneth
have the same roots with different inflections. And a handful of words—
about
,
and, but
,
for
,
from
,
he
,
his
,
into
,
is
,
it
,
not
,
the
,
to
,
toward
,
unto
—are too common to be of any interest to most people, so many concordance-makers remove these so-called “noise words.” That leaves this list of thirty-six unique substantive root words:

abide, according, again, all, also, another, arise, away, circuit, come, continually, down, earth, ever, full, generation, go, haste, north, one, pass, place, return, river, run, sea, south, sun, they, thither, turn, whence, where, whirl, wind, yet

With the list established, a useful index can be generated. For each word in the list, there is a pointer to every place in the text where it appears. The simplest concordance gives each word along with its location:

go
Eccl. 1:5, 1:6

haste
Eccl. 1:5

north
Eccl. 1:6

one
Eccl. 1:4

pass
Eccl. 1:4

place
Eccl. 1:5, 1:7

But because this is not enough to be useful, concordances usually give readers a little context, producing a list like this:

go

Eccl. 1:5 … and the sun
goeth
down and hasteth to …

Eccl. 1:6 … The wind
goeth
toward the south …

haste

Eccl. 1:5 … goeth down, and
hasteth
to his place …

north

Eccl. 1:6 … and turneth about unto the
north
…

one

Eccl. 1:4 …
One
generation passeth away …

pass

Eccl. 1:4 … One generation
passeth
away …

place

Eccl. 1:5 … and hasteth to his
place
where he arose …

Eccl. 1:7 … not full: unto the
place
from whence …

And so on, through the entire list—and eventually through all 14,298 unique words of the Christian Bible. (This method of presentation has been known since 1959 as KWIC, or “keyword in context.”)

The simplest use of a concordance is answering questions of the form “Where’s the part where …?” A reader who remembers “manna from heaven” can turn to any Bible concordance and find nineteen references to
manna
, of which four are in Exodus 16 and three in John 6—one of those probably contains the passage the reader is seeking. But a concordance can do more than refresh hazy memories; it encourages questions that would otherwise be impossible to answer. A reader wanting to know about attitudes toward wine in the different parts of the Bible could turn to a concordance and quickly discover that the word
wine
appears in 248 verses in the King James translation of the Bible, spread out over 165 chapters. The earliest reference comes in Genesis 9, where Noah gets drunk and uncovers himself; in Genesis 19, Lot’s daughters get him drunk “that we may preserve seed of our father.” In Deuteronomy, though, wine is an agricultural staple. In Esther and the two books of Chronicles, it is a luxury item. For the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, wine is a metaphor as often as it is a beverage. The Gospel of Matthew also leans toward the metaphorical: in chapter 9, Jesus runs through a series of parables, including “Neither do men put new wine into old
bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.” And so on.