Biblical Greek Language and Lexicography

by Bernard A. Taylor (Editor), John A. L. Lee (Editor), Peter R. Burton (Editor)

Overview

As the basis of modern translations of the Scriptures, biblical Greek and lexicography are disciplines vital to our understanding of the original Christian message. This volume, which celebrates the career of Frederick W. Danker, presents the state of the art in Greek and biblical language studies.

Amid the important topics of discussion are how one discovers the meaning of words, current tools available to students of language, and the approach being used in the latest New Testament and Septuagint Greek dictionaries. Added features of this book include appendices listing current Greek-English dictionaries and grammars and current Greek dictionary and language projects as well as indexes of biblical references, Greek and Hebrew words, and grammatical terms.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802863355
Publisher:	Eerdmans, William B. Publishing Company
Publication date:	10/31/2007
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.21(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

Scholar in residence at University Church, Loma Linda, California.

Read an Excerpt

BIBLICAL GREEK LANGUAGE AND LEXICOGRAPHY

Essays in Honor of Frederick W. Danker

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William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Copyright © 2004 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8028-2216-9

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Chapter One

Lexical Evolution and Linguistic Hazard

FREDERICK WILLIAM DANKER

Changes in language are such that bilingual dictionaries cannot lay claim to permanence. Their very genre is subject to an inexorable evolutionary process. Changing patterns in receptor languages, as well as the appearance of new data, require constant revision of dictionaries or lexicons devoted especially to biblical Hebrew and Greek. Hazards connected with such an enterprise are many, as becomes readily apparent in this paper. After engagement for over forty years in the business of courting linguistic hazard, I also offer this essay as a tribute to Walter Bauer (1877-1960) for his conscientious devotion to lexicographic responsibility and, above all, to his stimulation for further exploration.

The immediate precursor of what can be called the Bauer lexicographic tradition was the publication of Erwin Preuschen's Vollständiges griechisch-deutsches Handwörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur. This book contained 1,178 columns, with three pages of additions and corrections. Upon Preuschen's death in 1920, Walter Bauer was asked to update Preuschen's work. He had been Privatdozent in Marburg from 1902 to 1913 and professor in Breslau from 1913 to 1916, and had completed four years as professor at Göttingen. During those years he had written Das Leben Jesu im Zeitalter der neutestamentlichen Apokryphen and a commentary on John (1st ed. 1912) in the series "Handbuch zum Neuen Testament," followed by a commentary on Ignatius in the same series (1923).

In the foreword to his revision of Preuschen's lexicon (1928) Bauer gave Mosaic expression to his misgivings on undertaking the project, stating that neither the previous course of his studies nor the direction of his scholarly work, nor even his inclination led him toward lexicography. But Preuschen's work was in dire need of revision, if it were to meet the need of an advanced reference work rather than serve as an intermediate resource. "Chiefly," according to Felix W. Gingrich, of Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania, who summarized prevailing judgment, "it failed to show the place which the earliest Christian writings held in the on-going stream of Greek literature as a whole." Even the LXX was used sparingly in illustration of NT usage. Also lacking were references to modern discussions. References to papyri, inscriptions, and ostraca were lacking, despite their publication in great numbers since 1890. To some extent Preuschen shared the extraordinary imperviousness to new discoveries displayed by other colleagues in the interpreter's craft. Adolf Deissmann characterized his book as "ein ... tief bedauerlicher Rückschritt" (a very unfortunate step backward). Preuschen took a defensive position and in the epilogue to his work sighed that the time was not ripe for evaluation of the new material, and that taking sail on the vast sea of the Koine was too hazardous for him. Yet, while producing a stop-gap work, Preuschen did move in two new directions. First, he included words found in the apostolic fathers and other very early Christian literature, thereby expanding the base for understanding early Christian noetic history. Second, his is the first NT dictionary above elementary level to offer meanings in German instead of Latin.

In his watershed publication Licht vom Osten, Deissmann included a chapter on the future of lexicography. Bauer had evidently taken every word to heart, for the title page of the revision (1928) read: "völlig neu bearbeitete Auflage." This alteration in title resulted from a sour circumstance that turned sweet. The dive taken by German currency after World War I also left publication prospects dim, so Bauer used the extra time to expand his revision far beyond earlier assigned horizons. It was no longer a Handwörterbuch. The number of columns, two per page, increased to 1,434, with a great deal more on each page. Each headword is followed, where pertinent, by a display of usage, showing how widely the word was used in pre- and post-NT Greek. Individual words and phrases are illustrated by parallels drawn from various periods in the history of the Greek language, with special reference to the Koine and the LXX. Additions to secondary literature in English and other languages made the lexicon more accessible to readers outside Germany. Much reorganization of Preuschen's material took place throughout the work, which also contained a preface on the nature of the NT vocabulary. Deissmann's reaction to this production: "eine im allgemeinen ganz ausgezeichnete Arbeit" (on the whole a very distinguished work).

In his "Vorwort" Bauer apologetically noted that several more editions would be required for the lexicon to reach its full potential of usefulness. Restlessly productive, in 1937 he brought out a third edition, "völlig neu bearbeitet." Signaling a new stage in the evolution of his lexicon, the publishers moved from Gothic to Roman type, and a new system of abbreviations was adopted. The number of columns now totaled 1,490, and the title page bore only Bauer's name. Numerous errors were corrected. Some reorganization was undertaken (e.g., [Text Not Reproducible] under two main heads instead of four). The chief deficiency, lamented by many, was the space-saving omission of his informative introduction.

Even before the third edition came off the press, Bauer set himself the task of reading systematically every Greek author he could lay his hands on, focusing on the period from the fourth century B.C. to Byzantine times. The increased inventory of parallels in words and constructions was immense. He completed the manuscript about September 1948. The first three fascicles came out within three months in 1949, and after a delay of two years, the last fascicle of the fourth edition appeared in autumn of 1952.

Bauer's investigation of Greek literature anticipated much current interest in the cultural context of NT usage. It covered a broad range of subjects including religion, medicine (both human and veterinary), military tactics, agriculture, and romance, with frequent account taken of Byzantine novels. His achievement is all the more astonishing when one takes note of the circumstances under which he labored. After World War II, American biblical scholars were asked to aid their German biblical colleagues. Prof. Gingrich selected Bauer and sent him food packages from 1947 to the early 1950s. Gingrich visited Bauer in 1950, and Mrs. Bauer told him that the packages he sent saved their lives. But malnutrition during the closing months of the war caused an eye infection which led to impairment of Bauer's eyes, so that he had to read with the aid of a magnifying glass. Yet, seven years later, on his eightieth birthday, he was at work completing the fifth edition of his lexicon.

The only unabridged Greek-English lexicon of the NT up to 1957 was A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament being Grimm's Wilke's Clavis Novi Testamenti, translated and revised by Joseph H. Thayer. The title indicates that the basic underlying text is C. L. W. Grimm's thorough revision of C. G. Wilke's Greek-Latin lexicon. Thayer's work had served American scholars well, absent papyri, which were to draw attention soon after the discovery in 1897 of Roman office records in the sands of ancient Oxyrhynchus. Bauer's work dealt with this deficiency and more. Accordingly, there was no question concerning directions that lexicographic evolution would take in America.

BAG

While Bauer was laboring on his fourth edition, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod formed a committee for scholarly research under the direction of Martin Scharlemann, a professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis, Missouri. Its principal project was to be a translation and adaptation of Bauer's lexicon. Translation rights were duly obtained, and Prof. Gingrich received a full-time leave of absence from Albright College to work on the project, beginning in September 1949. Prof. William F. Arndt, of Concordia Seminary, was asked to head the project. He joined his colleague for several days each week at Chicago, where they profited from the advice of Dr. Mitford D. Mathews, head of the dictionary department at the University of Chicago Press.

In the course of the American team's work, it became necessary to determine the most advantageous locale for printing of the book. As reported by Gingrich, the typesetting was particularly challenging because it involved two main kinds of Greek type as well as several others for an occasional Hebrew word or phrase, roman and italic type for English, and special characters for Scandinavian and other languages. Finally, the contract was awarded to the Cambridge University Press in England. Funds for work on the manuscript were provided by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, which would share the costs of printing, as well as proceeds from the sale of the book, with the University of Chicago Press and the Cambridge University Press. Not only did Cambridge print the work, but it agreed to publish it simultaneously with its publication in the United States. Therefore, the earliest edition of A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature: A Translation and Adaptation of Walter Bauer's Griechisch-Deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der übrigen urchristlichen Literatur (generally known as BAG) appeared in 1957 in duplicate, one published in England, on January 25, and one in Chicago, on January 29. The book contained 909 pages of text and 37 pages of preliminary matter. The price was $14.00, courtesy of a generous subsidy by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. The University of Chicago Press heads, who, as Dr. Mathews said years later, did not have their fingers on the American ancient Greek and biblical pulse, set a figure of 2,000 copies for the first printing. But before the manuscript was finished, it was evident that the demand would be heavier than estimated, and so the run was raised to 4,000 copies, with 1,500 more at Cambridge. The first printing was sold out in about four months, and by October 15, 7,500 copies had gone into the hands of eager buyers, for nearly 100 theological seminaries adopted the book for classroom use.

BAG was produced on 22,400 slips of paper, four by six inches. On the fortunes of the manuscript, Gingrich writes: "No serious accident ever befell our manuscript. As we finished our slips, we kept them on a bookcase in the office, where they were subject to destruction by fire if one of the smokers in the adjoining office had been careless. Fortunately this never happened." The team also faced a special problem in transmitting their thousands of slips. They had to have them photographed by a Remington Rand machine. Faring far better than some biblical writers whose productions are alleged to have come down to posterity in scrambled form, Arndt and Gingrich did not go through the trauma of seeing a tray dropped in the course of feeding the slips into the copy machine. At his home in Reading, Gingrich received bundles of proof from England, then dispatched them to Arndt, who read them and sent them on to Chicago, whence they were returned to Cambridge. Not one package of proof went astray. The only mishap that befell the team was the loss of some documents that were inadvertently sent for safekeeping, early in 1952, to Davy Jones's locker via Captain Heinrik Carlsen's ill-starred ship, Flying Enterprise.

The typesetters at Cambridge estimated that if all the letters in the book were arranged in one line, it would be 84 miles long (or .093 miles per page). Gingrich reports that "one poor man did nothing but set type on our dictionary for eight months straight, and retained his sanity." Moreover, he writes, these printers "followed copy in spelling according to the American system rather than their own British system. For example, we always spelled 'labor' without the 'u' that is so dear to the British, and they never raised an objection." As indicated above, Bauer's introduction to the second edition of Preuschen's work included an essay on the nature of NT Greek. This was omitted in all subsequent German editions. Upon repeated urging, Bauer prepared a revised version of his essay, which was published separately, and Arndt and Gingrich added to BAG a slightly edited translation of this marvelously rich treatise, courtesy of Bauer.

During work on the book, neither Arndt nor Gingrich suffered any serious accident or illness. But during a stay in England, Arndt died suddenly of a heart attack in Cambridge, February 25, 1957, exactly one month after the publication of the book in the same city. "He was an excellent scholar," writes Gingrich, "and one who was thoroughly saturated with the spirit of the New Testament. I miss him greatly."

BAGD

Shortly after the publication of BAG, my own life took an unexpected turn. During my studies at Concordia Seminary (1940-45), I did not dream of doing lexicography. But without my awareness a specific route to the future was being paved for me. When I undertook my doctoral studies, with special interest in Homer, Pindar, and the Greek tragedians, at the University of Chicago, Department of Humanities, I was intrigued by the way L-S-J-M defined and classified words. But literary structures interested me more. Having been mesmerized by the Hebrew text of Koheleth, I satisfied seminary requirements for a B.D. with a dissertation in which I endeavored to show that this essay is a literary piece in its own right, with focus on the thematic word hebel, expressing "disappointment of expectation." I also filled an interleaved Greek NT with references to Greek literature culled while reading the thousands of pages required for partial access to the Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

	Introduction and Acknowledgments	viii
	Abbreviations	xv
	A Brief Biography of Frederick W. Danker	xviii
	Lexical Evolution and Linguistic Hazard	1
	Remarks of an Outsider about Bauer's Worterbuch, BAGD, and BDAG, and Their Textual Basis	32
	Look It Up. It's in BDAG	48
	A Review of BDAG	53
	The Present State of Lexicography of Ancient Greek	66
	Greek Electronic Resources and the Lexicographical Function	75
	Septuagintal Lexicography	85
	A Concise Greek-English Dictionary of the New Testament: Reflections and Ruminations	91
	Concordances and the Greek New Testament	94
	The LXX Quotations in the LSJ Supplements of 1968 and 1996	108
	The Use of [characters not reproducible] in the Septuagint	126
	Hebrew to Greek: A Semantic Study of [characters not reproducible] for the New English Translation of the Septuagint	136
	Linguistic Register and Septuagintal Lexicography	149
	Deponency and Greek Lexicography	167
	Verbs Perception and Aspect, Greek Lexicography and Grammar: Helping Students to Think in Greek	177
	Future Directions for Aspect Studies in Ancient Greek	199
	Aspect Theory and Lexicography	207
	External Entailment as a Category of Linguistic Analysis	223
	Appendices
A.	Selected Bibliography of Frederick W. Danker	231
B.	BDAG and Its Precursors	235
	Indexes
	Biblical References	237
	Greek Words	242
	Hebrew Forms	259
	Grammatical and Lexicographical Terms	262

Editorial Reviews

David E. Aune
— University of Notre Dame
"This collection of essays in honor of Fred Danker, the nestor of New Testament Greek lexicographers, consists of some of the most important and informative discussions of New Testament lexicography currently available between two covers. The book is a well-deserved celebration of Danker's achievement in radically reworking and correcting some of the deficiencies and egregious errors of the Bauer-Aland lexicon and transforming that work into the linguistically progressive, user-friendly Bauer-Danker-Arndt-Gingrich New Testament Greek lexicon."

Bruce M. Metzger
— Princeton Theological Seminary
"Everyone who has an interest in biblical Greek will learn much from this collection of essays dealing with a wide variety of lexicographic topics. The volume is an altogether fitting tribute to the career of Frederick Danker, to whose learning and industry all of us are deeply indebted."

From the Publisher