Who's Who: The Old Testament, Together with the Apocrypha (review)

Abstract

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 135 Reviews WHO'S WHO: THE OLD TESTAMENT, TOGETHER WITH THE APOCRYPHA. By Joan Comay. Pp. xxii + 398. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Paper, $15.95. This recent reprint of Joan Comay's Who's Who: The Old Testament by the Oxford University Press is a helpful addition to the reference materials available for the general public who are interested in the stories of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. This paperback edition will surely make the biographical data of the biblical characters much more readily accessible to these readers and hence stimulate further interest in the Old Testament as well as the Apocrypha. Taking a straightforward narrative approach, the author provides a complete, handy, and easy-to-use reference to the thousands of characters in the Old Testament. Each of the entries covers biographical infonnation on each character and includes a rather complete, detailed, and comprehensive compilation of passages in the Old Testament concerning a particular character. Though most often highly controversial, the author of this Who's Who manages to provide an easily comprehensible picture of the historical, geographical , and archaeological context of each subject. Moreover, although the author does not mean to set down in her book each character as he or she existed in historical fact, she places each character in a single chronological table and thus provides a convenient, though not always convincing, time-frame for the characters of the narratives. In other words, it gives brief biographical infonnation regarding almost 3,000 characters in the Old Testament. Above all, the greatest advantages of this book are, first, its alphabetically -arranged entries which, again, provide quick and easy reference to the biblical characters listed; and second, its being fully cross-referenced at the end of each entry, enabling those interested to reference the related biblical passages. From the perspective of biblical scholarship, however, there are several shortcomings of this reference book which cannot be overlooked. While, as already noted above, the simplified compilation of the biographical data on each character will help interested persons to find the basic literary references in the Old Testament, the dates and the chronological and geographical references assigned to a particular character can be misleading or most of the time simply irrelevant. Although it brings together a comprehensive picture of a particular biblical character, it does so at the Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 136 Reviews expense of unjustly compromising the multiple layers and traditions of a particular Old Testament text. I find the preservation of the multi-level readings the only way to retrieve the depth and richness of each biblical text and hence the reconstruction of a particular character. Furthennore. as a scholar sharing the critical perspectives of minority and feminist readings of the Old Testament. I was particularly disappointed to fmd that the entry for Miriam (p. 242). for instance. was missing her very significant role as a prophetess in Exod 15:20 and automatically assumed that she was the "unnamed" sister who approached Pharaoh's daughter in Exod 2:4, 7. Archie C. C. Lee The Chinese University ofHong Kong Shatin. New Territories BIBLICAL HEBREW AND DISCOURSE LINGUISTICS. Robert D. Bergen, ed. Pp. 560. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994. Paper, $40.00. When linguistics and study of the Bible join. people interested in either of these disciplines benefit: the linguist is satisfied to have been handed a precisely defmed corpus to which he can apply his methodology; the serious student of the Bible is always grateful for further elucidation of the text. If this beneficial partnership needs new proof, such can be found in the book before us. It consists of edited articles based on papers presented at a seminar on the subject stated in the title. The authors, numbering almost two dozen, are either academic specialists in biblical philology or else persons actively engaged in Bible translation projects; many of them combine those two activities. There is too much interesting and valuable material in this book to present a fair summary of all the contributions; naming only some of the authors may create the wrong impression-that others are not worth mentioning. Therefore, it seems preferable just to point out the scope...