A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature ed. by David Lyle Jeffrey

Abstract

David Lyle Jeffrey, ed., A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Litera­ ture (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1992). xxxii, 960. $79.99 (U.S.) As General Editor of the A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Liter­ ature (henceforth DBTEL), David Jeffrey has worked with a managing editor (his wife Katherine B. Jeffrey), an active editorial board of ten, contributors numbering more than 150, and with over 200 people who “contributed in one way or another” to this massive undertaking. And massive it is, with over 900 entries from Aaron to Zilpah spanning 856 double-columned pages, with an additional 101 pages of bibliographies. The dust jacket informs us that the work was sixteen years in the making, and Professor Jeffrey notes in his “Acknowledgments” that ten of the people involved did not live to see the volume in print. The size of this achievement would be impressive in any context; it is even more so when one considers that the only similar volume available to provide a springboard is Biblical Allusions in English Literature, written in 1965 by Walter B. Fulgham, Jr., which treats about a third fewer topics in about one third of the total pages, and with nothing like the concern for either the early conceptions of the biblical text or the later uses of it in English literature. Perhaps the most significant difference between DBTEL and its general predecessors, not to mention between it and the great majority of the many works available on biblical allusions in a single author, is the editorial con­ cern to provide a firm contextual and exegetical biblical anchor for each entry before turning to the chronological tracing of the entry’s appearance throughout English Literature. An entry can be a biblical name, concept, quotation, parable, or familiar term in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. For each substantial entry there are three parts. The first establishes how the word or phrase was understood and used in the Bible; the second traces impor­ tant lines of exegesis through the Fathers, medieval, and later commentators such as Luther and Calvin (not omitting the Jewish tradition); only then does the entry turn to English literary history. While the editors could have saved considerable space in the text and innumerable hours of labour by the contributors by letting the biblical text attempt to speak for itself, they wisely forbore to do so. Wisely, because of all available sources to writers in English the Bible is the one treated most variously, while some of that variety arises from the problematic nature of the text itself. Some illustrations will help show how useful this background is. Take, for example, the entry for the deceptively simple “Abraham’s Bosom.” After lo­ cating the image as the place of repose for Lazarus after his death in the story of Dives and Lazarus in the gospel of Luke, the entry notes the “Jewish char­ acter of the image” arising from “the custom in which an honoured guest at a 363 feast might recline against the chest of his neighbour, as John reclined on the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper (John 21:20).” Interestingly, “Abraham’s Bosom” is thus distinguished from the Jewish Sheol, which had realms of the righteous and the wicked both. To subsequent commentators, the image was regularly seen as a kind of paradise where the faithful are received. Thus Shakespeare could use the image straightforwardly, as he does in Richard III or play upon the idea as when the Hostess says of Falstaff in Henry V, “Nay, sure, he’s not in hell: he’s in Arthur’s bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom.” In DBTEL the next occurrence is the parodic reference to “Shadwell’s bosom” in Pope’s Dunciad, which is followed by a discussion of the image’s importance in Matthew Henry’s Commentary on the Whole Bible. There is a careful but succinct treatment of it in Wordsworth’s “It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free,” and a brief analysis of the image in Hardy, which alludes back to Wordsworth. The entry closes with a look at Shaw. Whether or not any of the...