Using the Dictionary of the Bible — What It Actually Gets Right and Where It Stumbles
I picked up my copy of the Dictionary Of The Bible Mckenzie back in 2006, right after grad school started demanding more from my exegesis papers than I could manage with a concordance and a good thesaurus. It sits on my desk next to a heavily annotated NIDOTTE and a dog-eared Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary. I don't reach for it every day, but when I do, it earns its shelf space. The book is structured alphabetically by entry, with each article covering a biblical figure, place, theme, or theological concept. Length varies from two dense paragraphs on minor figures to twenty pages on something like covenant or justification. Every entry follows roughly the same pattern: a concise definition, a historical-critical walkthrough, and citations pointing toward further reading. That last part is where it pays off most.
Dictionary Of The Bible Mckenzie
If you're new to working with this reference, the trick is not to treat any single article as a final answer. It's a starting point, a map drawn by people who spent decades in these fields. I've found that the entries on Second Temple Judaism and the formation of the biblical canon are among the strongest in the volume. The treatment of Palestinian Aramaic influence on the Gospels, for example, is surprisingly thorough for a general reference work. Here's a specific problem I ran into last year that illustrates how to use it properly. A student was arguing that the term apolytrōsis in Mark 10:45 carried exclusively commercial connotations of slave redemption, and they needed sources to back a lexical claim. The entry for apolytrōsis in this dictionary gives the basic semantic range, but it doesn't walk you through the recent debate around whether Paul inherited a pre-formed redemption motif from the Hellenistic Jewish world or adapted it independently. I cross-referenced with Walter Schmithals' work on the epistle's structure and pulled a 2003 article by Peter O'Brien that directly challenged the commercial-only reading. The dictionary pointed me to the right entry; it didn't solve the problem alone. That's the pattern. The book gives you the terrain. You bring the scholarship.
How to Get the Most Out of It
The entries are written by different contributors, so the quality and approach shift from article to article. Some are written from a more historical-critical angle. Others lean pastoral or confessional. There's no editorial mandate that forces consistency, and you'll notice the difference when you're comparing an entry on Pauline theology next to one on the sermons of Acts. The bibliography at the end of each article is selective, not exhaustive. It's there to point you toward the standard secondary literature that was current when the volume went to press. If an entry was published before 1995, you're already working with somewhat dated archaeology and some older textual criticism assumptions. That's not a dealbreaker. It's just something to keep in mind. When you're doing actual research, the best workflow is this: find the entry, read it straight through once, then go to the bibliography and look up two or three of the cited works. At that point you'll know whether the entry's framing is useful for your project or whether it's built on assumptions you don't want to carry forward.
Get the Full Details
I also recommend keeping a separate index of the entries you've used. After a while, you start to remember which articles handled specific topics well and which ones glossed over the hard parts. That kind of institutional memory saves hours when you're under deadline.
Where This Reference Falls Short
No dictionary is complete. The Dictionary Of The Bible Mckenzie has some blind spots that will frustrate anyone doing serious work. First, the coverage of women in the biblical text is thin. Entries on female figures like Ruth or Deborah get fair treatment, but the dictionary doesn't have robust articles on gender and ancient Near Eastern context the way newer reference works do. If you're writing about that angle, you'll need additional sources from the start. Second, the archaeological data is sometimes outdated. Entries that rely heavily on early excavations at sites like Hazor or Megiddo may cite reports from the 1970s and 80s that have since been revised or reinterpreted. The volume reflects scholarship up to its publication date, and some of that scholarship has moved on.
Third, the theological entries tend to assume a fairly traditional understanding of authorship and dating. If you're working from a source-critical framework or engaging with recent documentary hypothesis debates, you'll find the entries here somewhat conservative in their assumptions. They're not wrong, but they're not exploring the full range of contemporary scholarly opinion either. For those gaps, I typically supplement with the Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary for broader coverage, the New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis for OT lexical work, and Brill's Encyclopedia of the Ancient Near East when I need archaeological depth. The McKenzie dictionary fits into that toolkit, but it doesn't replace any of them.
Practical Usage Notes
The volume runs about 1,400 pages in its standard edition. It's not light enough to carry into the field, and the binding on the hardcover is solid but not indestructible. I've had mine for nearly twenty years and the spine is holding up fine, though the paper has yellowed noticeably. If you're looking to acquire a copy, the standard editions are available through academic booksellers and major online retailers. University libraries carry it, and you'll sometimes find it in seminaries and divinity schools. There's also a paperback reprint that's lighter and cheaper if you're on a budget. When you're citing entries from it, include the contributor's name if the article lists one. Not every entry does, and the dictionary doesn't always make authorship transparent. That's a known issue with multi-contributor reference works from this era, and it makes tracking down the original scholarly position behind an entry harder than it should be.
The real value here is in the synthesis. These authors took difficult material and made it readable without dumbing it down. That's not easy to do, and the result is a reference that will serve you well as long as you use it the way reference works are meant to be used: as a beginning, not an end point.
