The Dolphin of History, the Anchor of Faith

The publication of the Anchor Bible Dictionary--six huge volumes of approximately 1,200 pages each, 6,000 entries, 7,000,000 words by 1,000 learned contributors from all around the world--embodies and culminates a vast intellectual movement that began with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1803.

That discovery, which permitted the decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphic, blew the roof off Western history. “We”--the cultural continuum to which we belonged--were far, far older than we had guessed, and it was possible, by ever more refined techniques, to reconstruct the earliest recorded stages of our long journey through time. Two centuries of painstaking archeological and philological research have gone into that reconstruction.

As the reconstruction came to include ancient Israel and early Christianity, the cultures that produced the Bible, the discovery that at least some parts of the one of the foundational texts of Western civilization checked out as history muted the tension between religious belief and Enlightenment rationalism. More important, perhaps, the new research, initially assimilated by each religious community in its own way, gradually opened a new intellectual space in which the several varieties of Western religious commitment were circumscribed without being proscribed and Bible scholarship became a common, quasi-secular enterprise.

The Anchor Bible Commentary, a multivolume Bible translation with commentary, is perhaps the most spectacular single American product of this enterprise. Still incomplete, but with new volumes (and revisions of older volumes) appearing each year, it is the work of Protestants, Catholics, Jews and the religiously unaffiliated and is intended for all. William Foxwell Albright, the most influential American Bible scholar of the century, began it near the end of his life, enlisting his student David Noel Freedman as co-editor. Since Albright’s death in 1971, Freedman, now professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, has remained its head.

Here one can find, continuing the mood of objective, scientific learning, a 13-page entry on “Computers and Biblical Study” and, as evidence of the transformation of Western civilization into an international conversation open to all interested parties, a four-page entry on “Biblical Scholarship, Japanese.” Here are extraordinary entries on entire languages, veritable grammars in brief. Freedman and his colleagues expect the Anchor Bible Dictionary to be the last major biblical reference work published in the form of print on paper--the end, in short, of more than one era.

And yet, in a way, this extraordinary work is undone by the prodigious energy of historical scholarship itself. Take the discovery of the now all-but-mythical Dead Sea Scrolls. The promise of that utterly unforeseen find was a clarification of puzzles in the texts we already had, above all the New Testament. But by now the Scrolls have generated as wide a range of wildly contradictory commentary as has the New Testament itself. History, as the great Romanian critic Emil Cioran claimed, proves nothing because it contains everything. Every new document requires another for its historical explication in a regression to infinity.

To its great credit, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, unlike most such works, never tries to claim otherwise. One after another, interpretive, context-setting articles of encyclopedic scope conduct the fascinated reader through the historian’s equivalent of trap doors and secret passageways into a documentary hall of mirrors. There is no consensus. What you see depends on which way you are looking. Everything, under close enough scrutiny, turns into its mirror-image.

Read, for example, the seven-page entry “Jesus, Quest for the Historical” and you discover that there have been three identifiable quests: one in the 19th and early 20th Century, a second in the 1950s and 1960s, and a third in the 1980s. That the quest has continued so long is less noteworthy than that, in between, working scholars mysteriously lost interest in it. And that fact, in turn, points to another: The writing of history is always a motivated pursuit.

The Anchor Bible Dictionary succeeds and supersedes the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, a four-volume landmark published in 1962 by the (Methodist) Abingdon Press. (A supplementary volume appeared in 1976.) Since there would be, otherwise, every reason to call the massive new work an encyclopedia, I take the insistently modest use of the word dictionary to be quiet homage to a distinguished predecessor. The Anchor Bible Commentary bears a similar, if somewhat looser, relationship to the multivolume Interpreter’s Bible, also published by Abingdon.

The motivation behind the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible is never in question. “When this dictionary was first planned,” IDB editor George Buttrick wrote in his preface, “the Editorial Boards asked themselves what groups of people would use it; and they tried, in the light of such questionings and the likely answers, to provide a dictionary of wide advantage. The busy preacher was at the forefront of our concern.”

The busy preacher is not at the forefront of the ABD’s concern. The busy professor might seem to be, and yet many, if not most, of the ABD’S professor-contributors teach in seminaries or divinity schools or are in the religious studies or theology departments of religiously affiliated universities. In some ways, the old agenda lives on within the new.

Officially, the ABD is neutral and open to all, a monument of learning resting on and only on the historian’s disinterested desire to know. Unofficially, one senses the excited presence of multiple agendas, overlapping, bewildering, sometimes contradictory agendas. Were it otherwise, however, the enterprise might have been dropped somewhere well before the seven-millionth word. It would have been untrue to the community that produced it. The energy that powers the criticism of Western literature’s supreme, albeit borrowed, classic is like the energy of Western civilization itself: It is released at the points of fissure and collision.

Doubleday, the publisher of this work, once an independent, family-owned publishing house, now a subsidiary of Bertelsmann, the German publishing giant, has largely abandoned the dolphin-and-anchor motif that was for decades its logo. Anchor Books and the less well known Dolphin Books are venerable Doubleday imprints, each named for one-half of the original logo. The dolphin-and-anchor motif derives from ancient folklore according to which dolphins would guide storm-tossed sailors to safe anchor. Literature, the tacit analogy goes, can do the same.

If, for this dictionary, the full logo had been used, the anchor, invisible beneath the waves, might have stood for the conservatism of religion; the dolphin, leaping showily above the waves, for the dynamism of history. Whether the dolphin is guiding the ship to anchor can never be known, but equally mysterious is the fact that dolphins, for some reason, love ships, with their anchors, and follow them, inexplicably, for mile after mile. A dolphin with a ship to save or lose must somehow be a happier dolphin than one on the open sea with only other dolphins for company. The same, conversely, may go for the sailors.

And therein lies the inner tension and endless fascination of this reference masterpiece. Not just for its completeness in detail and its copious and meticulous references to further reading but also for the range and candor of its interpretation, the Anchor Bible Dictionary becomes, at a stroke, the first stop for anyone, scholar or layman, believer or unbeliever, with a question about the Bible. The ABD is not and, for reasons already indicated, does not seek to be the “last word” about the Bible. But for readers who want the state of any Bible-related question, it will remain for years and perhaps decades to come the indispensable first word.