Years have passed since we began our study of the Bible in an academic setting. However, we can remember the excitement of embarking on what has been and continues to be, for both of us, a rewarding and interesting career. After all, our job is basically to study the Word of God all day and to share our insights with others through our teaching and writing. We are both thankful.
Our start, though, was not so long ago that we have forgotten the barrage of new methods, scholars, terms, ideas, theories, and more that seemed so hard to remember and master from the time we were first introduced to them: form criticism, deconstruction, typology, revolution model, William Foxwell Albright, merism, colon, pericope, Zoroastrianism, and the list can go on and on. We have written this compact dictionary primarily to help beginning students. But we hope that it can help others as well, particularly pastors and laypeople who want to read and benefit from biblical scholarship.
We began our work by choosing the topics to be covered. Not an easy task. As longtime college and seminary professors of the Old (Tremper) and the New (Mark) Testaments, we asked ourselves what topics we expected our students to know about at the end of their first year of study of the Bible in an academic environment.
Once we chose the topics, we then wrote brief descriptions of them. We do not provide a detailed and extensive accounting of them but rather what we would expect our first-year students to know. This is a compact dictionary, after all, to be used as a quick-reference guide to the various topics covered here. This guide can be used as an introduction to these topics or as a review.
We hope that you find The Baker Compact Dictionary of Biblical Studies helpful in your study, whether you are just beginning or are further along. The Bible is God’s Word and deserves to be not only read but deeply explored.
Tremper Longman III
Robert H. Gundry Professor of Biblical Studies
Westmont College
Mark L. Strauss
University Professor of New Testament
Bethel Seminary, San Diego